The Fine Art of Listening

I’ve written about Mozart‘s Requiem before – how it has become the Requiem by which we judge all other Requiems. The music runs the gamut of musical expression, and you could argue that it’s unabashed display of dark emotions foreshadows the end of the classical era and the beginning of the romantic.

The work is shrouded in mystery and legend. This is largely the fault of Mozart’s widow Constanze, who started spreading lies about the piece the day after Mozart died. This wasn’t completely her fault – if word got out that the piece was unfinished at the time of his death, she wouldn’t receive the payment for the work. She secretly had some of Mozart’s students finish the composition; to this day there is disagreement as to who finished which movements. She was aware that the person who commissioned the work might try to pass it off as his own music (the person was famous for doing so.) But, she also claimed that Mozart was poisoned and that he knew he was writing his own funeral music. That’s just good for business.

However, it’s important to note that in general, human beings like to make legends out of things they love, even if the legends end up being gross exaggerations of the truth. For example, he didn’t get tossed into a pauper’s grave, he had a regular middle-class tomb. His burial was not unattended, and there was no dark storm that day.

Like yesterday’s post, there is much scholarship surrounding this work, so it’s fair to say we know what parts Mozart wrote and which parts were finished by another composer. Even if it’s not 100% Mozart, it’s still a marvelous work, and the dark circumstances surrounding it add to its mysterious flavor. Listening to the Dies Irae, I can’t help but feel that Mozart was genuinely afraid of his own death.

Misleading title – the jury is still out on who wrote Dracula‘s favorite Halloween piece, the Toccata and Fugue in d minor by Johann Sebastian Bach. An amazing amount of research has been done trying to solve the great mystery of its composer.

To sum up the debate:

• The work’s style is … strange. The toccata is very free-form, similar to the earliest immature works of the young master, and nothing at all like his mature works. The fugue is in four voices, but most of the time, only three sound (uncharacteristic of Bach.) It plays more like a violin piece than an organ work.
• The earliest copy of this piece was written around 1740, by an unimportant organist named Ringk. (Most music at this time was copied by hand, so it’s not so strange that a work by Bach would have been hand-copied by another musician.) People have deeply studied Ringk’s handwriting in order to pin down the approximate date of this single copy.
• It would be possible that Bach wrote the piece as a young man, and Ringk copied it when Bach was old, but then the question is, why did he choose this piece to copy? Why not something else, something better?
• Could Bach have copied this piece into his own library, only to have Ringk later copy it from him, falsely attributing the work to the great master?

Whatever the history, and whoever wrote it, this work has become Halloween staple. A gothic organ sound playing its twisted, dark harmony can chill your soul; the opening motif catches your attention immediately. No wonder hearing this piece brings up images of Dracula, or maybe the Phantom of the Opera. Its appeal has helped it overcome its compositional flaws; it has been arranged for all sorts of solo instruments (most famously for piano, but also violin and guitar) and ensembles (most famously for orchestra, but also saxophone choir (because, why not)).

It’s easy to be scared of large animals with sharp teeth or scary humanoid creatures with exaggerated features. It’s also easy to be scared of clowns.

But what about when everyday household objects go bad? Say, an umbrella, or shoes? Maybe a broom? What about a magical flying mortar & pestle, or a house with chicken legs?

Enter Baba Yaga, a your classic witch, except that she flies around in a mortar and lives in a house with chicken legs. I suppose that makes her more scary? Or is it a ruse to confuse children long enough for her to catch them?

It doesn’t really matter; more importantly, a painting of Baba Yaga’s house became the inspiration for part of Modest Mussorgsky‘s Pictures at an Exhibition:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5p-gNyVlo

There’s also an awesome metal version: