If you ask someone for a Christmas classical piece, they’ll most likely answer The Nutcracker. Everyone knows that. But what happens if you ask the same about Halloween? There probably won’t be such a unanimous answer. Some might say Carl Orff‘s Carmina Burana, for the haunting fake medieval mood. Except there’s nothing haunting about it if you listen to the lyrics. Others might say Leoncavallo‘s Pagliacci because hey, murderous clowns, but I’d rather save it for a spooky twist on Mardi Gras, alongside Verdi‘s Ballo in Maschera (spoiler: everyone dies). More refined choices might be Benjamin Britten’s Turn of the Screw, based on Henry James‘ ghost story, or Donizzetti‘s Lucia di Lammermoor, based on The Bride of Lammermoor by Walter Scott. Of course you know it: it’s the first part of the Diva’s aria in The Fifth Element.
These are all fine choices, but in my opinion you can’t go wrong with the Russians.
Take Modest Musorgskij, for instance. His Night on Bare Mountain would be an obvious choice, but I suggest you take a look at some other of his works, such as his Songs and Dances of Death. It’s a song cycle for baritone and piano, and my personal favourite is the Trepak where a drunken man is caught in a blizzard and meets death who invites him to dance with her.
Take Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and his operas based on folklore. Kashchey the Deathless is my personal favourite and it features an evil wizard, an imprisoned princess, star-crossed lovers, sleeping potions, maidens turning into weeping willows. Kashcheyevna’s aria, sung by the daughter of the evil wizard, is one of the most haunting things you’ll hear.
Take Alexander Borodin, sadly lesser-known to the masses than the previous two. He wrote a set of songs with titles such as Song of the Dark Woods, My songs are full of poison, The Sleeping Princess or The Magic Garden, and he must have been fun at parties.
If you want something that will really blow your mind, however, turn to Sergei Rachmaninoff. The featured video is his Isle of the Dead, a symphonic poem explicitly inspired by Böcklin’s painting. He didn’t even see the original: he saw a black and white reproduction. And he went “You know what? I’m going to spend the next three months obsessing about this.” One of us.
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