From ghosties, witches and barons on broomsticks to the extra pungent flavours of disturbing, there is a scary track for everybody. Here’s a choice of the scariest, to be loved this Halloween and past…

1. Gilbert & Sullivan: ‘When the Night time Wind Howls’ from Ruddigore/The Witch’s Curse

Supposed as a satirical dig on the Victorian obsession with the supernatural, Gilbert&Sullivan’s 1887 opera tells of ghosts, witches’ curses and the tiring enterprise of getting to commit a distinct crime every single day. Amongst its most well-known moments is Sir Roderic’s Act II track – ‘When the Night time Wind Howls’- whose music is as excessive because the lyrics: ‘Truthful phantom, come! The moon’s awake, The owl hoots gaily from its brake, The blithesome bat’s a-wing. Come, soar to yonder silent clouds; The ether teems with peopled shrouds: We’ll fly the lightsome spectre crowds, Thou cloudy, clammy factor.’

2. Alban Berg: homicide scene from Wozzeck

Based mostly on the true story of a soldier who murdered his girlfriend, Alban Berg’s 1925 opera profiles a younger man’s breakdown underneath the pressure of poverty and social injustice. The result’s a harrowing masterpiece, that harnesses atonality within the service of characterisation. As a sung play, it doesn’t include songs within the conventional sense, nevertheless this second, the place Wozzeck murders his girlfriend Marie, is fairly terrifying.

This chamber opera, written in 1980, relies on the true story of three lighthouse keepers who mysteriously vanished from a distant Hebridean lighthouse in 1900. It’s unsettlingly Hitchcockian, incorporating components of the supernatural right into a psychological inquiry concerning the results of childhood abuse and repressed sexuality. Amongst its most unsettling moments is Blazes’ track, sung by one of many three lighthouse keepers. Starting with a jaunty rhythm on the banjo, he tells a story of road violence revealing that he robbed and killed a lady on the age of 11. Haunting discords from the violin create a darkish undertone, suggesting that, like a manic clown’s smile, the track’s cheerful exterior shouldn’t be fairly what it appears.

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4. Trad English/Scottish: The Twa Sisters

This conventional homicide ballad, relationship again no less than so far as the mid-Seventeenth century, tells the story of a woman drowned by her jealous elder sister.

In some variants, the sisters are being two-timed by a suitor; in others, the elder sister’s affections should not inspired by the younger man. However they each come to the identical macabre conclusion: when the murdered lady’s physique floats ashore, somebody makes a musical instrument out of it, which then performs itself, singing concerning the homicide.

Probably originating in Northumbria, that is considered one of many very related songs about murderous sisters which have been discovered all through Europe. I do not what that claims about sibling relationships.

For sheer grotesquerie, it’s laborious to beat Richard Strauss’s single-act opera, primarily based on Oscar Wilde’s lurid 1891 play, about Salome, the step-daughter of King Herod. The opera’s decadence – particularly the mix of the erotic and the murderous – shocked audiences at its 1905 premiere, and nowhere is that decadence extra in proof than in its climactic scene, the place Salome declares her love for the severed head of John the Baptist and kisses the prophet’s useless lips passionately.

6. Kurt Weill: Mack the Knife from Threepenny Opera

You may know this track as a swing traditional, however the authentic 1928 model, sung in German as a part of Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, is extraordinarily creepy. Bertold Brecht’s lyrics inform of a knife-wielding prison in Victorian London, on his option to city, adopted by untraceable useless our bodies floating up the river and blood on pavements. Removed from a likeable caricature – as he would come to be portrayed by singers comparable to Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald – he’s a chilling creation, and Weill’s authentic imaginative and prescient for the track, through which the singer is accompanied by the haunting sound of the barrel-organ, makes that very clear certainly.

7. Leoš Janáček: ‘ Co chvíla…co chvíla’ from Jenůfa

You need scary? Infanticide should absolutely be up (or down?) there with probably the most disturbing of topic issues. Janáček’s Jenůfa is considered one of my all-time favorite operas, as a lot for the uncooked energy of its music as for its psychological depth: there aren’t any goodies or baddies right here; simply folks, as flawed and nuanced as they arrive. However sure, it’s darkish, and this aria (‘Co chvíla… co chvíla…’), through which Jenůfa’s stepmother, the Kostelnička, lays out her resolution to kill her stepdaughter’s little one, is considered one of its darkest moments.

8. Béla Bartók: Pool of Tears from Bluebeard’s Citadel

Opera doesn’t get rather more sinister than Bartók’s one-act expressionist drama concerning the mysterious Duke Bluebeard and his new spouse, Judith, who arrives for the primary time at his gloomy fortress and calls for that its seven doorways must be opened. Profitable the prize for scariest door should be Quantity 6 (‘lake of tears’), through which the music is plunged deep into shadows: all ghostly sighs and growling strings, with a spooky contribution from the celesta.

9. Trad Scottish: ‘The Merciless Mom’

This darkish Scottish ballad tells the story of a mom who offers beginning to illegitimate kids within the woods, kills them and buries them. On her return journey dwelling, she sees some kids enjoying and says that in the event that they had been hers, she would gown them up in tremendous clothes and maintain them.

In response, the kids compel her to recognise her duty for his or her deaths. Stuffed with historical folklore notions comparable to because the knife from which blood can by no means be washed, this is likely one of the most well-known cautionary ballads, sung and recorded by a dizzying variety of folks musicians over time, most not too long ago by Angeline Morrison on her 2022 ‘The Brown Woman and Different Folks Songs.’

10 Francis Poulenc: Salve Regina from Dialogues des Carmelites

Poulenc’s 1957 opera tells the story of the Martyrs of Compiègne, sixteen Carmelite nuns who selected to take a vow of martyrdom fairly than resign their religion in the course of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. The final scene is assured to hang-out you: pushed from their convent and arrested, the nuns sing Salve Regina, an antiphon to Mary, as they course of, one after the other, to the guillotine. Poulenc’s icily stunning music ploughs on, detached to the intermittent swish of the guillotine. It is a improbable coup de théâtre and as stirring as it’s chilling.