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<\/figure><\/div>\n\nThe day is done, the sun has set. Imagine it sinking majestically in the sky, as depicted by Richard Strauss <\/span>at the end of his vivid Alpine Symphony. <\/em> Perhaps the end of daylight gives rise to a languid mood, evoked nowhere better than in Delius\u2019s Songs of Sunset, <\/em> or maybe it is a time of revelry, talk and merry-making, of dancing and drinking, as in <\/span> Johann Strauss II\u2019s <\/span>fizzing Die Fledermaus<\/em>. Let\u2019s 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, which we\u2019ll explore here in a musical journey through the night. It\u2019s a time when not only the world looks different \u2013 a moonlit place of shadows \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n 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 \u2018Nachtmusik\u2019 was used for pieces, often serenades, written to be played at this time. Take, for example, Mozart\u2019s <\/span>two Wind Serenades, which the composer described as \u2018Nachtmusik\u2019 and \u2018nacht musique\u2019 in letters to his father. Or his ubiquitous Eine <\/em>kleine <\/em>Nachtmusik, <\/em> 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 \u2018notturno\u2019. Both terms have had a long afterlife. Think of the beautiful melody that Borodin <\/span> spins in the third movement \u2018Notturno\u2019 of his String Quartet No. 2, or Fanny Mendelssohn\u2019s <\/span> turbulent Notturno in G minor for solo piano. In 1905, Mahler <\/span>completed his Symphony No. 7 with two \u2018Nachtmusik\u2019 movements, including the sounds of nature at night (cowbells and chattering birds) and harking back to the serenade, with guitar and mandolin. For Bernstein, Mahler\u2019s \u2018Nachtmusik\u2019 wasn\u2019t a nocturne in the \u2018usual lyrical sense\u2019. Instead, it was \u2018nightmare \u2013 that is, night music of emotion recollected in anxiety instead of tranquillity\u2019. <\/p>\n\n The hours after dusk, of night and sleep, are when the surreal logic of the unconscious mind replaces rational thought <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n As Bernstein alludes, pragmatic descriptions gave way to a poetic idea of night during the Romantic era. Beethoven\u2019s Sonata quasi una fantasia <\/em> was dubbed the \u2018Moonlight\u2019 Sonata, its rippling broken chords said to evoke lapping waves on a moonlit lake. And an entire genre came into being when Irish composer <\/span> John Field published his 12 Nocturnes in 1812. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\n Soon the arpeggiated left-hand and bel canto right-hand became hallmarks of the solo piano nocturne. In Poland, Maria Szymanowska\u2019s <\/span> two Nocturnes, including her popular \u2018Le Murmure\u2019, possibly inspired or at least predate Chopin\u2019s <\/span> \u2013 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\u2019s evocative yet abstract title \u2018Nocturne\u2019, giving it to his many \u2018moonlight\u2019 canvases; in turn these paintings inspired Debussy\u2019s <\/span>Nocturnes, three impressionistic orchestral pieces that end with \u2018Sir\u00e8nes\u2019 and the moonlight playing on the sea. <\/p>\n\n As nocturnal creatures wake up, the sound world changes. No composer has more atmospherically and onomatopoeically conveyed this shift than Bart\u00f3k, <\/span>who developed a signature \u2018night music\u2019 style. From The Miraculous Mandarin <\/em>ballet to several of the string quartets, many of his pieces feature sections that evoke nocturnal worlds, often including imitations of insects and birds, as well as a sense of spaciousness. One of the most moving examples is found in the Adagio religioso <\/em>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 <\/em>and the cluster chords of \u2018The Night\u2019s Music\u2019 in Out of Doors <\/em>for solo piano. <\/p>\n\n 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. \u2018The solitary, sometimes melancholy hours as one day moves into the next can be a time of reflection and unrest,\u2019 notes Helen Grime, whose 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\u2019s ballet Cinderella, the frankly terrifying tick-tock of woodblocks over sustained fortissimo tremolo strings ratchets 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 Ad\u00e8s takes us out of time in his The Four Quarters for string quartet, a turn around the 24-hour clock that ends with \u2018The Twenty-Fifth Hour\u2019, written in the unusual, unstable time signature of 25\/16.<\/p>\n\n The bells toll, too, in Mahler\u2019s <\/span>\u2018Um Mitternacht\u2019, one of his R\u00fcckert-Lieder, <\/em> 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). \u2018Come, heavy Sleep, the image of true Death,\u2019 begins the resigned narrator of Dowland\u2019s <\/span> eponymous song, written in 1597, and conveying a message of peaceful acceptance. The poetic power of night reaches its height in Wagner\u2019s Tristan und Isolde, <\/em> in which his intoxicated lovers claim the darkness as their own. The night is where they can be together; the <\/span><\/span>l<\/span>ong night of death will unite them forever. In Act II, the rapturous \u2018Liebesnacht\u2019 (love-night) unfolds over a half-hour-plus, tracing, as writer Alex Ross notes, \u2018ecstatic greeting, serene bliss, sensual intimacy and a final majestic melody\u2019. Nocturnal music had never been so erotic.<\/span><\/p>\n\n For those, on the other hand, wishing for a restorative night\u2019s sleep, look no further than JS Bach\u2019s Goldberg Variations, <\/em> surely the world\u2019s 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\u2019s <\/span>Max Richter\u2019s Sleep, <\/em> 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\u2019s sleep process. At eight hours, Sleep <\/em>must surely be the world\u2019s longest lullaby \u2013 awhole topic in itself. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\n The sommeil <\/em> or \u2018slumber scene\u2019, 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\u2019s Atys <\/em> even has an allegorical character called Le Sommeil, who lulls the hero with slurred pairs of notes characteristic of the sommeil. <\/em>Dreams abound in classical music, whether daydreams (Debussy\u2019s R\u00eaverie), <\/em>visions (Prokofiev\u2019s Visions <\/em>fugitives), <\/em>dreamlike states ( John Cage\u2019s Dreams), <\/em>or desires (Liszt\u2019s Liebestraum <\/em> No. 3). Yet for a piece that captures the often absurd quality of dreams, turn to Martin\u016f\u2019s Julietta <\/em> of 1938, based on a surrealist play by Georges Neveux. The Czech composer\u2019s 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 dreamworld: if he returns, he will never be able to leave. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\n In Prokofiev\u2019s Cinderella, as midnight draws near, the tick-tock of woodblocks over tremolo strings ratchets up the tension <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n What a life trapped in a dream might feel like is captured by Delia Derbyshire. The Dreams <\/em> is a 45-minute work created using recordings of people recounting their dreams, underpinned by Derbyshire\u2019s electronic sounds. It recreates \u2018some sensations of dreaming \u2013 running away, falling, landscape, underwater and colour,\u2019 noted the Radio <\/em>Times <\/em>at the premiere. It\u2019s 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. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\n Bad dream \u2013 or nightmare? Birtwistle\u2019s <\/span>1968 opera Punch <\/em>and <\/em>Judy <\/em> includes a scene overtly titled \u2018nightmare\u2019, in which vocal and orchestral shrieks instil anxiety in the audience, while perhaps the most famous m\u00e9lange of daydreams and diabolical nightmares is found in Berlioz\u2019s Symphonie fantastique. <\/em> But for truly terrifying musical nightmares, turn to the fin <\/em>de <\/em>si\u00e8cle <\/em> and the Austro-Germanic tradition. A decade after Schoenberg <\/span>explored the night as a place of psychological transformation in his string sextet Verkl\u00e4rte <\/em>Nacht, <\/em>and two years before Sigmund Freud published his Interpretation <\/em>of <\/em>Dreams, <\/em>the Austrian composer wrote his one-woman monodrama Erwartung <\/em> (1909). \u2018[It] could be interpreted as a nightmare,\u2019 said the composer, a comment surely not only on the hideous sequence of events it traces but also the music\u2019s dream-like character. That same year, Richard Strauss <\/span>wrote his shocking opera Elektra, <\/em>a work, he said, of \u2018night and light, or black and bright\u2019, in which one unhappy character, Klyt\u00e4mnestra, is tormented by her lack of sleep. \u2018I am distraught with nights of horror,\u2019 she sings, over an orchestral score full of awful foreboding. The only cure is death. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\n Or, for the rest of us, waking up. The glorious sunrise of Ravel\u2019s Daphnis et Chlo\u00e9 <\/em> washes away the dramas of the night, or perhaps Strauss\u2019s Also sprach Zarathustra <\/em> stirs souls. A sigh of relief is breathed with <\/span> Grieg\u2019s \u2018Morning Mood\u2019 from Peer Gynt. <\/em>The night is over, another day has begun. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\n Dusk-until-dawn concerts, if relatively rare, tend to be memorable. This year, the London Contemporary Orchestra and conductor Robert Ames staged a 24-hour marathon at London\u2019s Barbican, including Morton Feldman\u2019s six-hour String Quartet No. 2. The <\/em>Times\u2019s <\/em>critic, Richard Morrison, embraced the \u2018trancelike meditation\u2019 of the fare, then, \u2018spiritually nourished\u2026 went out and murdered a bacon roll\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For the all-night premiere of Max Richter\u2019s Sleep <\/em>in 2015, just 20 audience members were invited to pull up the covers in beds at the Wellcome Collection in London. \u2018As silence cloaked the room and the soft piano chords began\u2026 I was engulfed by a sense of calm,\u2019 wrote The <\/em>Guardian\u2019s <\/em>Hannah Ellis-Petersen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The 2003 premiere of John Tavener\u2019s The <\/em>Veil <\/em>of <\/em>The <\/em>Temple, <\/em>a vast sevenhour piece inspired by orthodox vigil services and a host of religions, held at Temple Church in London, began at 10pm and ended at 6am. \u2018At the end, in a marvellous coup <\/em>de <\/em>th\u00e9\u00e2tre, <\/em>the choir led us out into the dawn to a joyful chant from the Hindu scriptures,\u2019 wrote Ivan Hewett in The <\/em>Daily <\/em>Telegraph, <\/em>who \u2018emerged dazed and elated\u2019. <\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>\n\n <\/p>\n\n Music and the night Through the Night Whether peaceful moonlit evenings or witching hour nightmares, composers over the centuries have been inspired by the after hours. Rebecca Franks takes us on a musical journey from dusk till dawn The day is done, the sun has set. Imagine it sinking majestically in the sky, as depicted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":20063,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ub_ctt_via":"","purple_page_number":"42","purple_custom_meta_purple_page_number":"42","purple_seq_number":"1","purple_custom_meta_purple_seq_number":"1","purple_source_article":"article_42-1.xml","purple_custom_meta_purple_source_article":"article_42-1.xml","purple_source_issue":"November-2022","purple_custom_meta_purple_source_issue":"November-2022","purple_external_id":"November-2022-42-1","purple_custom_meta_purple_external_id":"November-2022-42-1","purple_issue_code":"|0000086188||","purple_custom_meta_purple_issue_code":"|0000086188||","purple_android_product":"com.im.bbcmusic.380","purple_custom_meta_purple_android_product":"com.im.bbcmusic.380","purple_ios_product":"com.im.bbcmusic.380","purple_custom_meta_purple_ios_product":"com.im.bbcmusic.380","purple_web_product":"","purple_custom_meta_purple_web_product":"","purple_publication_id":"5b9287a1-9911-4f59-a9d7-30a805560f3d","purple_migrated":"","kt_blocks_editor_width":"","apple_news_api_created_at":"2022-10-06T09:42:40Z","apple_news_article-theme":"","apple_news_api_id":"44284479-322c-4112-abd1-d16d55e8eb57","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2022-10-06T09:42:40Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/ARChEeTIsQRKr0dFtVejrVw","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":true,"apple_news_is_preview":true,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_article_theme":"","apple_news_sections":"[]"},"categories":[17],"tags":[13],"apple_news_notices":[],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/09\/NightMusic_cmyk-scaled-e1664467149723.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"10","apple_news_title":""},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/09\/NightMusic_cmyk-scaled-e1664467149723.jpg",1932,1299,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/09\/NightMusic_cmyk-scaled-e1664467149723-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/09\/NightMusic_cmyk-scaled-e1664467149723-300x202.jpg",300,202,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/09\/NightMusic_cmyk-scaled-e1664467149723-768x516.jpg",768,516,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/09\/NightMusic_cmyk-scaled-e1664467149723-1024x688.jpg",800,538,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/09\/NightMusic_cmyk-scaled-e1664467149723-1536x1033.jpg",1536,1033,true],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/09\/NightMusic_cmyk-1546x2048.jpg",1546,2048,true]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"Music and the night Through the Night Whether peaceful moonlit evenings or witching hour nightmares, composers over the centuries have been inspired by the after hours. Rebecca Franks takes us on a musical journey from dusk till dawn The day is done, the sun has set. Imagine it sinking majestically in the sky, as depicted…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19596"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19596"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20340,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19596\/revisions\/20340"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/dj9jqhxgw9833.cloudfront.net\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/09\/GettyImages539741184_cmyk-1024x681.jpg\")
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Pushing on through <\/h3>\n\n\n\n
All-night <\/em>marathons <\/em><\/h6>\n\n\n\n
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