“It was a dark and stormy night…” Just as in literature, there are countless evocations of stormy weather in classical music, from epic thunderclaps to the pitter-patter of rain. Storms capture the human imagination, inspiring awe and fear in equal measure. In this article, we examine how composers have tried to harness the uncontrollable forces of nature in their music, using storms as a dramatic device or metaphor for intense emotions.
Giuseppe Verdi: Rigoletto
Storm scenes are rife in opera, acting as an omen or heightening the drama of the dénouement as if issuing a moral judgment on the action onstage.
A prime example of this comes in Act III of Giuseppe Verdi’s 1851 opera Rigoletto. The title character has hired hitman Sparafucile to kill the Duke. Sparafucile is arguing with Maddalena, his sister and accomplice, about whether they should carry out the killing. But when Gilda comes to the door disguised as a beggar—her knocks initially mistaken for the wind—they decide to kill her instead, so they have a body to present to Rigoletto.
How does Verdi musically depict the storm brewing outside that fateful night? Fluttering flutes amid the pre-storm stillness mimic birds who sense the impending storm. Chromatic ascending and descending “oohs” from the offstage chorus and low string tremolos evoke wind gusts as the storm rolls in. When the voices of Sparafucile, Maddalena, and Gilda finally come together, the full orchestra, complete with rolling timpani, erupts. Gilda—who has overheard the siblings’ plan from outside—soars over the texture with “Oh cielo, pietà!” (“Oh heavens, have mercy!”).
A consummate dramatist, Verdi includes a stage instruction for a flash of lightning to occur on Gilda’s climactic high B over a diminished chord (4:38). As she knocks on the door, more flashes of lightning accompany high-trilling flutes and low-rolling timpani. When Gilda finally enters Sparafucile’s dwelling, the orchestral storm reaches a fever pitch, and Gilda meets her fate.
Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes
A storm serves a slightly different dramatic purpose in Benjamin Britten’s 1945 opera Peter Grimes. Britten masterfully paints his native Suffolk coast throughout the opera’s four orchestral interludes (often excerpted for the concert stage as Four Sea Interludes). The interlude “Storm” occurs in Act 1 as fisherman and social outcast Peter Grimes rides out the approaching storm outside, while the rest of the townsfolk seek shelter in a nearby pub. Britten captures the roiling sea with an agitated melody that climbs upward and dynamic swells punctuated by bass drum, while cymbal crashes suggest waves breaking against the harbor. The storm here, instead of heightening the drama of the moment, foreshadows the conflict to come, as another young apprentice of Grimes will soon die on his watch.
Jean-Philippe Rameau: Platée
Operatic storm scenes are not restricted to dramas. French baroque composer Jean-Philippe Rameau bookends Act I of his 1745 comic opera Platée with two storm scenes. Here, the storm is the byproduct of marital conflict between Roman gods: when Juno is jealous, she creates a storm. When Mercury descends to explain this to the King, the King proposes a fake love affair between Juno’s husband, Jupiter, and a hideous marsh nymph named Platée. The idea is that when Juno comes down to investigate, she will realize her jealousy is unfounded. Rameau paints Juno’s envy-induced storm through furiously fast scales and repeated notes. Given the inextricable link between French baroque opera and ballet, this scene is cast as a dance number, providing the opportunity for inventive choreography.
Antonio Vivaldi: The Four Seasons
Operas aren't alone in their musical evocations of storms. They crop up in plenty of orchestral works, particularly those that are explicitly programmatic (that is, conveying a specific story). One of the most famous examples occurs in “Summer” from Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Each of the four violin concertos illustrates a different season based on an accompanying sonnet. Unusually for the time, Vivaldi published these sonnets (which he may have written himself) alongside the music. The full power of the storm, while alluded to in the first two movements of “Summer,” is unleashed in the Presto (8:34). The poem reads,
Alas, [the shepherd’s] fears were justified
The Heavens thunder and roar and with hail
Cut the head off the wheat and damages the grain.
Here, we are caught in a heavy downpour of furiously fast repeated notes and scales, punctuated by sharp accents as the hail pummels the crops.
Ludwig van Beethoven: Pastoral Symphony
In the Romantic era, storm scenes became practically cliché. Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony No. 6, completed in 1808, provides an early example of this Romantic trope. Uncharacteristically for Beethoven, he gives a descriptive title for each movement to guide the listener. Although he insisted the symphony was more “an expression of feeling than of description,” the titles suggest a program relating to his cherished summer holidays in the countryside, featuring musical illustrations of birdsong, peasant dances, babbling brooks, and a thunderstorm.
In the fourth movement, “Thunder, Storm,” the tempest builds from distant thunder, depicted by pianissimo tremolos in the low strings. Raindrops begin to fall in the form of staccato eighth notes in the violins. Reserving the timpani, trombones, and piccolo for this movement, Beethoven deploys the orchestra’s full forces in a thunderous crescendo. The wind swirls in fierce arpeggios, the piccolo pierces the air like lightning strikes, and sixteenth-note string tremolos pour down like rain. The storm eventually passes, though thunder occasionally rumbles in the distance. An ascending flute scale could be heard as a rainbow, leading seamlessly into the final movement, “Shepherd’s Song—Happy, Thankful Feelings After the Storm.”
Richard Strauss: An Alpine Symphony
Programmatic music had become a staple of the late Romantic period, often appearing in the form of tone poems. A tone poem or symphonic poem is an orchestral work, usually in one movement, that depicts something nonmusical, such as a painting, poem, landscape, or story. Richard Strauss was a major proponent of this genre. His last tone poem, completed in 1915, was Eine Alpensinfonie (“An Alpine Symphony”). Featuring a titanic, 125-piece orchestra, the program follows a group of climbers as they summit a mountain in Strauss’s beloved Bavarian Alps. Although cast as one continuous movement, the score has 22 distinct sections with titles describing the natural features the hikers pass along the way, such as flowering meadows and a waterfall. After taking in the glorious view from the summit, the hikers are caught in a thunderstorm on their way down.
Just like Beethoven, Strauss reserves the heaviest instrumentation of the work for this scene, adding a thunder sheet and wind machine to the already large percussion section as well as organ. He employs many of the same sonic tricks as previous composers to evoke the storm as it approaches, intensifies, and abates, including ominous drum rolls as thunder, staccato and pizzicato notes as rain drops, searing piccolo as lightning, and rapid descending scales as pouring rain. As the wet climbers trudge down the mountain, many of the same themes heard during their ascent recur but in reverse order, more quickly, and in combination with the stormy music.
Franz Liszt: Years of Pilgrimage
One doesn’t need a massive orchestra and special effects to convey a storm. Franz Liszt was able to accomplish this with just the piano in “Orage” (“Thunderstorm”), which appears in the first book of his Années de pèlerinage (“Years of Pilgrimage”). These suites feature some of the most poetic piano music of the 19th century and codify essential elements of Romanticism, the draw of nature, the connection between music and literature, and the emphasis on both physical and psychological journeys.
To cement the place of these works within the Romantic literary movement, Liszt prefaces each piece with a literary quote. “Orage” bears a caption from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which reads, “But where of ye, O tempests! is the goal? / Are ye like those within the human breast? / Or do ye find, at length, like eagles, some high nest?” As this quote suggests, this piece is more of a psychological storm than a meteorological one. While not as colossal as Strauss’s storm, Liszt still captures nature’s fury in this compact piano piece with torrents of fiendish octaves, cascading arpeggios, and chromatic scales.
Frédéric Chopin: "Raindrop" Prélude
A more tranquil depiction of precipitation comes in Frédéric Chopin’s Prelude in D-flat Major, Op. 28, No. 15. The constant repeated A-flats/G-sharps that pervade the piece are often likened to rain, giving the prelude its nickname: “Raindrop.”
Although Chopin did not intend this sobriquet, an apocryphal story of the prelude’s composition by his partner, writer George Sand, helped to proliferate it.
In the winter of 1838/9, Chopin traveled to Mallorca with Sand and her children. He had sketched most of preludes prior to the trip, including the so-called “Raindrop” prelude. But Sand recounts a compelling story of the work’s composition in her memoir. According to Sand, one evening during their ill-fated sojourn, she and her son Maurice returned from an outing in a terrible rainstorm. Chopin, already sick and hallucinating from tuberculosis, was distraught, fearing they had died. He supposedly improvised this prelude, capturing the incessant pitter-patter of rain on the roof of the 15th-century monastery where they were staying.
Although he did get very ill during the trip, this story is likely untrue, as compelling as it may be. Chopin never intended any of his works to be programmatic and balked at the notion that this prelude attempts to imitate the sound of raindrops. If we take Sand at her word in Historie de ma vie, when she suggested the prelude's likeness to rain to Chopin, “He was even angry that I should interpret this in terms of imitative sounds... His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds.”
Regardless of whether Chopin was inspired by rain or not, the beauty of music is the listener can interpret it however they hear it—there are no wrong answers.
We have only scratched the surface of how composers have drawn inspiration from the forces of nature and tried to capture the immense power of storms in music.
In recent years, some contemporary composers have begun using their music to address the trauma of climate change or inspire activism. As we become more aware of our environmental impact, it will be interesting to see how our evolving relationship with the natural world manifests in art in the years ahead.
