The Spookiest Melody in History

What’s the scariest sound you can think of? Maybe a strange voice when you’re home alone? Or total silence when things are supposed to be raucous? Now what if I told you there’s a musical code that has signified death for centuries?

The Dies irae, Latin for “day of wrath,” is a 13th-century poem describing the terror you’ll feel on Judgment Day, when all your sins are revealed. Every time you swiped that extra slice of pizza at Whole Foods without paying for it? All those times you forgot your blinker when merging? The horror. By the 14th century, the poem was set to a plainchant sung by monks and worked into the Requiem Mass, the church service for the dead.

It goes something like this.

Then came the French composer Hector Berlioz, who quotes the ancient melody in his Symphonie fantastique as a burlesque parody of his own funeral. That one moment turned the tune into a rich and productive symbol, not only of death and the fear of death, but of anything spooky, creepy, or that goes bump in the night. Composers have since used it to evoke the supernatural, political oppression, and even ophidiophobia, the fear of snakes. In fact, since Berlioz, the opening of the Dies irae has become perhaps the most frequently quoted idea in classical music.

In a translation by William Foster Apthorp, Berlioz’s own program notes set the scene:

He sees himself at the witches’ sabbath, in the midst of a frightful group of ghosts, magicians, and monsters of all sorts, who have come together for his obsequies. He hears strange noises, groans, ringing laughter, shrieks. The beloved melody again reappears; but it has become an ignoble, trivial, and grotesque dance-tune; it is she who comes to the witches’ sabbath. . . . Howlings of joy at her arrival. . . . she takes part in the diabolic orgy. . . . Funeral knells, burlesque parody on the Dies irae. Witches’ dance. The witches’ dance and the Dies irae together.

(Start at 3:42.)

Franz Liszt’s obsession with death led him down into prison dungeons to see those condemned to die. He turned the Dies irae into a handful of wicked variations in his Totentanz.

Modest Mussorgsky writes it into the bassline of his Songs and Dances of Death.

Gustav Holst’s favorite “planet” in his suite was Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age. There, the Dies irae makes an appearance as a constant reminder of mortality.

Interestingly, almost a third of Rachmaninoff’s music quotes or hints at the Dies irae. He seemed to be fixated on death and fate his whole life, even building an entire tone poem, The Isle of the Dead, around it. The Dies irae shows up as the seventh variation in his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and again in his Symphonic Dances, among many other works.

The trailblazing 1927 German science-fiction film Metropolis has one of cinema’s most epic scores. Composer Gottfried Huppertz quotes the Dies irae as an allusion to the dystopia that technological advances can bring. (Are we living in this world already?)

Wendy Carlos was one of the first big names in synthesized music. Stanley Kubrick approached her to record the soundtrack for the 1980 film The Shining, and her opening title is basically the Dies irae in synth form.

By now, you can recognize the melody anywhere, right? What about Jimmy Page’s guitar solo in “Stairway to Heaven”?

(Start at 6:25 and listen for the guitar string bends.)

Or the theme music to The White Lotus?

It’s a musical meme at this point, the Dies irae, and once you know where to look, you’ll hear it everywhere.

Happy Halloween, and stay spooky out there.