Broken chords: the music of grief

Subtle and potent

Celebrated examples of how sung music can elevate texts on grief include Herbert Howells’s Hymnus Paradisi, written after the death of his son, and Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), based on poems by Friedrich Rückert, who had lost two children. Less recognised is how purely instrumental music can offer subtle and potent channels to combine remembrance, loss, and consolation.3

Chamber music is particularly intimate. Without great splashes of sound, variety of tone, or virtuoso display, we are offered the composer’s inmost intentions. Although grief has been expressed in forms such as Bedřich Smetana’s Piano Trio and Louis Vierne’s Piano Quintet, string quartets are perhaps the most canonical and revealing form of chamber music, and several have been associated with loss and bereavement.

Mendelssohn provides a striking example arising from the loss of Fanny, his beloved older sister and fellow composer. On hearing of her death he fell into deep depression and subsequently wrote a string quartet as a personal requiem. This final quartet (Op 80), written only months before his own death at age 38, contrasts starkly with his sweet, inventive, and mellifluous earlier string quartets. In the key of F minor—and privileging the diminished fourth, associated with strong and deep emotions—the work is characterised by agitation and restlessness, with discontinuities and abrupt changes. The slow movement is a deeply personal elegy, whereas the finale is fretful and wild, not yet ceding to solace and catharsis. Mendelssohn’s friend Julius Benedict wrote, “It . . . so completely impresses the listener with a sensation of gloomy foreboding, of anguish of mind, and of the most poetic melancholy.”4

Pain, solace, and consolation

Equally striking and plangent is the second string quartet of the 20th century Icelandic composer Jón Leifs, a somewhat thorny personality who lived in Germany during both world wars. Much of his work reflected the elemental splendour of his native country, his tone poems Hekla and Geysir portraying volcanoes and geysers with extraordinary added percussion. His quartet Vita et Mors (Life and Death) was one of four compositions inspired by the drowning of his teenage daughter, Líf, whose name translates as “life.” Three movements trace her life: Childhood, Youth, and then Requiem and Eternity. Childhood, enmeshed with Icelandic rimur song, has increasingly complex structure and energy, parallelling our early development. The central movement carries a sense of maturing and ends with abrupt dissonance, reflecting Líf’s tragic fate. Pain, solace, and consolation entwine in Requiem and Eternity, with plaintive violin and anguished harmonies, delicate pizzicati (plucking) like gentle tears, and a hushed ending.

Lastly is a string quartet by Giacomo Puccini. Written in one night on hearing of the death of his friend Amadeo di Savoia, Crisantemi is an exquisite, single movement lament. Lasting barely six minutes, its title referencing the flowers traditional for mourning in Italy, it offers a spontaneous and masterly expression of love and loss.