Candlelight Halloween

ISSUE #176

Last Wednesday night, desperate for consolation from lives shackled with chaos, I went with Elsie to go see Candlelight—a small concert series of classical music held in hidden, non-traditional venues around the city, each lit solely by hundreds of scattered candles. The theme of this performance was “Halloween Classical,” played solo by Serene, a self-taught composer and pianist who left her role as a Google Engineer to dedicate herself to classical performance.

Tall and lithe with pitch-black hair, she walked out in a black leather trench coat with buckled sash, her voice barely cresting a haunted whisper as she spoke between each piece. She began with Rachmaninoff's “Prelude in C-sharp minor, Op. 3, No. 2”—published sometime in London as The Burning of Moscow, a fitting start to a candlelit show—and followed it with Ravel’s Jeux d’eau, roughly meaning “water games,” keys pattering like rain stripping trees of auburn leaves. After playing her selections of The Well-Tempered Clavier, she introduced Liszt’s “Mephisto Waltz No. 1, S. 514,” a whirlwind dance with Mephistopheles grabbing the fiddle at a village inn and goading Faust into joining the fun, waltzing in a wanton frenzy out the door and into the woods.

The night’s centerpiece was Gaspard de la Nuit, a set of three horrific poems notorious for being the most difficult of all piano pieces. “I think they’re fun, though,” Serene said with a smirk as she launched into the first piece, a tale about drowning at the hands of a mermaid. The second poem, “Le Gibet,” tells the story of a wanderer in a desert who spies a hanging corpse, the bells of those who sent him to the gallows ringing out over the wastes. The third, “Scarbo,” is the skittering of a demon who hides in your room, flitting in and out of the dark as you lie awake in bed.

Then without introduction, she played “Clair de Lune,” like when Mother Moon dispels the fog by begging the air for peace. My first time hearing it performed before me, I was shocked to be brought to tears—a full, orange moon was shining outside, and I’m only a little farm boy, after all, who’s been foolishly paving a path through hell on the way to being swallowed by the sun. Serene ended the night with Danse Macabre, where Death calls forth the dead on Halloween to dance to his fiddle by the midnight moon. It was hearing this, too, in a live performance that I finally understood its meaning—the Death follows me closer every year, but instead of turning to dance, I play the coward and run.

I’ve remade the program in this week’s playlist, so I can always keep that night close to me. There are only two things that matter in this world—love and music. They are the sum of all beauty and the sound of it. Yet still I wake up and toil every day for those who chase chocolate as it melts. So I’ll use this as a way to drown out their squealing, a playlist for studying on Halloween, even when we all should be out dancing—or a reminder that at least Death waits for all, even the most vile men on Earth.