Detail, Trionfo della morte, ca. 1446
As spooky season approaches, we’re exploring what makes certain pieces of classical music sound scary. One way composers have injected some fright into their scores is through an ominous musical device: the “Dies irae” chant.
The Gregorian chant “Dies irae” (“Day of Wrath”) has been used as a musical shorthand for doom and gloom for centuries. Commonly attributed to the Franciscan monk Thomas of Celano (c. 1185–1265), the Latin poem vividly portrays the Last Judgment—the day of reckoning when Catholics believe the dead are raised and either sent to heaven or condemned to hell.
Dies irae, dies illa,
Solvet saeclum in favilla:
Teste David cum Sibylla.
The day of wrath, that day,
will dissolve the world in ashes:
(this is) the testimony of David and the Sibyl.
Composers such as Mozart and Verdi have set this harrowing text memorably in their respective Requiems. However, it is the original plainchant melody that we’re interested in here:
From the fourteenth century until the 1960s, the “Dies irae” sequence (a hymn or chant) formed part of the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass, or Mass for the Dead. Having gained a sinister connotation in sacred music, the melody—especially the first four notes—has since made countless appearances in secular music, from Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony to the musical Sweeney Todd and film scores like The Shining, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and It’s a Wonderful Life.
So, what is it about those first four or eight notes that makes them so hair-raising? Is it just their longstanding association with death in music and other media, or is there something inherently menacing about the melody itself?
The chant is in the Dorian mode, which is almost like a minor scale but without a raised seventh, or leading tone. The somber mood created by the absence of a leading tone, coupled with the chant’s descending melodic contour, gives the “Dies irae” an inherently dark and foreboding quality. Other famous examples of music set in the Dorian mode are the sea shanty “Drunken Sailor,” “Et incarnatus est” from Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, and countless pop songs like “Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix and “Thriller” by Michael Jackson.
But, to be certain, the chant’s repeated use in Western culture over the centuries has cemented it in our collective unconscious as denoting something ominous. So, let’s look at some of the most famous examples in classical music.
1. Hector Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique, op. 14 (1830)
Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) was so particular about the programmatic content of Symphonie fantastique that he provided extensive notes describing the action in each of the five movements. In the story, a young artist is consumed with passion when he sees the embodiment of his ideal woman. The image of his beloved continues to haunt him throughout the first three movements. In “March to the Scaffold,” things take a turn for the worse. Convinced his love is unrequited, the artist attempts to poison himself with opium. Although the dose is not strong enough to kill him, it causes him to hallucinate that he has killed his beloved and been condemned to death. The hallucination intensifies in “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath,” where a frightful band of ghosts, witches, and monsters come together to celebrate the artist’s death with laughter, groans, and all manner of strange noises. As the funeral knell tolls, the bassoons and tuba solemnly intone the “Dies irae” chant. The haunting melody soon returns in combination with the witches’ dance, transforming into what Berlioz described as a “burlesque parody.”
2. Franz Liszt: Totentanz, S. 126 (1849)
Franz Liszt (1811–1886) was inspired to write Totentanz (“Dance of the Dead”) after seeing a particularly harrowing fresco at the Camposanto Monumentale in Pisa, Italy. Titled Il Trionfo della Morte (“The Triumph of Death”), the fourteenth-century fresco is a cautionary tale on the inevitability of death. It depicts several scenes. On the left, a group of hunters comes across three open caskets, each with a corpse in a different state of decay. On the right, well-dressed youths frolic in a garden, while death hovers nearby, personified as an old woman with long, white hair, bat wings, claws, and a scythe. In the center is the vision of the Last Judgment, where angels and demons fight over the bodies of the dead, dragging them to their respective realms. Given the content of the “Dies irae” text, it comes as no surprise that Liszt quotes the ancient melody extensively in Totentanz. In fact, the piece presents five virtuosic variations on the Gregorian chant, though as many as thirty iterations or fragments of the theme appear throughout the work.
3. Camille Saint-Saëns: Danse macabre, Op. 14 (1874)
Quoting “Dies irae” is just one of the ways that Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) makes his tone poem Danse macabre sound just that—macabre. Based on a poem by Henri Cazalis (1840–1909), the work is references an old French superstition that at the stroke of midnight on Halloween, Death summons the skeletons from their graves. They dance as Death plays his fiddle until the dawn chases them back into their graves for another year. The solo violin creates a tritone (“the Devil’s chord”), the chromatic descending melody, the xylophone imitating rattling bones—all these effects heighten the horror of the scene. In contrast to the more solemn renditions of the chant heard in the previous selections, here the “Dies irae” is cast incongruously as a major-mode waltz, first stated by the woodwinds about a third of the way into the piece.
4. Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 2, "Resurrection" (1894)
Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) was notoriously preoccupied with the themes of death, fate, judgment, and redemption. It is no surprise either. He lost eight of his thirteen siblings in childhood and another sibling to suicide later in life. As a result, dirges and funeral marches often pop up in his works. This is nowhere more true than in his Second Symphony, “Resurrection.” He wrote the first movement as a standalone tone poem titled Todtenfeier (“Funeral Rite”) six years before completing the rest of the symphony. Cast as a funeral for the hero of his First Symphony, the movement ponders existential questions, like whether there is life after death or a point to suffering.
The “Dies irae” first appears in the development section of the first movement as a solemn chorale over a funeral march. However, the theme plays a larger role in the fifth and final movement, where emotions swirl in a musical enactment of the five stages of grief. Appearing first as a quiet melody over tiptoeing strings, it reminds us that death is still lurking under the surface. It then turns into the rising “Auferstehen” (“Resurrection”) motive. But the “Dies irae” is not banished forever. It comes back as a noble brass hymn, then transforms into a snappy march later in the development. In battle with the “Auferstehen” motive, bell tolls, and other musical material, chaos erupts in a primal “scream,” which ushers in the acceptance and transcendence of the recapitulation and coda.
5. Sergei Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43 (1934)
Sergei Rachmaninoff’s (1873–1943) Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is a rapid-fire set of twenty-four variations on Niccolò Paganini’s Caprice No. 24. In addition to the virtuosic and ingenious transformations of Paganini’s famous melody, Rachmaninoff introduces a second theme. You guessed it—the “Dies irae.” The medieval chant was a favorite of Rachmaninoff, an idée fixe appearing in at least a dozen of his works, from the First Symphony to his Symphonic Dances. In Variation 7, the chant is played in slow chords in the piano under a plaintive rendition of Paganini’s theme in the bassoon. Perhaps this quotation is a nod to Paganini’s “devilish” reputation. He was so wickedly talented people thought he had sold his soul to the devil, earning him the moniker “The Devil’s Violinist.” The “Dies irae” chant then infiltrates the rest of the work, recurring in Variations 10 and 12 and the finale in stentorian brass.
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