Link to the performance: https://youtu.be/zGBXA1tBiLw
Totentanz in English means Dance of the Dead.
How does one begin to write about a musical piece as beautiful as Totentanz?
As with most forms of beautiful art, one can’t really point to or explain the exact thing in the work of art that fascinates them and makes their heart’s clocks tick. At best, we can only speculate. Here goes my speculation…
I love Valentina Lisitza’s rendition of Totentanz because it strikes me as a beautiful narration of the entirety of an ancient Greek hero’s life. It starts with deep bass chords (forgive me. I’m not quite familiar with the classical music lexicon) as if indicating the difficulty in birth of the hero. It then slips into a more mundane melody which, to me, indicates the early childhood and youth of the hero. It gets a bit exciting soon, indicating the wily, frolic adolescence of this hero and then descends into a soft, melody of high notes indicating his romance and love affairs. It soon gets a bit animated, indicating the quarrels and combats he had with competing suitors for the love of his fair maiden. He seems to have won her love shortly later but has to leave her to explore the world and take on his demons. He meets a number of tough adversaries on his journey and slays them all, incurring a lasting injury with each fight. He finally returns home to his wife, only to find that she has been abducted by his fiercest foe yet. He battles with this foe, exerting as much skill and strength as he can muster. Blood-sodden and wounded, he climbs to the mountain peak, where his wife has been chained. His foe pushes his wife off the cliff. She tumbles down the rocky steep, scratched and smacked by the rocks on her way down. She dies even before reaching the base. He beheads the foe in anguish, and jumps off the mountain hoping to reunite with his love in the land of the dead.
Cheesy, I know. And it probably doesn’t make much sense. I wrote all of that while listening to Totentanz at 2:37am. I probably just re-narrated Odyssey with a bit of an uninspiring flavor.
Valentina’s skill and musical accent largely contributes to my enchantment by this piece. She’s just brilliant.