You're Killing Me

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from 1 November 2013. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/Pcast129

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This week’s peek into the Podcast Vault revisits a post from 2013. The occasion, as is the case today, was All Saints Day, a Christian festival celebrated in honour of all the saints, known and unknown. In Western Christianity, it is celebrated on 1 November ; the Eastern Orthodox Church and associated Eastern Catholic Churches and Byzantine Lutheran Churches celebrate it on the first Sunday after Pentecost. Oriental Orthodox churches of Chaldea and associated Eastern Catholic churches celebrate All Saints' Day on the first Friday after Easter.

In many traditions, All Saints' Day is part of the season of Allhallowtide, which includes the three days from 31 October to 2 November. On All Saints Day, it is common for families to attend church, as well as visit cemeteries in order to lay flowers and candles on the graves of their deceased loved ones.

(It goes without saying that we seem to observe the first night of that three-day season – Hallowe’en – more than the other two days, All Saints and All Souls days.)

In other montages, we listened to works that dwell on the topic of death – think of Berg’s Violin Concerto and Mahler’s Kindertottenlieder. Those works, if I may say so, tackle the subject and its companion, mourning, straight on. As I tried to say in the original musing that accompanied this montage, my thinking was to present music that alludes to death without trying to be morbid. The two “major” works on the montage – Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet and Strauss’ Death and Transfiguration provide opportunity to refkexct on mortality much mire in my mind than death itself, but that’s a personal opinion…

As a bonus, I selected a work by Franz Liszt who famously provided a piano transcrtiption of one of the tracks on our montage – the Danse Macabre. Some of the titles of Liszt’s pieces, such as Totentanz, Funérailles, La lugubre gondola and Pensée des morts, show the composer's fascination with death. Totentanz (lit. rrans. Dance of the Dead) is notable for being based on the Gregorian plainchant melody Dies Irae as well as for daring stylistic innovations. The video clip features American pianist Byron Janis.

I think you will (still) love this music too.