Funeral Music

Does funeral music celebrate death or life before and beyond death? Why have composers reserved some of their grandest thoughts for music related with death and why do we listen, by choice, to music that is (at least partially) filled with morbid thoughts?

Mozart’s Requiem Mass K 626, his last (incomplete) work, was supposedly commissioned by a mysterious stranger and according to the film “Amadeus” is filled with thoughts of his own impending mortality. How likely is it that a young man of 35 (as he was when he died) would foretell his own death? Even if you do ignore the romanticised myth behind the writing of it, the Requiem is the definitive music for the dead. Of course, an earlier work, less well-known but more typical of Mozart the man, is the Masonic Funeral Music, which ends on a long rising note played by woodwinds, like the departed soul rising heavenwards.

The 19^th century came to see other grand Requiems: Berlioz’s Grand Messe de Morte, Verdi’s Requiem and Faure’s Requiem. Despite the religious context of the work, the composers did not shy away from writing on an almost symphonic scale (Berlioz), nor from using the voices in an operatic style (Verdi). The grandest and noblest of them is Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem, which is unique in having German, rather than Latin words.

Funeral music or funereal music did not necessarily have to be religious music though: Beethoven in the FuneralMarch from his Eroica (3^rd) symphony or Chopin in the Funeral March from his 2^nd piano sonata, were not writing for a religious ceremony, nor even about a particular person, but rather expounding their thoughts on death as a concept.

Writing about death could not leave the composer unaffected mentally though; but as Gustav Mahler found after writing his “Songs on the Death of Children” (Kindertotenlieder), it could have tragic consequences: his own eldest daughter passed away soon after. Even though this was just a very sad coincidence, the work is particularly haunting and affecting.

Writing about death was not just a philosophical exercise: sometimes, the composer really would use it to express his own anguish and fear of mortality: Shostakovich’s 14thsymphony is almost a Symphony for the Dead, a terrifying nightmare-world. Hearing it, one can only try to console oneself with the immortal words of John Donne:

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.