Branching Out / Vol. 11

What to listen to next, based on our recent experiences with the melancholy music of Gustav Mahler and Erich Korngold.

William Turner (English, 1789–1862). Study of a Tree in Bloom, c. 1835. Watercolor and gouache on ivory wove paper. Art Institute of Chicago

Welcome to the latest edition of Branching Out, where works recently featured in Shades of Blue become your launching point for discovering more melancholy music that cultivates calm, connection, and healing. (If you're a new subscriber, head over here to explore previous installments.)

To grow our tree of classical music knowledge this month, we'll explore music inspired by our experiences with Gustav Mahler's "Urlicht," a poignant prayer of love and light that comforted me after losing my beloved English bulldog, and Erich Korngold's Violin Concerto, with its cinematic expressions of nostalgia and desire.

So let's dig in and branch out …

If you found solace in Mahler's "Urlicht" and its ability to help us transcend sorrow and grief, then take a listen to ...

Edward Elgar / "Nimrod," from Enigma Variations

One evening in October 1898, Edward Elgar returned to his home in western England after a long day of teaching violin lessons. After enjoying dinner with his wife, Alice, he decompressed with two of his favorite activities: smoking cigars and improvising at the piano. The English composer, enduring one of his recurring bouts of self-doubt, was deep in flow when Alice interrupted his noodling.

"Edward, that's a good tune," she said, lurching Elgar out of his trance. "Play it again."

The composer repeated what he had been playing, a melody of muted sighs that alternates between sun and shadow like a Caravaggio painting.

"That's the tune!" Alice said. "What is that?"

"Nothing," her husband responded, "... but something might be made of it."

Elgar christened his new melody "Enigma," finding nothing remarkable about it — until, for fun, he began adapting its beguiling contours into musical portraits of close friends. After playing through each new twist on the "Enigma" theme, he prompted Alice to guess the character behind the caricature.

What began as a parlor game ultimately became a large-scale set of variations for orchestra — 14 vignettes of Elgar's family, friends, neighbors, and even the composer himself. A longtime devotee of word games and cryptography, Elgar affixed a mysterious title to each movement — either the subject's initials or a nickname — and laced his score with inside jokes masquerading as music of tremendous emotional range, humorous and light-hearted one moment, solemn and grand the next.

The Enigma Variations skyrocketed Elgar to international fame and remains today a staple of orchestral programs around the world. But the ninth variation, "Nimrod," has taken on a life of its own as a profound expression of collective mourning. The musical equivalent of the stiff upper lip synonymous with stoical British culture, "Nimrod" has offered a space for deep reflection and consolation at funerals and memorial services, including the annual National Service of Remembrance honoring those who died serving in the British military.

Elgar composed this music of swelling emotion and heartfelt lyricism to honor his close friend and publisher Augustus Jaeger. (Jaeger, the German word for "hunter," prompted Elgar's cryptic title of "Nimrod," the mighty hunter from the Book of Genesis.) A steadfast champion of Elgar's talents, Jaeger supported his friend's grueling quest to gain the recognition that had eluded the 41-year-old composer and his music. The pair shared many deep conversations over the years, one of which directly inspired "Nimrod," described by Elgar as:

"A portrait of a long summer evening talk, when my friend grew nobly eloquent (as only he could) on the grandeur of Beethoven, and especially of his slow movements."

Today, "Nimrod" stands as a symbol of resolve, of strength, of the interlacing of joy and grief that shapes our lives — all inspired by a friendship of nourishing tenderness and reverence.

Academy of St. Martin in the Fields
Sir Neville Marriner, conductor

And if you're wondering whether anyone has composed a musical portrait of an English bulldog, then spend 57 seconds with ...

Edward Elgar / "G. R. S.," from Enigma Variations

The title of the 11th movement of Elgar's Enigma Variations, "G. R. S.," refers to George Robertson Sinclair, Elgar's friend and the organist of Hereford Cathedral. The music, however, paints a portrait not of Sinclair, but of his beloved bulldog Dan.

In the variation's rollicking bass line, we hear Dan running to and fro while fetching sticks along the River Wye in Hereford, where Elgar and Sinclair often met for nature walks. Skittering string scales portray the bully falling down a steep bank into the river and paddling his way back to shore, while the final flourish in the orchestra evokes Dan's wet dog shake and a bark of unbridled triumph as he returns all four paws to solid ground.

Elgar's portrayal of his friend's dog has become so beloved in Hereford that a sculpture of Dan and a commemorative plaque now stand along the riverbank where the composer first thought to immortalize one feisty bulldog's adventures in music.

Left: George Robertson Sinclair (1863–1917) and his bulldog Dan. Date and photographer unknown. Right: Wooden statue of Dan on the banks of the River Wye in Hereford, England. Photo by David Merrett, via Flickr

Academy of St. Martin in the Fields
Sir Neville Marriner, conductor

If you were swept up in the waves of longing and desire Korngold embedded in his romantic Violin Concerto, be sure to spend some time with ...

Bernard Herrmann / "Scène d'amour," from Vertigo

Like Janus — the Roman god of doorways and duality — Bernard Herrmann had two faces to show the world. The first was that of an orchestral conductor and composer with high hopes of having his music performed in concert halls around the globe. The second, a pioneering film composer whose film scores moved beyond the glossy sheen of silver screen melodramas to probe the deepest recesses of the mind.

While Herrmann never considered himself a "film composer," but rather a composer who worked in film, he forged his greatest successes under the bright lights of Hollywood — a celebrated career that began in 1941 with Orson Welles's Citizen Kane and ended 35 years later with Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

But no director let Herrmann flex his musical muscles like Alfred Hitchcock, who shared Herrmann's fascination with the mix of beauty and longing, violence and death inherent in the human condition. The pair unleashed their singular poetic vision over eight films: Hitchcock crafted the plot, dialogue, and visuals while Herrmann's hyper-expressive scores established the emotional atmosphere and the psychology behind the characters' actions — those unseen elements of a film that haunt us long after the credits roll.

For many, this director-composer relationship reached its apex in Vertigo, a tale of anxiety, obsession, and desire based on the novel D'Entre les morts (From Among the Dead) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. The film traces the steps of Scottie Ferguson, a retired San Francisco detective hired by a friend, Gavin Elster, to follow Gavin's wife, Madeleine, who he claims is suicidally possessed by her Spanish great-grandmother. Scottie and Madeleine fall in love, but the detective later discovers — after believing he'd witnessed Madeleine's death — that the object of his infatuation is, in fact, a woman named Judy pretending to be Madeleine after Gavin murdered his wife.

If that plot sounds particularly operatic, there's good reason: The source novel was a modern twist on the medieval myth of Tristan and Isolde, which had also inspired Richard Wagner's staged saga of love and death. And like Wagner, Herrmann burrows the audience deep into each character's psyche by weaving leitmotifs — recurring musical snippets linked to specific characters and their emotions — throughout the film's score. In Herrmann's hands, the music of Vertigo doesn't play a subordinate role to the action on screen, but instead reimagines the relationship between sight and sound, creating what The New Yorker's Alex Ross called "a symphony for film and orchestra."

In “Scène d’amour,” Herrmann emphasizes the doomed nature of Scottie and Madeleine's love by employing the sensual harmonies and lush orchestration of Wagner's opera. The music slowly, achingly raises the temperature of a pivotal scene in the film, in which Judy dons Madeleine's clothing and hairstyle so that Scottie, who is descending into depression and delirium, can once again embrace the woman he (thinks he) loves.

As the orchestral texture blossoms from the distant, ethereal sound of muted violins to a climax of seismic sensuality, we're immersed in the duality of fear and desire, anxiety and ecstasy that lies at the film's core. This scene, more than any other moment in Herrmann's score, mirrors Wagner's own description of the musical momentum that drives his Tristan and Isolde:

"... one long succession of linked phrases to let an insatiable longing swell forth … to find the breach that will show the infinitely craving heart the path into the sea of love's endless delight."

Los Angeles Philharmonic
Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor

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