The Dies Irae, the Medieval Melody that Heralds Death
From a thirteenth-century sequence to symphonic poems and film: how the Dies irae became music's symbol par excellence for death and the judgement.
Four descending notes are enough to make many listeners think of death. They are the opening of the Gregorian melody of the Dies irae, the «day of wrath», a medieval Latin sequence that for centuries was sung at the Mass for the dead. No other liturgical melody has enjoyed such wide success outside the church. Composers of every age have quoted it to evoke judgement, the sabbath and the dance of death, until it became a true sound signature of the afterlife.
A Thirteenth-Century Sequence
The text of the Dies irae is a Latin poem in rhymed three-line stanzas, describing the day of the Last Judgement: the world reduced to ashes, the trumpet summoning the dead, the book in which everything is written, the plea to Christ for salvation. The opening echoes a passage of the prophet Zephaniah, who in the Vulgate describes that day as a day of wrath, anguish and darkness.
Tradition attributes the sequence to the Franciscan Thomas of Celano, biographer of Saint Francis, who lived in the thirteenth century, but the attribution is not certain. The text became a fixed part of the Mass for the dead with the Roman Missal promulgated by Pius V in 1570. With the liturgical reform that followed the Second Vatican Council it was removed from the funeral Mass and kept only as an optional hymn in the Liturgy of the Hours.
Text Set to Music and Melody Quoted
Two ways in which the Dies irae entered art music must be distinguished. The first concerns the text: composers of requiem masses, such as Mozart in 1791 or Verdi in 1874, set it to music with melodies of their own, often dramatic, without taking up the Gregorian chant. Verdi's famous Dies irae, with its strokes of the bass drum, is the best-known example.
The second way concerns the Gregorian melody itself, quoted without words within instrumental works. Here the sequence is no longer prayer, but symbol: its recognisable outline is enough to evoke death. This use arose in the heart of Romanticism and spread enormously. Nineteenth-century audiences, who heard that chant at funerals, grasped its meaning at once.
From Berlioz to Rachmaninoff and the Cinema
The first famous example is the finale of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, of 1830, where the Dies irae, intoned by the low brass, is distorted into parody during a witches' sabbath. Liszt built his entire Totentanz for piano and orchestra on the melody, and Saint-Saëns included it in the Danse macabre of 1874.
Sergei Rachmaninoff was almost obsessed with it. The melody appears in The Isle of the Dead of 1909, inspired by Arnold Böcklin's painting, in the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini of 1934 and in the Symphonic Dances of 1940, his last work. In twentieth-century cinema the Dies irae has been used in many soundtracks, for example in the opening titles of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, in 1980.
The path of the Dies irae shows how a chant born for the prayer of the dead became, through art, a common language. Today many people recognise it without knowing its name, and this is perhaps the clearest sign of its symbolic power. Even after leaving the liturgy, the melody lives on in concert halls and in films.