Sometimes, hatred of a person or object can be almost as powerful as infatuation in serving as a muse. Here are six instances where hatred has found its way, pretty fruitfully we'd have to say, into music.
Six classical works inspired by hatred
Ligeti: Musica Ricercata II
György Ligeti composed the Musica Ricercata, a set of 12 pieces for solo piano, from 1951 to 1953. The second of the 12 is particularly haunting, obsessively repeating just two pitches (E sharp and F sharp) until a third note, a G natural, makes an unexpected appearance. With Hungary struggling with life as part of the Eastern Bloc, under the control of Stalin's Russia, Ligeti famously said that the third note represented 'a knife through Stalin’s heart'.
No wonder that Stanley Kubrick, who'd famously used Ligeti's music in The Shining, deployed this chilling little melody in 1999's Eyes Wide Shut to soundtrack the bewilderment and dread inside Tom Cruise’s mind.
Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
Beckmesser, the carping, pedantic critic and villain of Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger, is a vicious caricature, sometimes thought to embody the composer’s anti-Semitic prejudices. However, he's also strongly believed to embody the powerful and hostile music critic, Eduard Hanslick.
This acerbic reviewer was famously partial to the more classical sound world of Mozart and Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms, and was hostile to the more forward-looking soundworlds of Wagner and Liszt (he also had a go at Bruckner and Hugo Wolf, and opined that Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto 'stinks to the ear'.
One early plan of Wagner's was to name the character of Beckmesser 'Veit Hanslich', just to ram the point home.
Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra
During the Intermezzo fourth movement of his magnificent Concerto for Orchestra, Bartók lampoons Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, quoting a phrase that itself is a quote from Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow, followed by giggles from the woodwind section.
Bartók’s son Peter recalled listening with his father to the symphony’s US premiere on the radio: Bartók took exception to the repetitions in the grotesque march, and to the banality of its theme.
It’s possible Bartók didn’t get Shostakovich’s Lehár reference – Lehár was Hitler’s favourite composer and that theme was Shostakovich’s own expression of hatred, representing the Nazis approaching Leningrad.
Shostakovich: Symphony No. 11 ‘The Year 1905’
Shostakovich had to bury his loathing of the Soviet system deep within music disguised for state approval. His Symphony No. 11 ‘The Year 1905’ contains a horrifying musical depiction of a massacre, followed by a lament for the fallen and finally a resurgence.
The work’s title masked the fact that it was written soon after the USSR brutally crushed the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.
Prokofiev: Piano Sonata No. 7
Prokofiev’s Piano Sonatas Nos 6, 7 and 8, meanwhile, were a musical response to the atmosphere, public and private, of the Second World War. The Seventh Sonata finishes with a wild toccata that incarnates – within a thrilling pianistic framework – motoric destruction and the sickening boom of falling bombs.
Gabriela Montero: Ex Patria
With 2011's Ex Patria ('Away from the Homeland') for piano and orchestra, Venezuelan composer Gabriela Montero expressed both a deep love for her native land, and a hatred towards those responsible for its fate. The work expresses both Montero’s own experience of exile, and her profound sadness about the crisis facing Venezuela.
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‘Words are simply inadequate to express what I feel about the theft of my homeland by forces so dark that I can only describe them in music,’ Montero explains. ‘My musical creativity is a profoundly personal act of outrage, protest, dissent and resistance.’ Composed in 2011, her Ex Patria is ‘a crushing tone poem that brings the listener into a barbaric world of theft, decay and personal sorrow.’