André Caplet, who composed many of the loveliest works for harp in the repertoire, took the instrument out of its comfort zone with some incredibly ethereal, chilling music based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Mask of the Red Death. The harp isn’t usually associated with fear and death, most often relegated to music of a “nymphs and shepherds” variety. In the solemn opening strains of Rachmaninov’s symphonic poem, we hear plaintive oboe and gloomy clarinets as the composer depicts the sound of the oars of Charon cutting through the waters of the river Styx, bringing our immortal souls ever closer to the underworld. At the cruel climax of the work, she discovers the real body. When she stumbles upon a tree trunk that she believes to be his dead body, a tirade of fears and emotions is unleashed. A lone woman wanders through the woods at night searching for her lover. But the German composer’s one-act opera Erwartung (Expectation), an extended monologue for solo soprano, is one of his most confronting, intensely paranoid psychological experiences. Totentanz (Dance of the Dead) is one of his most thrilling and schockingly modern compositions, from the strident, menacing opening to the truly diabolical virtuosity demanded of the solo pianist.įor some listeners terrified of atonal music, almost anything Schoenberg wrote could have made this list. The great Romantic was obsessed with all things macabre and diabolical, themes he explored in works including La lugubre gondola, Funérailles, Pensées des morts and the Mephisto Waltz). Listen out for the unusual timpani glissandi effect (the low, other-worldly sliding bass) that underscores the unsettling mood. In the final movement of Symphonie fantastique (1830), described by Berlioz as a “diabolical orgy”, a lovelorn artist who has attempted suicide by opium poisoning (but not with a lethal dose as intended) has a tripped-out vision of witches, sorcerers and monsters assembled at his funeral.īartòk: Adagio from Music for Strings, Percussion and Celestaīartòk’s haunting, strangely delicate “night music” in the third movement of this 20th-century masterpiece is so atmospheric and suspenseful that Stanley Kubrick used it in the soundtrack to his horror film The Shining. With his cursed fiddle, Death summons the dead from their graves to kick up their heals until dawn.Įven without Hitchcock’s horrific shower scene burned on our retinas, Bernard Herrmann’s massed string dissonances in his score for the 1960 film Psycho instantly create an atmosphere of fear and disturbance.īerlioz: Dreams of a Witches’ Sabbath from Symphonie fantastique Saint-Saëns’s creepy 1874 tone poem is a Halloween classic, depicting the revelry of the Grim Reaper at midnight every year at this time. This he is granted, provided he can sacrifice three young ladies by the following midnight. Marschner’s sinister chromatic writing and chorus of witches and hobgoblins is enough to put Twilight to shame. Lord Ruthven Earl of Marsden, a newly created vampire, has asked the Vampire Master for another year on earth before being dragged into hell for eternity. Heinrich August Marschner’s grand opera Der Vampyr (1828) is based on a fragment of a novel by Byron, which was completed by the poet’s doctor. The creatures of the night enjoyed a brief vampire craze in theatre and opera of the early 1800s, well before Bram Stoker’s Dracula emerged on the scene. The vampires in tabloids and teen novels today have nothing on the 19th-century European variety. Sadly, it was never performed in his lifetime, but the arrangement by his friend Rimsky-Korsakov has become a concert blockbuster. The image of brooding, winged ghouls wreaking havoc on a mountain village under cover of night has terrified generations of young children in Walt Disney’s Fantasia. Inspired by Russian legend, Mussorgsky’s tone poem depicts the dark ritual of a witches’ sabbath. Whether operas about vampires, the iconic score to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, a tone poem about Death himself summoning the dead from their graves for a Halloween party, here are the 13 scariest pieces of classical music for Halloween. When it comes to Halloween, there is nothing spookier than classical music.