We humans certainly are fascinated with Death. Do you fear it? welcome it? try to postpone it? encourage it to come sooner? And what happens as we pass out of this world? Let’s dive into some musical expressions of death.

Richard Strauss – Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration): Strauss’ magnificent tone poem tells the story of a sick man, facing death – he fights the illness, but loses, his life flashes before his eyes, he is scared, and then achieves a peaceful calm as his life slips away and, in Strauss’ own words, “the soul leaves his body, to discover in the eternal cosmos the magnificent realization of the ideal that could not be fulfilled here below.”

Guiseppe Verdi – La Traviata finale: This is your classic tragic ending to an Italian opera (the music at the point of death is strikingly similar to the final death scene in Rigoletto). Like nearly all Italian tragic operas, you can sum up the plot thus: adultery is all fun and games until somebody gets killed.

Gustav Mahler – Symphony No. 9 finale: Mahler’s last complete symphony ends with mournful elegy to himself. He had been diagnosed with a heart defect, and felt (knew?) he was dying as he wrote it. Though a long, slow-moving listen, the deep peace of the pianissimo strings ending is very rewarding – it’s as if Mahler is taking his final breaths (and indeed, I find it hard to breathe when I listen to it!)

Giacomo Puccini – La bohème finale: Maybe it’s a little clichéd as far as deaths go, but every time I see this opera I get a cold chill when the minor chord signals Mimi’s death (in this video, 2:05). Mimi is finally at peace, but the torment that her friends and lover go through is utterly heart wrenching.

Richard Wagner – Liebestod (Love-Death): In a Romeo-and-Juliet-like moment, Isolde dies over the body of her lover, Tristan, and in doing so finds complete fulfilment and repose, and becomes one with the universe, or something like that. The romantics were totally into that sort of awesomeness.

Gustav Mahler was a composer of superlatives. Why have one hundred musicians on stage when you could have one thousand? His Fifth Symphony‘s famous slow movement, Adagietto (meaning “just a little slow”) has a tempo marking of Sehr Langsam (meaning “very slow”).

Teasing aside, the music is marvelous and it’s easy to hear why it is his most played piece. There’s a touching story that this was a love-song he composed for his new wife. Mahler wrote this poem for her, and attached it to this movement:

“How much I love you, my sun, I cannot say to you in words.
Only through my lamenting can I show my longing and love.”

Musically, it’s a very slow lyrical song, played by the warm sound of the strings playing very slowly; the harp provides a sense of rhythm and motion through its arpeggios. The sense of longing comes through as practically every phrase is ripe with instances where you expect a certain note at a certain time, but are denied that expectation for an extra beat or two.*** And at a slow tempo, the wait for the musical fulfillment can be painful – that kind of wonderful pain of wishing yourself in your lover’s arms.

*** need a specific example? Right at the beginning – you’ll hear the violin melody come in at 0:10. It plays sol – la – ti – do … a simple musical idea that most anybody will recognize and know (think the theme song of the Adams Family, just very very slow.) You expect to hear the final note “do” at 0:15 … but you are denied that pleasure until 0:18. It’s only 3 seconds, but practically every phrase in the piece uses this compositional trick. And there’s even a marvelous 7-8 suspension at 0:58.

The bitter cold weather of December has arrived.

The death of a child is a difficult thing to experience. I have not lost any of my children, but I have had nightmares where I have. A dream like that is enough to keep me awake for the rest of the night.

19th century German poet Friedrich Rückert lost two of his children to scarlet fever. He dealt with his grief by writing a set of 428 poems on the death of children. Composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) selected five of these to set for voice and orchestra. This is the fifth of the set, titled “In diesem Wetter” (In this Weather). Mahler’s genius of composition lets you feel the blowing winds, the stinging raindrops, the anxiety of a parent whose child is lost forever, and, at the end, a sense of peace and acceptance.

In this weather, in this windy storm, I would never have sent the children out.
They have been carried off, I wasn’t able to warn them!

In this weather, in this gale, I would never have let the children out.
I feared they sickened: those thoughts are now in vain.

In this weather, in this storm, I would never have let the children out,
I was anxious they might die the next day: now anxiety is pointless.

In this weather, in this windy storm, I would never have sent the children out.
They have been carried off, I wasn’t able to warn them!

In this weather, in this gale, in this windy storm, they rest as if in their mother’s house:
frightened by no storm, sheltered by the Hand of God.