Halloween piano music
The genuinely frightening end of the classical repertoire, free to read, hear and print.
Open the sheet music libraryClassical music got there long before the film composers did. Saint-Saëns has the dead climbing out and dancing until the cockerel calls, Mussorgsky has a witch flying in a mortar, Grieg has something chasing you out of a mountain, and Bach has the organ chord every haunted house has borrowed since. All of it is out of copyright, so it is yours to play.
Easiest first, and plenty of it is easier than it sounds: In the Hall of the Mountain King is a slow creeping tune before it is a stampede, and Gnomus is short. Open any of them and the reader plays it back, so you can hear where the fright is before you try to make it yourself.
About the pieces
Marche funèbre
The slow movement of the B flat minor Sonata, written some years before the rest of the sonata was built around it. It was played at Chopin's own funeral at the Madeleine in Paris.
In the Hall of the Mountain King
Written for Ibsen's play Peer Gynt, for the scene where Peer is chased through the mountain king's cave by trolls. Grieg thought the Peer Gynt music was worthless and said so in a letter.
Album for Children: 10. Funeral March of a Canary
A mock-solemn funeral march for a pet bird, marked Andante molto espressivo, with a sweeter middle section before the sad march returns.
Pictures at an Exhibition: 1. Gnomus
Mussorgsky wrote Pictures at an Exhibition in 1874 after a memorial show of drawings by his friend Viktor Hartmann, and it was published in 1886. The first picture is a gnome lurching about on crooked legs, all sudden bursts, stops and silences.
Pictures at an Exhibition: 8. Catacombae
Hartmann drew himself exploring the Roman catacombs of Paris by lantern light. Mussorgsky answers with slow, massive chords that swell and fade, echoing in the dark.
Marche funèbre in C Minor Op. 72
A march is in two, at walking pace, and its whole character depends on the pulse never wavering. Chopin wrote almost nothing that was not for the piano, and spent his life finding out what the instrument alone could do.
March of the Trolls, Op. 54 No. 3
From Grieg's fifth book of Lyric Pieces, Op. 54, published in 1891.
Funeral March in C minor, K. 453a
Mozart wrote this tiny march in Vienna in 1784, in the notebook of his pupil Barbara Ployer, with the tongue-in-cheek title Marche funebre del Signor Maestro Contrapunto. It is only sixteen bars long, slow and serious, with a chromatic bass line.
Pictures at an Exhibition: 9. The Hut on Hen's Legs (Baba Yaga)
Baba Yaga is the witch of Russian folk tales, who lives in a hut on chicken legs. The music stamps and leaps savagely, with an eerie, quiet middle section, and plunges straight into the Great Gate of Kiev.
Toccata in D minor, BuxWV 155
A large organ toccata in the North German stylus phantasticus, where free, flashing passagework alternates with sections of strict counterpoint, including a stretch in triple time. It is arranged for piano from the organ original, and over 140 bars it runs from the opening flourish through to a closing cadence on D.
Lacrimosa
Eight bars into this movement Mozart's manuscript stops: it is where death interrupted the Requiem he believed he was writing for himself. His student finished it; the world kept the grief.
Night on Bald Mountain
Mussorgsky's orchestral picture of a witches' gathering, best known in the version Rimsky-Korsakov arranged after Mussorgsky's death in 1881. This long piano transcription is by Konstantin Chernov, and after the wild D minor revels it ends quietly in D major as dawn breaks.
Toccata and Fugue in D minor
The most theatrical opening in all of Bach: one flourish, one silence, one abyss. Organists own it; pianists borrow it whenever they want the room's attention.
Erlkönig
Schubert was eighteen when he set Goethe's ballad of a father riding through the night with a dying child. One singer has to be narrator, father, child and the Erlking, and the piano is the horse.