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Musical Depictions of Hell

28K views 63 replies 26 participants last post by  myaskovsky2002 
#1 ·
An exciting topic - at least for me!

I am in no way religious, but in every way fascinated by the image of 'Hell'. To me, the epic proportions of the mythical fall of Angels and the Hell inhabited thereafter is a wonderful creation of literary imagination, and I love coming across new explorations and representations in literature and music (being a student of English Literature at university, I have chosen to partly specialise in medieval apocalyptic literature).

Anyway, having felt another yearning to plunge into hellish portraits once more, it struck me that my music library is somewhat devoid of fire and brimstone. So, what pieces of music can you direct me towards that are (in some way) to do with hell?

Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini is most prominent on my list, as the depiction of one of the circles of Hell from Dante's Divine Comedy (and, of course, Liszt's far inferior Dante Symphony :p).

As well as this, the last movement of his Manfred Symphony is (arguably) hellish. At the very least, it's demonic! Byron's own description of the related act in his drama sees Arimanes, lord of the underworld, on a fiery throne.

Of course, a Requiem can be good now and then for its Dies Irae (of course, Requiems are always good, but I mean if you're seeking hell-like fulfilment). But where else can I turn? There are certainly plenty of pieces that seem to evoke the end of life or the world, but what compositions are explicitly to do with Hell and/or Judgment?
 
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#2 ·
One of my favorite piano pieces is actually written with inspiration from text from Dante's Inferno. It's the 5th movement of Edward MacDowell's First Modern Suite Op. 10. It's available on Naxos. The piece sounds incredibly demonic. MacDowell was a master of writing for the lower half of the piano.

"Lasciate ogni speranza / Voi chentrate" translated to "Abandon all hope, ye who enter"

Ligeti's 13th Etude (Book 2) is titled "L'escalier du diable"

I know a few others but not off the top of my head right now.
 
#5 ·
One of my favorite piano pieces is actually written with inspiration from text from Dante's Inferno. It's the 5th movement of Edward MacDowell's First Modern Suite Op. 10. It's available on Naxos. The piece sounds incredibly demonic. MacDowell was a master of writing for the lower half of the piano.

"Lasciate ogni speranza / Voi chentrate" translated to "Abandon all hope, ye who enter"

Ligeti's 13th Etude (Book 2) is titled "L'escalier du diable".
Thanks for the recommendations. I was certainly struck by the MacDowell - it deserves a good few, focused listens over the next few days, so it looks like he'll be receiving my attention for a while!

Ligeti was good too - it's quite curious how, even though he falls completely outside my usually stringent tastes, it's still a marvel to listen to a piece like this when I know it's informed by a certain image that I'm very interested in.

Lukecash12 said:
Scriabin's Vers La Flamme may not be a hell scene specifically, but it certainly ties in emotionally to the subject matter.
I really enjoyed listening to this! Though not explicitly hellish, it certainly fits in if Horowitz is right in saying that Scriabin's inspiration was from his "eccentric conviction that a constant accumulation of heat would ultimately cause the destruction of the world"!

How about the NIght on the Bare Mountain?

Jon Leifs - Hekla. A symphonic poem depicting the Icelandic volcano Hekla. Ive seen it and trust me its very imposing and quite terrifiying as its still active.
I do like Night on the Bare Mountain, but it's one of those unfortunate pieces that, for me at least, has suffered immensely through its uses in 'popular culture' :( I'll see if I can find the Leifs now...
 
#3 ·


Scriabin's Vers La Flamme may not be a hell scene specifically, but it certainly ties in emotionally to the subject matter.

Edit: Also, this is a bit of a shot in the dark, but it seemed somewhat relevant. I'm listening to it right now, and I thought I may as well refer it to the topic.
 
#4 ·
How about the NIght on the Bare Mountain?

Jon Leifs - Hekla. A symphonic poem depicting the Icelandic volcano Hekla. Ive seen it and trust me its very imposing and quite terrifiying as its still active.
 
#6 ·
The Ligeti is more traditional though than a lot of his other works. I think people can appreciate it for what it is without having to like Ligeti very much.

I still can't grasp how dark the MacDowell is. There is one part that just sounds so demonic. Being a student composer and a pianist, I envy how he can write such a well written piece with most of it being played on the lower half of the piano. I want to learn it one day. It isn't terribly hard to play, but hard to master.

The Scriabin is good too.

My guess is that you (and I) should dig a bit more into the tone poets to find more literal settings of Hell.
 
#8 ·
Penderecki - Threnody for the victims of Hiroshima (though I'd be surprised if you hadn't heard it before)
Mahler - Symphony No. 1, last movement
Liszt - Totentanz (especially the beginning :D)
He didn't ask for THE MOST POWERFUL HELL LIKE DARK PIECES (I'M METALHEAD WANT TO LISTEN CLASSICAL LIKE DARK POWER MUSIC!!!!), but fot the pieces with infernal theme behind them. Didn't he?
 
#10 ·
I think Mahler 8 is closer to the mark (beginning of part two), but I think that's slightly less convincing than Mahler 6 in that regard, even though the latter doesn't have a "program" at all.

Oh, and the ever-popular Danse Macabre by Saint-Saens.
 
#11 ·
How about Stravinsky's very popular Rite of Spring? It may not be specifically about hell but pagan rituals and a young girl dancing herself to death… if that isn't even a little hellish then I don't know what is!

Here is Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting part of the last movement like a man possessed and towards the very end it even looks like (well to me anyway) a tiny bit of head banging ensues. :p

 
#12 · (Edited)
Thanks for the general, 'this sounds like hell' suggestions, but Aramis is right to point out that I did ask for recommendations that are explicitly to do with a depiction of the Hell of Christianity itself in a much more academic sense than 'I could describe this piece as infernal'; hence the close of my original post:

ME! said:
There are certainly plenty of pieces that seem to evoke the end of life or the world, but what compositions are explicitly to do with Hell and/or Judgment?
The pieces I originally cited are explorations of works of literature about characters who descend into the realms of Hell and deal with its torments. At the very least, compositions of relevance will have some kind of openly demonic programme. Indeed, any relevant composition would have to be programmatic because I am not searching for an approximation of devilish emotion, but rather an obvious and formally-stated depiction of Hell or other closely linked ideas.

Thus, any Totentanz or Danse Macabre is relevant (though I would have to say tangentially), for they are a representation of the inevitable fate of every living being; other suggestions of programmatic works based on terrible disasters, while appreciated, don't have much to do with what I am asking for; and, most certainly, absolute music is completely off the mark because it can no way have anything to do with what I wish to explore in music.

I'm not saying that any of these suggestions are pointless, but there's no point in getting diverted into a heated discussion about what is and isn't relevant. If you'd like to stay on topic, then make sure the piece you have in mind is explicitly concerned with a figurative portrayal of Hell or similar ideas, rather than a simply apocalyptic-sounding piece that approximates the same emotions ;)

---- TIP: I would imagine that any fitting piece is more than likely to be based on a literary source. Ones already suggested are musical imaginings of works by the likes of Byron, Dante and Goethe. So the chances are that if the piece you have in mind isn't based on a literary work, then it probably only resembles what I'm looking for in a not-so-useful way.
 
#13 ·
Thus, any Totentanz or Danse Macabre is relevant (though I would have to say tangentially), for they are a representation of the inevitable fate of every living being; other suggestions of programmatic works based on terrible disasters, while appreciated, don't have much to do with what I am asking for; and, most certainly, absolute music is completely off the mark because it can no way have anything to do with what I wish to explore in music.
Music without any other stimulus but sound can only be absolute. If the music is set to words like an opera or song, or there is a intrinsic visual accompaniment to the sound then an extra-musical idea can be incorporated into the work. Music without these non-sonic factors can't really portray anything as abstract as the notion of Hell or an afterlife. Things like busy/calm, pretty/ugly, natural/artificial could be conveyed by music alone but a made up place is impossible to conjure. So say, a birdsong can be mimicked to transfer the thought of nature but Hell has no base in reality. Therefore any suggestion in this thread is as correct as the next.
 
#15 ·
This strikes me as the perfect baroque depiction of hell, at least in the realm of single instrument pieces:

It's very picturesque, and rather free form compared to other pieces of the genre. And it touches on so many different emotions that one might associate with hell. Also, the phrases begin and end in a spontaneous manner.
 
#50 ·
It's interesting you mention Alkan, the second movement of his Grand Duo Concertante in F sharp minor, Op. 21 is literally titled: "L'Enfer", which is french for hell. You can't get much more specific when it comes to musical depictions of hell.

...Which in itself is strange, since Alkan was jewish, and jews don't really believe in hell. Guess the christian afterlife was more inspiring to him than the jewish.
 
#18 ·
Apologies for misunderstanding the topic before Polednice!

For literal depictions of hell you could try listening to Krzysztof Penderecki's opera Paradise Lost (based on John Milton's epic poem of the same name).

Or try Ride to the Abyss and Pandemonium from Berlioz's opera The Damnation of Faust:

 
#19 ·
No worries, The Rite of Spring was one of the better suggestions ;)

Thanks for mentioning Penderecki; Paradise Lost has always been one of my favourite literary works. I did a search a while back (admittedly, it must have been a pretty absent-minded search!) for music based on the epic, and I was surprised at the lack of the results. I'm glad my attention has been drawn to this.

It's a good coincidence that you mentioned Berlioz as well; The Damnation of Faust was on BBC Radio 3 just this afternoon :D
 
#21 ·
Ha, at least there's one person I can trust :D

I just spent a couple of minutes putting keywords into the naxos music library and came across some works that I already knew about but had slipped my mind. Notable for the inclusion of the Devil as a character are Dvorak's The Devil and Kate and Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale. Today though, seeing as it's currently available on the BBC iPlayer, I'm going to give a listen to Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust (and, of course, I'll give another few listens to MacDowell!).
 
#22 ·
Don Giovanni has a literal hellish undertone. In the finale, when the dark creatures come after Don Giovanni, it really feels hellish. Siepi was the first Don, that I ever saw, to actually be pulled into an inferno. They usually just fall in, but he was dragged. Even better, was when Kurt Moll dragged Samuel Ramey into hell.
 
#23 ·
It's not about undertones. It's about songs directly inspired from hell or literature from hell.

Polednice, I'm sure there are a few works from Crumb that fit in that category, but that's not really your style as I have somewhat figured out. He does some incredible stuff with tunes we know, like the Dies Irae. I'm not familiar with a large portion of his work though.
 
#24 ·
With some of the things I've listened to in the last few days, it's been quite interesting hearing pieces that most certainly fall outside the boundaries of my style. They're definitely not things that I would listen to regularly, but for the sake of finding this specific type of music, it's still good to listen to. Of course, there will still be some people that are so far out of my tastes that I just can't listen to them, but (uncharacteristically!) I won't rule anybody out too hastily, so I'll read up on Crumb.
 
#25 · (Edited)
It doesn't look like anybody has mentioned Tartini's Devil's Trill Sonata. Tartini had a dream in which Satan played it for him on the violin.

Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_Trill_Sonata

YouTube clip:



It's not really a musical depiction of Hell, but it sounds diabolical.
 
#30 ·
Thanks very much for pointing that out; it made an interesting read.

The author certainly seems right when he says that most musical inspiration for depicting Hell or its inhabitants comes from Goethe's Faust. Thus, we can add the following to the list:

Rubinstein: The Demon
Spohr: Faust
Schumann: Scenes from Goethe's Faust
Gounod: Faust
Liszt: Faust Symphony (which should have sprung to mind when I thought of the Dante Symphony!)

I'm sure it's all worthwhile listening, but I can't help but think that all of this Faust-centric music is probably one step too detached from the kind of musical imagery I'm looking for. *sigh*
 
#31 ·
:D You must be joking.

One for early music: Les Elemens (1737) by Jean-Fery Rebel (1666 - 1747) is an orchestral suite depicting creation with chaos at the start; not quite hell, but close enough. Interesting French Baroque piece.
 
#36 · (Edited)
#37 ·
Glad to be of some help and I hope you enjoyed the Damnation of Faust! :)

Here is another hellish work I came across after a quick search:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job:_A_Masque_for_Dancing

It's Vaughan Williams' ballet Job: A Masque for dancing. I'm not 100% sure if it contains literal depictions of hell (there's a possibility of it in the second scene) but there are certainly literal depictions of Satan.
 
#39 ·
BTW sara I apologise for posting about the Penderecki opera after you had already done so. I should have gone through the earlier posts more carefully.

The Faust Symphony by Liszt is great! I listened to it for the first time last night (having bought it nearly a year ago, and never gotten around to it until this topic came up).

Job: A Masque for Dancing
is available on Naxos. The shops around here all have that recording. If you are signed up you can listen to part of it on their website.
 
#40 ·
The Faust Symphony by Liszt is great! I listened to it for the first time last night (having bought it nearly a year ago, and never gotten around to it until this topic came up).

Job: A Masque for Dancing
is available on Naxos. The shops around here all have that recording. If you are signed up you can listen to part of it on their website.
The Faust Symphony does look interesting. I've had the Dante one for a while now, which I really like, but I didn't by the Faust alongside it. I didn't realise until a few days ago that the Faust Symphony is made up of four character-pieces - I think I'll listen to that today.
 
#48 ·
@Fsharpmajor, there's no need to apologise at all but thanks all the same. :)

After doing that quick search and only coming up with the Penderecki suggestion and finding 'Job' and a few 'Fausts' I have a sneaking suspicion that there are more literal depictions of God and Heaven than Satan and Hell.
 
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