depressing music

[calimac]

kip_w has been asking about depressing music by composers other than Shostakovich. I've been trying to think. There are composers of somber music, and of sad music, but I can't think of any other major composers of depressed music. Except Mahler, who was a manic-depressive.

And he wrote mostly symphonies, and K. doesn't listen to many symphonies while I do.

I know a symphony that's commonly taken (though the composer denied it) as an expression of thoughts at the prospect of nuclear war: that's a pretty damn depressing thing to face, and the music is absolutely harrowing. (Ralph Vaughan Williams's Sixth)

I also know a symphony that depicts the composer's near-fatal heart attack, and his feelings afterwards. Judging by the music, he was more dazed than anything else. (Carl Nielsen's Sixth)

Comments

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

I think part four of the Symphonie Fantastique may qualify.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

Well, there's always Tchaikowsky's Symphony No. 6, "Pathétique." Tchaikowsky died a week after the first public performance, possibly by his own hand.

I also remember hearing about a wave of suicides following the first public performance of some piece of classical music, but I can't recall which one. If it wasn't the Pathétique, it was likely by somebody slavic.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yes, the Pathetique. Exceedingly depressing.

The story of Tchaikovsky's suicide is pretty well debunked.

A wave of suicides by morose young people followed the publication of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. The kind of societal panic we normally think of as a more recent phenomenon followed that. I can't think of an equivalent after the premiere of a work of music, though there's enough works of fiction depicting music that can kill its listeners (as well as at least two with killer jokes).