There are a lot of classical pieces that make for great Halloween music. Johann Sebastian Bach wrote what is possibly the best Halloween instrumental song: Tocatta and Fugue in D minor. If we want to pull in a choir, we have “O Fortuna” from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. (In college, the choir sang this with the university orchestra. There were only five or six first sopranos singing the highest part. We were standing right next to this HUGE gong. It stood taller than my five feet five inches. When it was played for the first time at dress rehearsal, we all jumped and screamed.)
Opera brings us many songs of death, murder and ghosts. The Mad Scene from Lucia di Lammermoor ( Death Count) is used in the movie The Fifth Element. It is sung by the Diva, the big, bald, blue singer. My personal favorite, though, is a little-known piece from The Medium.
This aria (aria is the fancy, operatic way of saying song) is called “The Black Swan” and is dark and disturbing. It is also a lullaby:
The moon is weaving bandages of gold.
Oh, black swan, where, oh where is my lover gone?
Torn and tattered is my bridal gown,
And my lamp is lost, and my lamp is lost.
With silver needles and with sliver thread,
The stars stitch a shroud for the dying sun.
Oh, black swan, where, oh where has my lover gone?
I had given him a kiss of fire,
And a golden ring, and a golden ring.
Don’t you hear your lover moan?
Eyes of glass and feet of stone,
Shells for teeth and weeds for tongue,
Deep, deep, down in the river’s bed,
He’s looking for the ring, looking for the ring.
Eyes wide open, never asleep,
He’s looking for the ring, looking for the ring.
The spools unravel, and the needles break.
The sun is buried and the stars weep.
Oh, black wave, oh black wave, take me away with you.
I will share with you my golden hair,
And my bridal crown, and my bridal crown.
Take me down with you.
Take me down to my wand’ring lover
And my child unborn, with my child unborn.
Did I mention that this is a lullaby? Normally, we think of a loving mother singing a lullaby to her baby to soothe it to sleep. However, in the opera, Monica sings the lullaby to soothe her mother. Madame Flora, Monica’s mother, is the medium. Earlier, she has been drinking and has hosted a séance in her home with Monica and the mute Toby assisting her behind the scenes. (Madame is something of a fake.) However, something has happened at the end of the séance that scares the bejeebers out of Madame Flora. She forces the ‘guests’ to leave. In an effort to calm her mother, Monica sings this lovely little song. I repeat: this is a lullaby. Go back and read through the lyrics again. I’ll wait.
Creepy, isn’t it?
Interpretive Points
Earlier this month, I broke down some of the interpretive points of Hellfirealong with timing and key shift or change. I won’t do that here. But I do want to look at a couple of things. First, there is the fact that the song has a duet in it that is seldom performed outside of the opera itself. Meaning that if you are hearing this aria in a concert setting, you will probably just hear the melodyand not the lovely harmony that can go with it.
Eyes of glass and feet of stone,
Shells for teeth, and weeds for tongue,
Deep, deep, down in the river’s bed
He’s looking for the ring, looking for the ring.
Eyes wide open, never asleep,
He’s looking for the ring, looking for the ring.
I had an accompanist once, a brilliant pianist, who loved dissonance. Once, jokingly, he said that he would love to find an aria that ended with the singer holding onto one note while the piano was a half-step off. It only took me a moment to come up with this aria for him. The soprano’s last note is a G. The piano plays a G flat, just that half-step lower. The note before has the same issue. Let me tell you, learning how to sing this was a bear. Holding on to the correct notes while playing the piano, or hearing the piano, part was one of the hardest things I’ve sung. The aria itself is not hard. Those last two notes are. Why are they like that?
As I’ve said, dissonance was big in the early to mid-twentieth century. Just listen to anything by Arnold Shoenbergor John Cage. But, for the singer, that’s not a good enough explanation. Why is it there? I think that the sound of the last two notes is so wrong because it is there to highlight how everything is falling apart for Madame Flora. She is losing her sanity and all control of the situation. Even though she is not singing the final notes, the song is for her. Looking at it strictly as a solo, it takes on a slightly different slant. In that case, I think that those notes are showing the singers loss of sanity as she contemplates joining her lover and her dead, unborn child.
Let me just say, for the record: I am not a huge fan of dissonance. Used in moderation, it is a very effective tool for the composer. Used all over the place, it just becomes noise. Parts of this aria fall into that problem, but I think that in this particular context, it works. Its supposed to be weird and spooky. And it succeeds.
Briefly back to the opera: We find out that Toby and Monica are in love. Madame Flora decides that Toby is responsible for the voices that she is hearing. She kicks him out. He sneaks back in while she’s asleep to see Monica. He makes a noise that wakes Madame and hides. She grabs a gun and starts shooting, killing Toby. The end. Death count: 1. Pretty small for an opera, but it is only an hour long.
Halloween is almost upon us. I hope that you have your costume all picked out. Maybe I’ll be a medium.
I’ll be posting roughly once a week with a new song. I’m trying to make the songs seasonal, but Thanksgiving songs are hard to find, so I can make exceptions. If there’s a song that you’d like some background on or questions about what it means, let me know.
Thanks for reading! Until next time!