Halloween is once again here… and to celebrate, I wanted to put forth another playlist of appropriate classical music. In years past, I’ve presented classical playlists of music depicting vampires, works based on the writings of Edgar Allen Poe, or even a collection of horror operas.
This year, let me feature one of the most archetypal images of Halloween: the witch.
Witches have long been depicted in classical music, and they continue to fascinate composers today. Sometimes these powerful women spark terror, but in other times witches inspire sympathy, or even admiration.
Enjoy, and Happy Halloween!
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Bantock: The Witch of Atlas. Percy Shelley’s “visionary rhyme” The Witch of Atlas concerns a mysterious cave-dwelling witch and recounts the pranks she plays on mankind. Composer Sir Granville Bantock selected lines that concentrate on the ecstatic beauty of the Witch for his 1902 tone poem for orchestra.
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Berlioz: “Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath,” from Symphony Fantastique. Berlioz was a great revolutionary—writing only a few years after Beethoven’s death, he revolutionized what music could sound like, or what it could portray. His Symphonie Fantastique shocked the musical world at its debut, and still surprises today. This work about obsession and drug use ends with a vision of the (anti)hero being dragged to Hell for killing his beloved, mocked by a coven of witches celebrating his fall with a twisted version of the Dies Irae. This movement was used to great effect in Stanley Kubrick’s classic film, The Shining.
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Dvořák: The Noon Witch. This tone poem by Dvořák retells a particularly grim Czech folktale. A mother scolds her child and threatens to summon the Noon (or Mid-Day) Witch if he continues to misbehave. Alas, the Noon Witch hears about the unruly child, and decides to claim him for herself. The terrified mother tries to fight the witch off, but ultimately collapses. Later that day, the father arrives home, and finds his wife passed out with the dead body of their son in her arms—the mother had accidentally smothered their son while protecting him from the witch.
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Handel: “Saul and the Witch of Endor,” from Saul. The third act of Handel’s oratorio opens with dramatic music for King Saul as he seeks advice from the Witch of Endor. The Witch invokes the Ghost of Samuel in a passage of supernatural spookiness, and the Ghost prophesies doom for the King.
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Humperdinck: “Witch’s Ride,” from Hansel and Gretel. Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera achieved world-wide fame, and remains particularly associated with Christmas. But the story of a child-eating witch seems equally at home with Halloween. The Witch’s Ride that separates the first and second acts is a particular delight.
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Larsen: Witches’ Trio. Libby Larsen’s a cappella work for women’s voices is a take on the famous witches’ incantation, “Double, double, toil and trouble,” from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. And it’s a hoot! The work is filled with lurid word-painting and rhythmic tricks.
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Lyadov: Baba-Yaga. Like many of his contemporaries, Lyadov was drawn to Russian subjects—including Baba-Yaga, the much-feared witch of Slavic mythology. This Russian tone poem isn’t nearly as popular as Mussorgsky’s depiction from Pictures at an Exhibition, but it captures all the quirky horror of this quintessential witch.
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MacMillan: The Confession of Isobel Gowdie. James MacMillan’s tone poem is a dark, terrifying work—a modern-day warning that explores what happens when innocents are swept up in moral panics. Under horrific torture, Isobel Gowdie confessed to being a witch in 1662, claiming she had been baptized by the devil and indulged in all manner of wicked, perverted acts. Ultimately she was strangled and burned at the stake. James MacMillan’s The Confession of Isobel Gowdie was his breakthrough work at the 1990 Proms; he describes it as “the Requiem that Isobel Gowdie never had.”
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Mendelssohn: Andres Maienlied. Mendelssohn’s Andres Maienlied, is also known as Hexenlied (“Witches’ Song”). Ludwig Christoph Heinrich Hölty’s tale of a coven celebrating the arrival of spring inspired Mendelssohn to a glorious essay in comic diablerie, with show-stopping virtuoso effects for both singer and pianist conjuring up the frantic activities of the Witches’ Sabbath on the Brocken mountain-top.
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Musgrave: “Circe,” from Voices of the Ancient World. Circe is one of literature’s most ancient and venerable witches. She first appeared in The Odyssey, where she who changed Odysseus’s men into beasts. Odysseus was given a sprig from a certain plant (moly… which shows up in the expression, “Holy moly!”) by Hermes which allowed him to resist her charms. Thea Musgrave presents a fascinating portrait of this powerful sorceress in her 1998 chamber work, Voices of the Ancient World.
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Mussorgsky: Night on Bald Mountain. Mussorgsky was fascinated by the idea of composing a work depicting a Witches’ Sabbath; alas, he never completed a definitive version of his score. When his original tone poem (originally titled St. John’s Eve on Bald Mountain) was rejected by Russia’s musical elite, he attempted to recast the piece for vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra, into two subsequent projects—the collaborative opera-ballet Mlada (1872), and the opera Sorochintsy Fair (1880). It never took hold, and seemed destined for oblivion. Later, Mussorgsky’s friend Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov took the music and created more or less a new tone poem for orchestra—a work that has become a beloved standard. Mussorgsky’s original (linked here) is perhaps less refined, but it bristles with creative energy, and savage orchestration. There are four sections to the music: (i) Assembly of the Witches; (ii) Satan’s Journey; (iii) Black Mass; (iv) Sabbath.
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Purcell, “Witches Scene,” from Dido and Aeneas. English composer Henry Purcell added a bit of Macbeth to his retelling of The Aeneid. In his libretto, a trio of witches decides to ruin the happiness of Dido and Aeneas by making the Trojan hero believe he is summoned by the gods to leave Carthage and build a new city in Italy. He does so, leading to Queen Dido committing suicide in grief.
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Smentana: Macbeth and the Witches. Smetana’s piano sketch Macbeth and the Witches, after William Shakespeare’s tragedy, originated in 1859 while the composer was living in Sweden. Some scholars believe that it was meant to be scored for full orchestra. The work’s dark and gloomy mood is connected with the death of Smetana’s wife Katharina in 1859. Published posthumously, it is a supernatural showstopper that brings to mind the works of Franz Liszt.
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Verdi: “Chorus of Witches,” from Macbeth. This was the first of Verdi’s great Shakespeare operas, originally written in 1847 and revised in 1865. It is much more compressed and economical relative to his later Otello and Falstaff; as a result, the opera comes off a terrifying thriller. As in Shakespeare’s original, Macbeth tells the story of a Scottish lord who begins a bloody campaign to seize the crown and hold it against all rivals. The opera abounds with supernatural evil, including witches who feed Macbeth’s ambition, and ghosts that shatter his sanity.
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Mask of the Flower Prince 