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Dead Inside: The Macabre, the Terrifying, and the Pursuit of Wholeness in the Music of Liszt and Rachmaninoff

By Lucian Baxter, Los Medanos College Mentors: Edward Haven and Luis Zuniga, Los Medanos

College

Abstract

In Being and Time, Heidegger develops an existential approach called being-toward-death

which claims that human existence is incomplete without living fully into the possibility of death.

Half a century earlier, the music of the Romantic period was notable for a fascination with the

macabre. Using Heidegger’s philosophy as a lens, what statement about death is made by two

Romantic tone poems: Liszt’s Totentanz and Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead? Both composers

lost formative mentors in their youth, which fueled their existential anxiety. In addition, both tone

poems incorporate a haunting plainchant from the Catholic Requiem Mass, the Dies Irae. Its

presence in Totentanz frantically seeks to escape death, but in Isle of the Dead it reveals the

coexistence of life and death. Thus, while Totentanz pushes us deeper into defiance and

inauthenticity, Isle of the Dead aligns with Heidegger’s theory that acceptance and anticipation

of death completes authentic existence.

Introduction

During the Romantic Period (roughly 1830-1900), composers of music were obsessed with

passionate emotions, the macabre, and death. Two of the greatest pianist-composers of the

Romantic Period, Franz Liszt and Sergei Rachmaninoff, had intensely uncomfortable

relationships to death, expressing this in both healthy and less than healthy ways through their

music. The question that drove this research was: using Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of

being-toward-death as a lens, what relationship to death can we observe in Liszt and

Rachmaninoff through their tone poems Totentanz and Isle of the Dead? Additionally, can we

discern from these tone poems whether their being-toward-death was healthy or not?

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Fig. 1: Franz Liszt

Liszt: Biography of a Showman

Liszt and Rachmaninoff were the focal points of this research because they were both very

sensitive to existential anxiety but approached this emotion in significantly different ways. Liszt’s

tendency throughout his life was to become immersed in dramatic religious mania, though there

were those who questioned whether his religious expression was authentic or whether it was

merely an act calculated to garner publicity. Regardless of the motive for his religious

expression, he was undoubtedly surrounded by

supernatural mystique from the time of his birth. He was

born in 1811, the year of the Great Comet; this eerie

spectacle of nature caused not only great fear at the evil

it was thought to foretell but also a plethora of omens

and predictions. According to legend, when his mother

Anna was awaiting his birth “gypsies arrived in the village

and predicted the birth of a famous man [and] Anna saw

in this a sign from heaven” (Hilmes 2). It is anyone’s

guess how much truth there is to this story, but it makes

a good tale nonetheless. As a child Liszt was quite

sickly, once becoming so ill that his parents “feared the worst and

ordered a coffin” only for him to make an unexpected recovery

(Hilmes 4). His attraction to mysticism and religion began at an early age through attending

Catholic church with his family every Sunday; here, he was first exposed to the allure of the

rituals and legends of the Catholic tradition and became bewitched by them.

Liszt’s father Adam was a gifted musician, playing the piano, violin, cello, and guitar; though he

never made it as a professional, he was determined to help his son achieve what he himself had

never managed. He was completely devoted to furthering Liszt’s education and career as a

child prodigy, giving him his first piano lessons, moving the family to a new city so that Liszt

could have lessons with renowned teachers including Carl Czerny and Antonio Salieri, and

taking him on an extended concert tour of Europe when he was a teenager. However, in taking

the young Liszt on this tour, Adam was also in part after the money that Liszt earned as a

concert pianist: as Czerny noticed, “Unfortunately [Liszt’s] father wanted to derive great

pecuniary advantage from him, and the boy was working well and just starting to compose when

he went off on tour, first to Hungary and ultimately to Paris and London and so on, where he

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caused the greatest stir, as all the papers of the time can attest” (Hilmes 14). Czerny worried

that Adam’s devotion to money would be detrimental to his son’s education.

During the tour, Liszt obsessively read De imitatione Christi, a bestseller by the fifteenth century

mystic Thomas a Kempis. In the book’s “meditative brooding on the life and sufferings of Christ”,

Liszt first “conceived the desire to be a priest. There were two sides to his piety, which on the

one hand was genuine and sincere, and on the other represented a kind of protest against the

secularism of his existence as a child prodigy” (Hilmes 26-27).

At the end of his tour came two devastating losses that set him to questioning the meaning of

his existence. First, Adam fell ill and died while they were in France in 1827, leaving the fifteen-

year-old Liszt on his own. Up until that point Adam, an astute businessman, had cleverly

engineered his son’s success, planning his tours and acting as his public relations manager;

now, Liszt had to learn to play the game of society to his advantage all by himself.

As if that were not enough, he then fell in love with one of his students, Caroline de Saint-Cricq,

who was decidedly upper class to his middle class. Her father would not allow her to marry

below her station and forced the couple apart by marrying her off to someone of her own social

rank. After losing his first love Liszt fell into depression, not only because he missed her but

because the experience drove home the reality that while musicians were admired for their

talent, they were not truly respected as equals in society during that time period.

After these crushing blows he gave himself over to his existential crisis, going to church every

day and studying philosophy and religion. His alienation from society was so dramatic that there

was even a rumor that he had died: “on the day after his seventeenth birthday, Le Corsaire

published a lengthy obituary under the heading ‘Death of the Young Liszt’” (Hilmes 31).

Later in life, death was to deal Liszt another blow when it took two of his children within the span

of three years. His son Daniel became mysteriously ill in 1859 and died at the age of twenty,

and three years later in 1862 his daughter Blandine died at the age of twenty-six after giving

birth to her first child. Not long after these losses he finally realized his dream of becoming a

priest, in a way. He took minor orders in the Catholic Church, was given the title ‘Abbot’, and

wore a cassock for the rest of his life. He even lived in a monastery for a time. Despite this, he

still remained committed to his glamorous life as a performer, composer, and teacher, and never

gave up his womanizing ways (which he was not required to give up since he was never

ordained as a priest). As his son-in-law Hans von Bulow observed, “‘My father-in-law strikes me

as being outwardly too much of an abbe and inwardly too little of one’” (Hilmes 196).

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Liszt’s Musical Influence

Always one to shake things up, Liszt was responsible for many innovations in music during his

career. He pioneered the form of the tone poem or symphonic poem, which is the form of both

Totentanz and Isle of the Dead; the tone poem as Liszt developed it was an orchestral work in

one movement, and was to include ideas from poetry, art, or nature in order to relate a particular

non-musical narrative through music. Another way in which he left a lasting mark on musical

tradition was to create the idea of the solo recital where a lone virtuoso performer is allowed to

show off their skills and command an entire audience on their own. The last innovation to be

examined here derived its inspiration from Niccolò Paganini, the infamous virtuoso violinist

whose abilities on his instrument were so superhuman that he was said to not be a person at all

but “the devil returned to earth in human form” (Hilmes 38). When Liszt saw him perform,

transcending all the “usual technical difficulties...and even appearing to reinvent the whole art of

playing the violin”, Liszt decided to do the same thing with the piano, opening the instrument to

an entirely new mode of expression and giving the piano the power of a full orchestra (Hilmes

38-39). A consummate showman, he knew how to utterly captivate his audience through his

astonishing technique and the ferocity of the sounds he could command, and how to use the

“magic that drew listeners into the artist’s sway” (Hilmes 41). His natural charisma overwhelmed

his audiences, particularly the females among them; this “intimate interaction between Liszt and

the women in his audience seems to have worked particularly well, but it meant that the music

took second place, being effortlessly eclipsed by a pronounced element of eroticism and sex

appeal” (Hilmes 42).

Totentanz was premiered in 1865, though it had been in the works since 1838 and was

considered complete in 1849 with revisions in the 1850s. This piece was typical of his

pyrotechnical style, putting great physical strain on the piano soloist. It was far from being the

only sinister piece Liszt ever wrote: among that number are his Mephisto Waltzes, Dante

Symphony, and Faust Symphony—which are all in some way about hell, the devil, or other

demons.

Rachmaninoff: Biography of a Pessimist

In contrast to Liszt’s glamorous attempts to achieve immortality, Rachmaninoff handled his

anxiety with the stoic pessimism stereotypical of the Russian people. Rachmaninoff was born

into a musical family; on his father’s side, musicianship went back three generations or more.

His father, Vasily, and mother, Lyubov, were both amateur pianists who recognized his obvious

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Fig. 2: Sergei Rachmaninoff

pianistic capabilities when he was very young; by the age of six, he was studying with Anna

Ornatskaya, a gifted graduate of the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Rachmaninoff grew up in

rural Russia on the family’s estate, where the bells that are an important aspect of Russian life

imprinted themselves upon him, becoming associated with his childhood memories, both happy

and painful. According to Oskar von Riesemann, one “particularly grand funeral in Novgorod

Cemetery, accompanied by the relentless tolling of huge iron bells, stamped itself eternally on

his memory” (Haylock 9). This was only the beginning of the experiences that would influence

his obsession with death.

When Rachmaninoff was eight years old, his pleasant,

peaceful childhood came to an end; for years, Vasily had

been financially careless, losing a small fortune on a series

of brainless financial schemes, which forced him to sell four

of the family’s five estates. Finally, his carelessness led to

the sale of the fifth estate, the family home. The family

moved to a suburb of St. Petersburg, where Rachmaninoff

received a scholarship to study at the St. Petersburg

Conservatory. Unfortunately, there was a diphtheria

epidemic wreaking havoc in St. Petersburg, and

Rachmaninoff, along with his brother Vladimir and sister

Sofiya, fell ill. He and Vladimir eventually made full

recoveries, but Sofiya died. This loss was traumatic to

Rachmaninoff, which contributed to the fear of death that was

such a powerful creative force in his music (Haylock).

In 1885, Rachmaninoff traveled to Moscow to study under Nikolai Zverev, who was a highly

demanding and formidable mentor. Such distinguished composers as Tchaikovsky sometimes

visited at Zverev’s apartment, where they would be treated to a concert by the young

Rachmaninoff and other students who lived with Zverev. Rachmaninoff wrote of these times:

I can barely describe how inspiring it was to perform in front of the finest musicians in Moscow, and to receive such distinguished encouragement (Haylock 12).

Tchaikovsky ended up being quite a mentor to the younger composer; when Rachmaninoff

wrote his opera Aleko in 1892, Tchaikovsky was enormously supportive, even asking

Rachmaninoff whether he would like to have his opera performed alongside one of

Tchaikovsky’s own operas. Rachmaninoff’s next traumatic experience with death came in the

summer of 1893, when his two great mentors, Zverev and Tchaikovsky, died within a month of

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each other. Given the extent to which he looked up to both of them, it is obvious how much he

lost; this could only have added to his already-difficult relationship with death. He openly

acknowledged his obsession with death; Marietta Shaginian, a young poet with whom

Rachmaninoff shared a contemplative and deep friendship, quoted him as saying to her once:

“‘It’s impossible to live while one knows one must die after all. How can you bear the thought of

dying?’” (Gitz 9).

Another form of existential angst surfaced for Rachmaninoff in 1897, when his first symphony

premiered. It failed spectacularly: he later recalled the premiere as “the most agonizing hour of

my life” (Huscher). Until its premiere in Saint Petersburg in 1897 he had been productive and

confident, full of ideas and enthusiasm, and gaining momentum in his career; but the appalling

performance of his symphony under the direction of Alexander Glazunov (who, it was later said,

was drunk at the performance) so shattered his resolve and his ambitions that he could write

nothing for the next three years. One particularly harsh critic wrote:

If there were a conservatory in Hell, if one of its talented students were instructed to write a program symphony on the “Seven Plagues of Egypt,” and if he were to compose a symphony like Mr. Rachmaninoff’s, then he would have fulfilled his task brilliantly and would bring delight to the inhabitants of Hell (Keller).

This must have been especially devastating criticism, as it came from Cesar Cui, a senior

composer who was one of ‘The Mighty Five,’ a group of great Russian nationalist composers

including Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, and Mussorgsky. Rachmaninoff was unable to write any

music for the next three years, only returning to composing after undergoing much therapy. The

depression and introspection of this period shaped the way he treated his existential anxiety in

his music to follow. On the whole, his music is inherently contemplative and, though it never

expresses pathological fear, is yet obsessively focused on death; his fascination with darkness

was such an intrinsic part of his character that Stravinsky once called him a “six-and-a-half-foot

scowl” (Spencer).

Despite Rachmaninoff’s musical genius and the beauty of his work, there were those who had

issues with the pessimism inherent in his music. Shaginian believed that real music with staying

power was music that served to “cleanse, organize, lift the soul…finally, to unite one with all

humanity” (Mitchell). The dark emotions that were integral to Rachmaninoff’s work caused her to

worry about their negative effect on his audience; and she encouraged him to focus on less

gloomy emotions, as she felt that music that expressed desolation and sensuality was false and

harmful. Despite this criticism, many other critics observed Rachmaninoff’s music as “deeply

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human” and as “healthier, simpler, more balanced” than the more major-sounding compositions

of his contemporaries such as Scriabin (Mitchell).

Ivan Lipaev [affirmed] this interpretation in 1913, claiming that “in his music, Rachmaninoff contemplates more than he depicts,” a tendency in which he found evidence of the composer’s central focus on the “soul of humanity,” rather than searching for something beyond the human (Mitchell).

Rachmaninoff’s passionate focus on the darker side of humanity may have made some people

uncomfortable, but although dark emotions are difficult to deal with, it is unhealthy to deny that

aspect of the human experience, and his willingness to confront that darkness was what made

his music so authentic to human existence.

The Creation of Isle of the Dead

Rachmaninoff lived in Dresden from autumn of 1906 to spring of 1909 due to political unrest in

Russia; in January 1905, a group of workers taking petitions to the czar were murdered by the

Royal Police outside the Winter Palace, which was a foreshadowing event to the Russian

Revolution of 1917. He completed three great pieces during his time in Dresden, the last of

which is his orchestral poem Isle of the Dead, Op. 29 (the others are his Second Symphony,

Op. 27, and his First Sonata for Pianoforte, Op. 28); along with his later Symphonic Dances and

his symphonies, Isle of the Dead is one of his finest orchestral works. Though the final date of

the manuscript score is 17 April 1909, he continued to polish Isle of the Dead even twenty years

later. It is dedicated to his friend Nikolai Struve, one of the new friends he made in Dresden,

who suggested to him that he should compose a piece inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s Symbolist

painting Toteninsel (Isle of the Dead). This suggestion worked perfectly for Rachmaninoff, as his

composing process required that “There must be something definite before my mind to convey a

definite impression, or the ideas refuse to appear” (Bertensson, et. al. 156). He gave unusually

intimate details about his process of composing Isle of the Dead in an interview:

My composing goes slowly. I go for a long walk in the country. My eye catches the sharp sparks of light on fresh foliage after showers; my ears the rustling undernote of the woods. Or I watch the pale tints of the sky over the horizon after sundown, and they come: all voices at once. Not a bit here, a bit there. All. The whole grows. So The Isle of the Dead. It was all done in April and May. When it came, how it began—how can I say? It came up within me, was entertained, written down (Bertensson, et. al. 156).

His fatalistic philosophy of life is prominent in Isle of the Dead, but does not manifest as “morbid

terror at the inevitability of death—for…in Isle of the Dead…death brings release and peace…”

(Martyn 29).

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Clearly, both composers were extremely aware of death, and existential anxiety came naturally

to both of them courtesy of their emotionally charged life experiences; however, while Liszt on

the whole sought to run away from his anxiety, seeking an empty solace in a church he did not

fully believe in and a life of busyness and glamour that allowed him to escape his thoughts,

Rachmaninoff leaned into his anxiety and made it an unshakeable part of himself and his art.

Heidegger’s being-toward-death

Though Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) never knew either of these composers, they nonetheless

fit into his philosophical model like puzzle pieces. Heidegger was a key philosopher of the

twentieth century who was primarily interested in ontology, or the study of being. A core term in

Heidegger’s work is Dasein, a German word meaning there-being. It refers to the conscious self

which is occupied with existential matters. Dasein refers to an experience of existence peculiar

to humans, because there are no other life-forms on Earth in possession of the same sort of

consciousness of meaning. Another core term is Das Man, which is frequently translated as the

They, and refers to the inauthentic, everyday mode of the self. It is not an actual being, but a

potentiality of being for Dasein; one that Dasein takes on whenever Dasein chooses to do

something because ‘that is what one does.’ In this way, the They arises from the social

construct of the human and the cultural norms that Dasein is supposed to conform to.

Dasein is always directed toward its possibilities, so it exists in a mode of anticipation, waiting

for those possibilities. To illustrate this, imagine that a student who has written a massive term

paper for English is waiting to see what their grade is; there is that outstanding grade lurking in

their future, and they are anticipating finding out what that grade is. All is not well because

anticipation leads to something a bit uncomfortable: anxiety. For that student waiting to find out

what grade they received, anxiety is going to surface because they do not know what the grade

will be—it could be an A+ or they could have completely bombed it. That state of not-knowing

and being uncertain in the world is Heidegger’s understanding of anxiety.

Because anxiety is not pleasant, Dasein allows itself to get lost in the commotion of the wider

culture (the They), giving up its responsibility for making its own choices because it is easier to

run away from the anxiety of having free will and having to make choices. For example, imagine

that our friend the student really stresses out over college, but they did not know what else to do

with their lives when they graduated from high school so they just plugged into the system

because that was what their parents did.

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No matter how well Dasein hides behind culture, the one thing it cannot evade is death.

Heidegger understands Dasein’s existence as being-ahead-of-itself, meaning that Dasein is

always directed toward its possibilities and is therefore incomplete. Death completes Dasein

because it is the last possibility and the end of all possibilities, so Dasein’s authentic existence

is being-toward-death. If we are to understand Dasein’s existence in its totality, we must also be

able to understand Dasein’s relation to death. However, there is a problem that immediately

arises: Dasein cannot experience its own death. As long as Dasein exists, it has not reached

wholeness, but as soon as it does reach wholeness in death it no longer exists in the world and

cannot understand its death as something experienced. A possible solution is that Dasein can

have a substitute experience of death through the deaths of others; through missing their

presence, mourning their loss, and honoring their memory. However, in being-with the dead in

this way, we are with whatever is left over now that they have left our world, so we are not truly

with them: it is only in “terms of this world that those remaining can still be with” them

(Heidegger 222). This being-with reveals death as a loss “experienced by those remaining

behind,” but the living cannot tap into the loss of being that the dead person experienced: “we

are at best always just ‘there’ too” (Heidegger 222). Death is each Dasein’s own in a radical

way. One’s death is the only thing in the world that is truly one’s own, not given by society or

other Dasein; language, fashion sense, political opinions, and even one’s own birth are given by

other people or by the societal construct. When we face our deaths, we are truly alone.

In everyday being, death is understood as a familiar certainty; it happens to friends, neighbors,

and people we do not know at every moment all over the world. The attitude that Dasein adopts

in the face of this is that “One also dies at the end, but for now one is not involved” (234).

Dasein in its everyday mode of being does not understand death as something that it is always

directed toward, but as something distant and abstract which has no real presence in Dasein’s

existence; or, as Heidegger says, the “public interpretation of Dasein says that ‘one dies’

because in this way everybody can convince [themself] that in no case is it I myself, for this one

is no one” (Heidegger 234). In the mind of the They death is but a social nuisance, death should

be kept away from the public so as not to make people anxious, and it is unseemly to even have

Angst about death at all. This sort of indifferent certainty distances Dasein from its own greatest

possibility of being; Dasein is aware of its death as a fact, but not as something that belongs

intimately to itself.

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Heidegger argues that the authentic way to be disposed to death is Angst, because Angst

delivers Dasein to the possibility of death that Dasein cannot evade. Angst reveals the world to

Dasein:

When I am anxious I am no longer at home in the world. I fail to find the world intelligible. Thus there is an ontological sense (one to do with intelligibility) in which I am not in the world, and the possibility of a world without me (the possibility of my not-Being-in-the-world) is revealed to me (Wheeler).

Through Angst, Dasein is confronted with its own possible non-existence. The authentic way for

Dasein to look forward to a potential mode of being is anticipation, because anticipation is not a

mere waiting, but an assertive going-out to meet the potentiality that awaits. Therefore, Dasein’s

authentic mode of being toward death is to feel Angst about that possibility, and yet to own that

possibility by going to meet it. As Heidegger wrote to sum up his own philosophy,

What is characteristic about authentic, existentially projected being-toward-death can be summarized as follows: Anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility to be itself, primarily unsupported by concern taking care of things, but to be itself in passionate anxious freedom toward death which is free of the illusions of the they, factical, and certain of itself (Heidegger 245).

In slightly more understandable language: anticipation of death frees Dasein from the They’s

denial of Dasein’s own nature and its real possibilities, which frees Dasein to be itself with full

awareness of its place in the world and its own potentiality for being.

The Dies Irae:

The tone poems by Liszt and Rachmaninoff are similar not only in that they clearly fit into the

Heideggerian philosophy of death; in addition to their treatment of death anxiety, they have a

musical theme in common: The Dies Irae. The Dies Irae is a plainsong chant from the Catholic

Requiem Mass for the dead, which is essentially a funeral Mass. The Latin text describes the

Day of Wrath, which is the literal translation of the title of the chant. The ominous tune has been

sampled by many secular composers of the Romantic period including Liszt and Rachmaninoff

in order to create atmospheres of terror in their music; death and the supernatural were

common themes of the Romantic period. Many Romantic composers, including Saint-Saens,

Berlioz, and Mussorgsky wrote pieces having to do with skeletons, witches, and other assorted

spirits. Part of this obsession with the otherworld came from the Medieval Period: “[Medieval]

Europe was obsessed with everything related to death and Romantic Era Europe was obsessed

with everything related to [Medieval] Europe” (Counts). Another component of this fascination

with the dark and gritty parts of human existence had to do with the Romantic Period’s rejection

of the logic and order of Classical Period music in favor of freer expression and exploration. (A

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Fig. 3: The Dies Irae

note of clarification: Romantic Period music and Classical Period music are both eras in the

tradition of Western classical music.)

Secular quotation of the Dies Irae frequently consists only of the first two melodic phrases, or

even of the first four notes alone. The melody follows:

The Dies Irae is commonly attributed to a Franciscan monk named Thomas of Celano (d. circa

1250), but his authorship is not certain. The Dies Irae first became part of the Roman Catholic

funeral liturgy in the fourteenth century, and was sung as a Gregorian chant.

Day of wrath, day that

will dissolve the world into burning coals,

as David bore witness with the Sibyl.

How great a tremor is to be,

when the judge is to come

briskly shattering every grave.

A trumpet sounding an astonishing sound

through the tombs of the region

drives all men before the throne.

Death will be stunned and so will Nature,

when arises man the creature

responding to the One judging.

The written book will be brought forth,

in which the whole record of evidence is

contained whence the world is to be judged.

Therefore, when the Judge shall sit,

whatever lay hidden will appear;

nothing unavenged will remain.

The Latin text is full of dread, predicting the end of the world in a fiery apocalypse and foretelling

the final judgment of all of humanity, both the living and the dead, by a merciless (perhaps even

vengeful) god.

The Dies Irae appeared one way or another in a great many of Rachmaninoff’s works, including

his First Symphony, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Symphonic Dances, Etudes Tableaux,

six of his nine Op. 39 etudes, the choral symphony Kolokola (or The Bells), and Isle of the

Dead. Indeed, it is “probably true to say that [the] Dies Irae figures more prominently in

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Rachmaninoff’s work than in that of any other composer, alive or dead” (Martyn 29). Liszt did

not fixate on the Dies Irae to the extent that Rachmaninoff did; in fact, it appears that he only

used it in Totentanz, which is a set of six variations on the Dies Irae.

Totentanz

The word Totentanz is German for Danse Macabre, or dance of death. Originating in the

medieval period, the Danse Macabre depicts skeletons rising from their graves and dancing with

the living, bringing them into the land of the dead at the end of the dance. The Dies Irae looms

over this piece because it is the constant reminder that as soon as the dance of death is over

the dancer must die. True to this imagery, Totentanz is a violent, frantic piece, scored for piano

and orchestra as a piano feature piece. Totentanz is a modern piece in many respects: the

percussive nature of the piano part, the chromaticism of the composition, and col legno (where

musicians play with the wood of their bow instead of the hair) in the string section during the last

variation are chief examples. One could interpret the piano as the driving personality, as the

instrument representing the narrator of the piece, because it stands alone in juxtaposition to the

might of a full orchestra. We could consider it to be the representation of the inauthentic Dasein

standing in defiance of the inevitable and shut off from its healthy and productive form of

anxiety.

Death on the Prowl

The piano and timpani (deep, ominous sounding kettle drums) open the piece by repeatedly

hammering down a diminished chord, which has a very tight, tense sound; this creates an

image of death on the prowl, its heavy footsteps shaking the earth and bringing terror wherever

they fall. Low winds and strings intone the Dies Irae in bar 3; immediately after the first two

melodic phrases of the theme have occurred, the piano takes off on a wild martellato cadenza

up and down the piano range. (A cadenza is a virtuosic solo inserted into a piece.) The entire

orchestra interrupts it in a staccato blast, as though death is intervening in Dasein’s dash into

the They; the piano pays no heed, however, and embarks on another such cadenza. The only

difference between the first and the second is that the second is a half-step up—the first begins

with an A# in the left hand and a G# first inversion diminished chord in the right hand, while the

second takes off from B in the left hand and an A first inversion diminished chord in the right

hand—which literally takes Dasein’s mad dash away from anxiety to the next level.

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Then the piano and orchestra have a brief conversation, with the orchestra punctuating the

downbeats of the bar and the piano responding with a melodically augmented version of the

Dies Irae: instead of the usual descending minor second, ascending minor second, and

descending minor third, this melody is a descending major third, ascending major third, and

descending perfect fourth. Here, the piano attempts to make a shallow, effortless peace with

death, but it does not fully enter into the language of death so it cannot truly escape its anxiety.

After this confrontation with the united voices of the orchestra, the piano is so spooked that it

runs away from the orchestra into yet another cadenza.

Inauthenticity in Mimicry and Running Away

At rehearsal A, wind instruments and string instruments join forces to intone the Dies Irae once

again; meanwhile, the piano plays an F fully diminished seventh chord in both hands, alternating

eighth note chords between hands, for eight straight bars. There is a sense of great expenditure

of energy in these eight bars, but the energy is static—there is an aimless, frantic effort to go

nowhere. This is exemplified by the piano’s eight bars of absolutely no harmonic motion. In the

context of Dasein’s mad dash from the awareness of death, this symbolizes how Dasein

compulsively runs away from death even though it does not really know what it is running from,

much less to, and how this sort of running away is couched in inauthenticity because it never

leads to anything meaningful.

The first variation on the Dies Irae begins at rehearsal B with bassoons playing the melody and

low strings playing the Dies Irae as the harmony; eight bars later, the piano mimics the low

voiced instruments, and then the orchestra and piano trade fours, for a total of twenty-four bars.

Interestingly, the piano never has anything to say of its own: it only repeats perfectly, note for

note, what the orchestra said before, just as inauthentic Dasein is content to echo the narrative

of the They without thinking for itself. This variation expresses uneasy caution predominantly

through rhythmic devices: the main rhythm that appears in this section is a two note unit of a

dotted eighth note and a sixteenth note, which is essentially a long note and a short note. This

long and short interchange, compounded by staccato (detached) articulation, causes the

melody to have a fragmented quality, almost evocative of a child struggling to express

themselves.

Baxter 14

Expressions of Panic

Just as the unstable rhythm of the first variation was its hallmark, so too does the second

variation have a signature device: piano glissandi. A glissando is a musical gesture where many

notes are played in a quick run, either up or down the range of an instrument. On the piano, this

would be achieved by the pianist running their fingers or the side of their hand up or down the

keyboard very rapidly. The glissandi are a very obvious expression of panic: these signify

Dasein’s frantic attempts to escape death, as it throws itself recklessly upward. It can never

escape the Dies Irae played underneath by low strings, as it returns again and again to the

glissandi. The low strings become more insistent in their declaration of the deathly theme as

Variation II progresses, developing from violas, cello, and bass playing pizzicato (plucked

strings, instead of the usual bowed strings) to the same group of instruments playing bowed

staccato triplets, and then to the full string section playing those triplets fortissimo (extremely

loudly, nearly as loudly as possible). The piano develops in intensity as well, from playing very

rapid fingered scales at the beginning of the variation to right-handed glissandi with left-handed

chords to two-handed glissandi.

Variation III picks up considerable speed, with the Dies Irae in the piano, bassoon, and bass

lines while oboes and clarinets play an ascending diatonic line in the A Phrygian mode. The

Phrygian mode sounds similar to the natural minor scale, but with a flat second degree. The

piano rhythm recalls the choppy and unstable rhythm from the first variation but at much greater

speed, so instead of careful hesitancy it rushes in a wild and confused frenzy. The melody

carried by the woodwinds speaks of accelerating anxiety, as in a chase. As they ascend the A

Phrygian mode they return methodically to the base note of A before ascending to each further

note, therefore grounding the melody in order to heighten the contrast between the base note

and the next reach the melody makes away from the comfort and stability of the tonic.

Contemplation in the Eye of the Storm

Variation IV trades its quick pace and the might of the full orchestra for a Lento piano solo in the

style of a canon, giving the piano (A.K.A. Dasein) a brief respite and a moment of contemplation

in the midst of its overwhelming fear. Dasein still meditates on death in the canon through the

Dies Irae, which is stated by each new voice entering the canon and develops thematically

throughout the eighteen bars of the canon. Dasein’s meditation is thoughtful, quiet, and poised,

everything that Totentanz has not been up until this point; this atmosphere is aided by the

contrapuntal nature of the canon, a very cerebral and deliberate form of music. Here Dasein has

Baxter 15

an encounter with authenticity, but finding the cold humility of authenticity not to its liking, it

creeps back into the domain of the They and yet another cadenza. This cadenza is not agitated

as were the first few; rather, the Dies Irae is masked by the happy-sounding major key, and the

entire melody has a dreamy, surreal quality that seems completely out of phase with the rest of

the piece, as though Dasein is blissfully unaware of the turmoil that surrounds it. However, there

is also a stagnant pedal tone that keeps this passage anchored instead of allowing it to move

freely: this signifies how a fixation on optimism that denies reality keeps Dasein from existing

authentically. Because all illusions must come to an end, this lovely cadenza ends with a return

to the jagged staccato articulation and fast tempo of the previous variations, leading

immediately into the fifth variation.

A Tenuous Hold on Reality

Variation V is in the style of a three-voice fugue, beginning with the solo piano and bringing the

orchestra in after 36 bars. The fugue is another very cerebral musical form: it is an imitative form

in which the theme is imitated by each new voice that enters the piece, each entering in turn

and weaving into the others already present. Each voice remains independent and yet they all

must fit together harmonically, melodically, and rhythmically, making this a mentally challenging

form to compose in. The rhythmically defining characteristic of this particular fugue is the

tremolo articulation—instead of each melody note being played once, it is rearticulated multiple

times during its duration to create a sensation of trembling. Though the fugue is rhythmically

exact and steady, the astonishing speed and the trembling melody hint at a mind unsteady and

about to derail, as it were, seeming to depict a frenetic Dasein driven to the brink of madness by

the darkness it refuses to fully accept.

Variation VI follows a pages-long piano cadenza that spans a range of emotions, from joy to the

all-too-familiar defiance. This variation goes beyond the mere inclusion of the Dies Irae theme in

the fabric of the piece, instead varying the theme itself. The form of the Dies Irae, or rather the

shape of the phrases, is kept as a framework for the variation; the distinctive three notes—

mediant (3), supertonic (2), mediant (3)—that begin the Dies Irae are kept as well. However,

after those initial notes, the theme continues to rise instead of to fall a minor third as the original

theme did. This is, perhaps, Dasein making one final attempt to distance itself from the notes

that have accompanied it since the very beginning, but the Dies Irae is always there, even when

its form has been contorted—just as death is always with Dasein, no matter what mental games

Dasein plays in denial. Releasing its tenuous hold on the world it is trying to control, the piano

Baxter 16

dives back into desperate glissandi, then going oddly quiet while the orchestra rages. The piece

comes to an end in a furious rush, all the unstoppable power of nature coming down to take

Dasein into the world of death that it fears so greatly, as the Danse Macabre ends.

Isle of the Dead:

As Totentanz was inspired by the medieval imagery of the Danse Macabre, so too did

Isle of the Dead have an extra-musical muse. Isle of the Dead is based on a painting by the

Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin. Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead is a meditation on death,

commissioned by a young German widow named Marie Berna as a “picture to dream by”

(Huscher). Böcklin painted five different variations of this piece between 1880 and 1886, and it

was recognized as such an iconic Romantic work that reproductions were widely circulated

throughout Europe. As the poet Max Halbe remarked, there was not a single middle-class

house in Germany at the close of the nineteenth century without a reproduction of Isle of the

Dead (it is probably safe to assume that he took some poetic license with this statistic). In every

one of the five variations, the island is seen across a field of dark water, the river Styx. There

are columns and archways carved into the cliffs that rise on each side of the island, reminiscent

of an ancient Greek temple. A small boat carries a coffin draped in white cloth and a red garland

to the island; Charon, the ferryman of the dead in Greek mythology, stands shrouded in white in

the bow. Towering cypress trees grow in the valley between two walls of jagged rock,

concealing whatever lurks deeper within the island.

Artistic Analysis:

The presence of light in Isle of the Dead is odd: the rock faces angled to the left catch the

sunlight, while the rock faces angled to the right are in shadow; the island, meanwhile, casts its

shadow forward instead of to the right and behind it, and there is a break in the clouds behind it,

crowning the cliff-tops in a wreath of pale light. This paradox supports the otherworldly subject

matter, because without the sun as a fixed source of light and warmth, there is no way to orient

oneself in the world: there is no direction, and everything is eternal dim light extending forever,

in this space outside of normal human space. The primary color scheme of Isle of the Dead is

muted earth tones—green so dark it is almost black for the cypresses; blue-grey for the sky and

the water; brown of various values, from the color of earth to the color of an eggshell, for the

island. These natural colors symbolize the natural order of things, of life turning to death, of

human artifice succumbing to the crushing pressure of time. The only truly alive colors are the

red and white of the coffin and of Charon’s white shroud: the colors of blood and bones. The

Baxter 17

Fig. 5: Isle of the Dead in black and white

boat and its passengers are the focal point of the painting, and this focal point is created by the

visual weight of the dark cypress trees and the vertical lines they create, leading downward to

the vertical lines of the gateway into the island’s little harbor, which frame the boat. Isle of the

Dead is highly vertical, on the whole; not only the trees are vertical, but the cliffs are as well, and

the figure in white. The few horizontal lines include the horizon where the river Styx and the sky

meet and the low stone wall of the harbor. This combination of vertical and horizontal lines

creates a sense of solidity and

permanence, while the accented

vertical lines create a sense of

spirituality by leading up to the

sky and beyond the realm of

humans. Stability is reinforced

by the symmetrical balance of

the island, with mirroring cliff

faces and harbor walls

encompassing the trees, gate,

and boat in the middle. The sense of the grandeur of

nature beyond the knowledge and control of humanity is reinforced by the proportion of the

towering rock and the expanse of sky and river relative to the tiny boat. The overall sensation of

this painting is a vast

powerlessness in the face of the

cycles of nature.

When Rachmaninoff was in Paris

in 1907, he saw a black and white

reproduction of Isle of the Dead,

which left such an impression on

him that he wrote his tone poem

on the subject of the painting two

years later. He later had the

opportunity to see Böcklin’s fifth variation in its

original color in Leipzig, but was less impressed with

the color version, saying “I was not much moved by the colour…If I had seen the original first, I

Fig. 4: Isle of the Dead in color

Baxter 18

might not have composed my Isle of the Dead. I like the picture best in black and white”

(Harrison 149).

Isle of the Dead is often interpreted as being a myth about Charon piloting a soul across the

Styx to the land of the dead, but viewing it as mere mythology puts distance between the

listener and the death content of the work. Retreating to mythology allows us to view the music

as a specific narrative case of death, one which involves someone else, but certainly not us. De-

individualizing death in this way returns us to the mode of the They, where fear leads to

inauthenticity. In Isle of the Dead, Rachmaninoff expressed the true human relationship to death

as we can understand it from Heidegger’s analysis, representing the inner journey through

Angst and anticipation to the freedom of accepting the lonely potentiality of death and owning it.

The Haunting Effect of the Ostinato

The opening phrases of Isle of the Dead imitate the rocking of the boat in the waves of the River

Styx by way of an uneven 5/8 rhythm. Almost all Western music is written in rhythms of four,

three, or two, so rhythms in five are very rare and sound strange to our ears. A few bars into the

piece the celli establish the ostinato, a continuously recurring pattern which will haunt the rest of

the piece. This ostinato pattern follows the same rhythmic shape as the wave motive, with a

rhythmic division of two and three quavers, beginning with an arpeggiated A minor chord with

the supertonic, B, thrown in on the third beat so that it creates the ethereal feeling of a

suspended fourth, or sus4, chord. The ostinato pattern travels up the string section: the violas

pick it up at Rehearsal 1, second violins pick it up 4 bars after Rehearsal 1, and first violins pick

it up at Rehearsal 2. The rhythmic division switches to three and two for four bars when the

violas first come in; though the two and three division did not feel overly stressful before, this

brief respite highlights the stress and anxiety of the seeming perpetual motion. The breathing

space of these four bars opens up even more at the third bar, when the ostinato pattern

changes from an A minor arpeggio to a C major arpeggio; the oppressive solidity of the ostinato

pattern is disrupted even more by the fact that the arpeggios in all four bars are in second

inversion, which is considered an unstable inversion.

The Appearance of the Dies Irae

The Dies Irae is first quoted 13 bars after Rehearsal 1, by a solo French horn, but so sneakily

and incompletely that it is easily missed; the horn plays A-G-A (4) and then leaps downward to

D4, A3, and then D3. This resembles the Dies Irae in contour—the descent by step, the ascent

Baxter 19

to the starting pitch, and the leap downward—but not in actual interval content; where the Dies

Irae descends by a minor second and later by a minor third, this melodic fragment descends by

a major second and later by a perfect fifth. At the next appearance of the Dies Irae, the melody

has begun to reveal its true form. The oboe quotes it at bar 38, F-E-F-D, and this time the

interval content is exactly right.

At bar 61, solo flute, unison first violins, solo oboe, French horn, and English horn quote the first

three notes of the Dies Irae in staggered entrances: solo flute starts its fragment at F6; first

violins come in a bar later and a tritone lower at B5; in the next bar solo oboe brings it down

another tritone to F5; French horn enters on B4 (though it shifts to Bb); and English horn enters

on F4. This tritone motion creates an intriguing sound because although it is the only interval

that can divide a 12-tone octave into two symmetrically balanced halves, it is also a highly

unstable interval. Using tritones in this way was a clever move on Rachmaninoff’s part,

especially considering the tritone’s history as a sinister interval (it has also been known by the

name diabolus in musica, or the devil in music, since the Medieval era).

The Loneliness of Mortality

Eleven bars after Rehearsal 5, a new motive enters the scene: descending fifths and fourths

from A to D, outlining a hollow D minor chord. Flutes pick it up first with A6 to D6, followed by

clarinets from A5 to D5, and French horns from A4 to D4 to A3. Two first violins take it up at as

a Rehearsal 6 (bar 115) but invert it, ascending by fifths and fourths from C to G to outline a C

major chord, while the other first violins play a C major arpeggiated chord and low strings keep

up a C3 pedal. At bar 117, the C major chord turns to a C augmented chord (which has a very

spacey quality), and the violin duet begins the Dies Irae melody. It begins on C7, which is the

highest point the violin duet reaches with the ascending C and G motive; this was an incredibly

clever move for Rachmaninoff to make, because the Dies Irae begins on the third scale degree

of the Aeolian mode, so by starting on C the melody returns neatly to A and to the realm of

minor tonality. This gesture represents the abandonment and solitude Dasein experiences when

it faces its own death, as the violins pull away from the rest of the orchestra to state the Dies

Irae on their own and then fall back down to their low range. The return to A minor from C major

is also sneaky in the underlying harmony: The G# of the C augmented chord keeps up its

chromatic momentum, moving one more semitone up to A, thus making the C augmented chord

into an A minor chord by the smallest amount of motion possible. The transition from bright

Baxter 20

major tonality to surreal, dream-like augmented tonality to bleak minor tonality by one silky

chromatic line is the work of absolute genius.

Celli have a veiled quotation of the Dies Irae at bar 165, following the contour but condensing

the intervals as far as possible within 12-tone pitch space: their notes are G(3), Gb, G, F, Gb, E,

F. This close dissonance in the low register of the orchestra has an unmistakably ominous feel.

By this time the high strings and high winds have begun to see sixteenth note patterns and

dotted rhythms, which has eroded the fluid calm of the previous two and three (or three and two)

division of the ostinato pattern and contributed to the heightening sense of restless anxiety.

Agitation increases in intensity at Rehearsal 10 when celli begin to play dissonant chords in their

higher register: as an example of the sort of tones they create, the first chord in the cello line

contains Ab3, B3, and F4, which contains a dissonant minor second and a dissonant tritone.

Three bars later at bar 184 flutes join in with high register fluttering scales in a rapid triplet

pattern, emulating a racing heartbeat and the beginnings of hyperventilation. With powerful

timpani roll at bars 199-200, the wave of anxiety crashes into the familiar ostinato pattern, finally

establishing itself in the new key of C minor at 201. After firmly re-establishing the theme of the

boat rocking in the waves, the music calms down. The time signature changes to 3/4 at bar 233,

but though it has more stability in the simple triple meter, it still retains the wave-like motion of

the ostinato pattern by frequently dividing the bar into the same quarter note and dotted quarter

(or vice versa) with an eighth note tacked onto the end to elongate the ostinato pattern to fit a

3/4 bar. Most of the orchestra drops out here except for a few ominous horns, a few low

woodwinds, harp, and strings, who play an eerie melody over a stagnant E pedal. Pizzicato

strings slowly die off, leaving a moment of pure silence permeated by dread. At the Largo at bar

253, the full brass section breaks into the silence with dissonant chords while timpani roll

thunders underneath it.

The Life Theme and the Return to Death

At bar 258 (14 bars after Rehearsal 14) unison strings pull away from the anxiety of the low

brass, ascending into another key change: from C minor to its relative Eb major. First violins and

flutes share the new melody, which actually subverts the Dies Irae by descending by minor

second and then ascending a minor third, resisting the downward pull to death. Rachmaninoff

explained in a letter to Leopold Stowkowski that this motive

Baxter 21

…should be a great contrast to all the rest of the work—faster, more nervous, and more emotional—as that passage does not belong to the ‘picture;’ it is in reality a ‘supplement’ to the picture—which fact, of course, makes contrast more necessary…In the former is death—in the latter life (Harrison 150).

Dasein loses itself in the They when the life theme arises to subvert the Dies Irae and delude

Dasein into the happy certainty that death has nothing to do with it. However, though this

passage is much lighter, with a very high and delicate melody in a lilting triplet rhythm over

woodwinds and tremolo strings, there is still something dark at work underneath the shallow

tranquility of the life theme: because even in “average everydayness, Dasein is constantly

concerned with its [death], if only in the mode of taking care of things in a mode of untroubled

indifference toward the most extreme possibility of its existence” (Heidegger 235).

The façade of happiness falls at Rehearsal 17, with towering chords reminiscent of the dark

cypress trees and jagged cliffs of the island. The bass line holds a C3 as the tonic pedal while

the melody in the shrill flutes and first violins begins on a D6; though they are multiple octaves

apart, the tonic still exerts a magnetic pull on the supertonic, trying to force the D down to a C.

The D in the melody line does indeed fall to a C, only to rise to an Eb, the minor third, in

defiance. Because the melody refuses to root itself in the tonic, it creates a sense of turbulence

and being adrift. Basses climb to a C4 in the second bar after Rehearsal 17, only to fall swiftly

down the scale almost in a glissando, like a wave crashing on the island. Here, the basses

symbolize the raw power of the ocean, which is in turn symbolic for death. Trombones and tuba

play hollow chords in a steady pulse, on the first bar of Rehearsal 17 and again two bars later;

this same pulse repeats twice more, with four bars between each.

When the ostinato returns at bar 428, this signals that Dasein has come home to its authentic

being-toward-death. Then, when violins soar up again, they stay in minor tonality using an A

minor chord outline. This is an expression of Dasein’s resoluteness, and Dasein’s freedom, now

that it fully lives in its authentic mode of being. Despite the undulating motion of the 5/8 rhythm,

this passage actually feels like it is at rest: in it we can hear emotional stability and calm

resignation. This symbolizes how when we lean into our existential anxiety, we are actually freer

than when we lean into the artifice of culture because we are afraid of anxiety.

Conclusion

We never see this same freedom from the artifice of culture in Totentanz, nor is there ever any

progress made toward authentic existence: there is the dichotomy of violent passages and

sweet passages, but though these alternate they never break out of the cycle and into freedom

Baxter 22

from the fear of death. However, in Isle of the Dead, the narrative progresses from anxiety to

abandonment to resoluteness, mirroring Heidegger’s philosophical arc of authentic being. With

Heidegger’s philosophy as a lens, it becomes apparent that Liszt’s piece brews aimless terror

that serves no healthy purpose, while Rachmaninoff’s opens up a space of focused anxiety that

makes us feel the impending gloomy reality of death but helps us to meet it calmly and surely.

Of all the art forms, Arthur Schopenhauer considered music to be the highest, as it is the most

abstract art form, the least related to actual phenomena in the world. Schopenhauer’s concept

held music as the truest form of art in part because music can express emotions in their pure

forms, transporting us beyond the concrete, mundane world to a realm closer to the eternal truth

beyond ourselves. This eternal, abstract quality is part of what makes music the most frustrating

philosophical puzzle of all the art forms. Many philosophers have attempted to come up with

answers to questions concerning music, such as how humans react to music emotionally, what

sort of value those reactions have, and why humans listen to music that makes them sad; but

every answer they come up with tries to reduce music to something technically intelligible,

something that can be understood in terms of logic and cognition. However, as Heidegger wrote

in his essay The Origin of the Work of Art, “If we try to make it comprehensible by analyzing it

into numbers of oscillations it is gone. It shows itself only when it remains undisclosed and

unexplained” (Heidegger 25).

With this in mind, the musical evidence suggests that while all the technical analysis of

Totentanz and Isle of the Dead in this paper is certainly interesting, it is not very important from

an authentic human perspective. All that truly matters is the world that the music opens up to

Dasein; as American philosopher Iain Thomson writes,

For Heidegger, thinking about death opens us up to the terrifyingly “awesome” insight that the known rests on the unknown, the mastered on the unmastered, like a small ship floating on a deep and stormy “sea”. We like to believe that humanity is well on its way to mastering the universe, but art teaches us that we are far from having exhausted the possibilities inherent in intelligibility (Thomson).

Even if one is not interested in philosophy or music, it is still important to find things that help

one think about death. Modern society has many cultural rituals surrounding the passage of

birth, but we do not have the same cultural preparation for the passage of death. We no longer

care for our dead at home, instead relinquishing that task to professionals. Even when we see

dead people at funerals, they are not allowed to actually look dead, but are covered in makeup

and made to appear as though they are sleeping. We allow society to take death out of our

hands because it makes us so uneasy that we would rather just be distanced from it instead of

taking the opportunity to be up close and personal with it.

Baxter 23

Death is the ultimate reminder that we have free will and that we get to take personal

responsibility for ourselves, but whether we accept ownership of our lives and take responsibility

for creating meaning for ourselves or allow society to lull us to sleep is up to us. In Totentanz,

the Dies Irae was a reminder that death is a terrifying certainty, and violent lengths were taken

to try to outrun death and live for a little while longer, but in Isle of the Dead its purpose is

entirely different: though it is as inescapable as it ever was, it is not an unwelcome specter but

rather coexists with the living, reminding them of the possibilities they have yet to meet. This

perspective is paralleled in the lives of the composers of these works (although certainly not to

the extremes that were given shape through the music): Liszt was always on the run from his

inner dead person, seeking solace in his performances or his compositions, his lovers or the

Church, and he was greatly frustrated by the superficiality of the society that he did not feel

entirely at home in (and, it could be claimed, hid his true self from). His music dwells on the

dramatic and the terrifying when it examines dark themes at all, as he poured out all of his fears

in a torrent of demonic terror. Rachmaninoff, however, went his own way, refusing to allow

society to dictate the artist he would be. He created his own meaning even though society

condemned him for the gloom of his authentic expression, the gloom that hit uncomfortably

close to home for his audience. The music of Rachmaninoff dwells unfailingly on the deep,

lonely questions of human existence because he was never out of touch with his inner

darkness—nor should we be.

Baxter 24

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Baxter 25

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