Read on to discover the best classical music inspired by night…
The day is done, the sun has set. Imagine it sinking majestically in the sky, as depicted by Richard Strauss at the end of his vivid Alpine Symphony. Perhaps the end of daylight gives rise to a languid mood, evoked in Delius’s Songs of Sunset. Or maybe it is a time of revelry, talk and merry-making… Of dancing and drinking, as in Johann Strauss II’s fizzing Die Fledermaus.
Let’s move quickly through the wakefulness of evening and head to later on, when daytime is a distant memory. Now, the moon and the stars are out; the owls and the bats have woken up. Darkness has settled in. The night has arrived. And with it, a wealth of nocturnal music, written by composers throughout the centuries and across countries.
It’s a time when not only the world looks different, a moonlit place of shadows. But somehow, we ourselves are also different, untethered from the safety of daylight. We enter altered states of consciousness, slipping into sleep and entering parallel universes in our dreams and nightmares. Rational thought is replaced by the surreal logic of the unconscious mind.
Asleep, we are suspended in time. Vulnerable. No wonder that the hours after dusk have long been a source of metaphor and imagery. When we talk about the night, about sleep, about darkness, we are talking about so much more… Fear, terror, love, lust, peace, calm, intimacy, the unknown, the unknowable. Even the biggest themes of all: life and death.
Classical music inspired by night… music to be played at night
Our tour begins with music written specifically to be played at night, around 11pm, when in the 18th century the evening was considered over. The German term ‘Nachtmusik’ was used for pieces, often serenades, written to be played at this time.
Take, for example, Mozart’s two Wind Serenades, which the composer described as ‘Nachtmusik’ and ‘nacht musique’ in letters to his father. Or his ubiquitous Eine kleine Nachtmusik, a genial serenade in G major for strings.
Mozart often used the word for pieces with simple scoring; for more complex works, he favoured the Italian ‘notturno’. Both terms have had a long afterlife. Think of the beautiful melody that Borodin spins in the third movement ‘Notturno’ of his String Quartet No. 2. Or Fanny Mendelssohn’s turbulent Notturno in G minor for solo piano.
In 1905, Mahler completed his Symphony No. 7 with two ‘Nachtmusik’ movements, including the sounds of nature at night (cowbells and chattering birds). For Bernstein, Mahler’s ‘Nachtmusik’ wasn’t a nocturne in the ‘usual lyrical sense’. Instead, it was ‘nightmare – that is, night music of emotion recollected in anxiety instead of tranquillity’.
Classical music inspired by night… the Romantic era
As Bernstein alludes, pragmatic descriptions gave way to a poetic idea of night during the Romantic era. Beethoven’s Sonata quasi una fantasia was dubbed the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata. Its rippling broken chords are said to evoke lapping waves on a moonlit lake. And an entire genre came into being when Irish composer John Field published his 12 Nocturnes in 1812.
Soon the arpeggiated left-hand and bel canto right-hand became hallmarks of the solo piano nocturne. In Poland, Maria Szymanowska’s two Nocturnes possibly inspired or at least predate Chopin’s… His 21 Nocturnes contain some of his most lyrical, profound music. Here, the night was a place of reverie and contemplation through endless melodies.
The artist Whistler loved Chopin’s evocative yet abstract title nocturne, giving it to his many ‘moonlight’ canvases. In turn these paintings inspired Debussy’s Nocturnes, three impressionistic orchestral pieces that end with ‘Sirènes’ and the moonlight playing on the sea.
Bartók and creatures of the night
As nocturnal creatures wake up, the sound world changes. No composer has more atmospherically and onomatopoeically conveyed this shift than Bartók, who developed a signature ‘night music’ style. From The Miraculous Mandarin ballet to several of the string quartets, many of his pieces evoke nocturnal worlds. These often include imitations of insects and birds, as well as a sense of spaciousness.
One of the most moving examples is found in the Adagio religioso of the Piano Concerto No. 3, full of woodwind birdsong, rustling strings and chirruping piano. But our ears are also tightly attuned to the night in the timpani glissandos in Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and the cluster chords of ‘The Night’s Music’ in Out of Doors for solo piano. .
Classical music inspired by night… the bells chime midnight
Midnight draws near. The significance of the clock chiming 12 is deeply woven into our collective subconscious: one day ends, another begins. Only the night owls and insomniacs are awake. ‘The solitary, sometimes melancholy hours as one day moves into the next can be a time of reflection and unrest,’ notes Helen Grime. Her orchestral tone poem Near Midnight explores this pivotal time of night. Brass fanfares toll like bells, leading us inexorably to the middle of the night itself.
In Prokofiev’s ballet Cinderella, the frankly terrifying tick-tock of woodblocks over sustained fortissimo tremolo strings ratchet up the tension, as the deadline of midnight draws near. We are into the witching hour, when the rules of daytime no longer apply. Perhaps even the laws of the universe are stretched. Thomas Adès takes us out of time in his The Four Quarters for string quartet. A turn around the 24-hour clock ends with ‘The Twenty-Fifth Hour’, written in the unusual, unstable time signature of 25/16.
Blissful life… and the cold hand of death
The bells toll, too, in Mahler’s ‘Um Mitternacht’, one of his Rückert-Lieder, a song which seems to hang in existential limbo as its narrator faces his death. Mahler was far from the first composer to use the night as a profound metaphor (although he returned to it more often than most). ‘Come, heavy Sleep, the image of true Death,’ begins the resigned narrator of Dowland’s eponymous song, written in 1597, and conveying a message of peaceful acceptance.
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The poetic power of night reaches its height in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, in which his intoxicated lovers claim the darkness as their own. The night is where they can be together; the long night of death will unite them forever. In Act II, the rapturous ‘Liebesnacht’ (love-night) unfolds over a half-hour-plus, tracing, as writer Alex Ross notes, ‘ecstatic greeting, serene bliss, sensual intimacy and a final majestic melody’. Nocturnal music had never been so erotic.
Music to help us sleep
For those, on the other hand, wishing for a restorative night’s sleep, look no further than JS Bach’s Goldberg Variations, surely the world’s most famous artistic cure for insomnia. Written for a sleepless Russian count, so the story goes, this solo keyboard work dazzles with its contrapuntal invention.
Or there’s Max Richter’s Sleep, written specifically with rest in mind: drawing on neuroscience, he created a 31-movement, continuous piece, for an ensemble including piano, strings, organ soprano, synthesisers and electronics, intended to work with our brain’s sleep process. At eight hours, Sleep must surely be the world’s longest lullaby – a whole topic in itself.
The sommeil or ‘slumber scene’, during which characters would drift off and find themselves in other realms and states of being, became popular in French operas of the 17th and 18th centuries. Lully’s Atys even has an allegorical character called Le Sommeil, who lulls the hero with slurred pairs of notes characteristic of the sommeil.
Classical music inspired by night… music for dreaming
Dreams abound in classical music, whether daydreams (Debussy’s Rêverie), visions (Prokofiev’s Visions fugitives), dreamlike states (John Cage’s Dreams), or desires (Liszt’s Liebesträum No. 3).
Yet for a piece that captures the often absurd quality of dreams, turn to Martinů’s Julietta of 1938, based on a surrealist play by Georges Neveux. The Czech composer’s colourful music, tinged with nostalgic accordion, underpins the quest of bookseller Michel to find the girl he once met whose voice he has been dreaming of for years. He searches for love in a place where no one has any memories, before arriving, in Act III, at the Central Bureau of Dreams, where he learns he has been in a dream-world: if he returns, he will never be able to leave.
What a life trapped in a dream might feel like is captured by Delia Derbyshire. The Dreams is a 45-minute work created using recordings of people recounting their dreams, underpinned by Derbyshire’s electronic sounds. It recreates ‘some sensations of dreaming – running away, falling, landscape, underwater and colour,’ noted the Radio Times at the premiere. It’s a truly unsettling work. Tales of being chased by crocodiles and monsters, of falling, unable to speak, of walking in alien red lands, of drowning in deep sea, are related over a bed of eerie electronica.
Classical music inspired by night… from dreams to nightmares
Bad dream – or nightmare? Birtwistle’s 1968 opera Punch and Judy includes a scene overtly titled ‘nightmare’, in which vocal and orchestral shrieks instil anxiety in the audience, while perhaps the most famous mélange of daydreams and diabolical nightmares is found in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique.
But for truly terrifying musical nightmares, turn to the fin de siècle and the Austro-Germanic tradition. A decade after Schoenberg explored the night as a place of psychological transformation in his string sextet Verklärte Nacht, and two years before Sigmund Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams, the German composer wrote his one-woman monodrama Erwartung (1909). ‘[It] could be interpreted as a nightmare,’ said the composer, a comment surely not only on the hideous sequence of events it traces but also the music’s dream-like character.
That same year, Richard Strauss wrote his shocking opera Elektra, a work, he said, of ‘night and light, or black and bright’, in which one unhappy character, Klytämnestra, is tormented by her lack of sleep. ‘I am distraught with nights of horror,’ she sings, over an orchestral score full of awful foreboding. The only cure is death.
The sun rises again!
Or, for the rest of us, waking up. The glorious sunrise of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé washes away the dramas of the night, or perhaps Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra stirs souls. A sigh of relief is breathed with Grieg’s ‘Morning Mood’ from Peer Gynt. The night is over, another day has begun.