Some Music to blow your pants off….or reduce you to tears?
Krzysztof Penderecki – Threnodi for the Victims of Hiroshima 10:00
The title of this piece of music invokes nothing less than the horrors of atomic apocalypse, and this piece of music delivers. It opens with a chorus of violins at a discordantly high pitch, highly suggestive of a host of abstract human screams, which are then joined by other violins at a similarly high pitch – layered in at quarter and half tones.
The violins cease after a minute, and resume with a series of continuous discordant rattlings, crashes and bangs, which suggest debris, bodies, and buildings being tossed about as an inferno of atomic energy cascades out from its epicenter.
The piece is thoroughly unsettling, disturbing and a must-listen for those with an interest in how visceral horror can be depicted musically.
Not for the faint of heart…
Dies Irae – Guisseppe Verdi 37:00
This piece of music is one of the most powerful in existence. It will literally knock you off your feet, send chills up your spine and quite possibly reduce you to tears.
Listen to it in an actual symphony performance if you can, because as good as a recording is, you would need an extremely high quality system set to a suitably overwhelming volume to even come close to replicating the experience of a chorus of several hundred thundering out the fury of death, grief and hellfire that inspired Verdi to write this piece.
Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla – Richard Wagner 6:35
In keeping with the epic scope of the music identified so far, Richard Wagner’s stirring and transcendental Entrance has to be experienced to be believed. This is music on a truly epic scope, with a very dominant brass component: sounding out the call for the Norse Gods to begin their ascendancy into the Heavens, while the somewhat subdued string section accompanies, issuing a more muted and sentimental commentary on the transit of the supernatural.
Pilgrims Chorus (Tannhauser) - Richard Wagner 3:47
In keeping with much of much of Wagners music and Entrance of the Gods as well, this piece has a certain measured progression to it, opening with a bass chorus refrain, which is then accompanied by a dominant string melody. The string section and the choral component have a parallel melodic structure and tendency to progress upwards in scale (the parade-like measure and repetition is similar to Ravel’s Bolero). The all-male bass chorus suggests a grim ecclesiastical fundamentalism, with undertones of triumphant militarism.
Götterdämerung (from ‘Ring der Niebelungen’) R. Wagner 9:29
Another impressive and aggressive piece of music from Wagner. This piece especially could be a film score to a science fiction, or a war film - in the beginning especially. It begins with an angry, ominous melody with intermittent bass drum percussion. The orchestra trails off, and then resumes with more percussive rhythms. The orchestra then resumes with a sorrowful interlude, to be followed with more militant percussion from the percussion and brass sections. After halfway through this piece, the orchestra opens up into an incredibly moving, and triumphal blast of brass: snare percussion intersticed with splendid blares of trumpet – quite impressive. On the whole, this moving, beautiful and powerful piece of music is very well conceived and leaves a lasting impression. Although this piece is a component of the Opera Götterdämerung, it is interesting to give it a listen without considering its meaning within the context of its Operatic narrative. This is music to bring out the Napoleon in everyone…
Side Notes:
Consider Wagner as composing in a vein diametrically opposite that of say, Mozart. Where Mozart was politically progressive, and composed incredibly complex, sophisticated music with refined and delicate sensibility, Wagner was a borderline fascist, known for his roguish personal life and anti-Semitic outbursts. His music is although somewhat simplistic in comparison to Mozart, defined by grand orchestral gestures, operatic leitmotif, and an incomparable and rousing emotional power (actually, Beethoven and Verdi could probably give Wagner a good run for his money).
His love and appreciation of Norse mythology also earned him the dubious favour of the Hitler’s Third Reich, where he joined Johannes Strauss as a representative of ‘truly German culture’. It’s not difficult to see what Hitler listened to in the music of Wagner, and why its militaristic and Norse-mythological themes might have meshed well with Hitler’s views of German culture standing in contrast to ‘degenerate’ Jewish culture.
German visual art of the Nazi period is also interesting to examine in relation to the music of Wagner, with its emphasis on grandiose, excessively macho nudes, militarism and mythological references.
Currently, the music of Wagner is banned from play by the Israeli Philharmonic for political and compassionate reasons. However, as many argue, banning the music of Wagner is giving the Nazi’s a kind of ‘last victory’. It is beautiful music regardless of Wagner’s faults as a person. And, as many have pointed out, Chopin was as rabid an anti-semite as Wagner (although Wagner is said to have had a Jewish girlfriend at one point, inviting us to question whether his anti-semitism arose out of his personal falling out with Meyerbeer) and yet his piano music is played regularly in Israel. See http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/Wagner.html for more information on this topic by author Lili Eylon.
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