I have been thinking about the funeral march, a musical genre which enjoyed great respectability for a century and a half.
Before its emergence with Romanticism, funeral music appeared in slow solemn baroque processionals for death rituals (Purcell, Handel) and in funeral processions in funerary scenes in baroque (Lully), neoclassical (Gluck) and late classical (Mozart) opera.
Revolutionary funeral marches mourning heroism, often political martyrs, emerged in the concert hall starting with the French Revolutionary period in the 1790s. This pan-European musical tradition lasted until the end of World War II, cultivated by a continuous line of major composers such as Beethoven, Berlioz, Chopin, Wagner, Alkan, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Prokofiev, Hindemith, Shostakovich, Eisler, Strauss, and Britten.
The funeral march flourished as a musical monument in the Romantic and Modern eras because it was associated with mourning a heroic individual, often with a tragic fate, and commemorating a national and/or revolutionary uprising or resistance with powerful political symbolism, like the march episode that follows the “invasion theme” in the first movement of Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 7, “Leningrad” (1941).
However, since the 1950s, the funeral march has faded away as heroism disappeared and grandeur became old fashioned. As trauma took the place of anti-fascist resistance, and memory the place of glorification, suffering, rather than struggle and sacrifice, started to be commemorated. Composers such as Penderecki, Pärt, Gorécki, Gubaidulina, Adams, and Mac Millan wrote threnodies and laments. A century ago, “in every other symphonic movement, Mahler’s marches mimic and mock the melancholy of monumental might long before the Austro-Hungarian empire was gone. Cruel or emotional, desperate or triumphant, they break apart an entire cultural tradition to expose its brutality and artificiality, and do it with wrenching respect and affection for it.” In our century, together with the heroic individual who died for liberty, the community that made him/her an inspiring symbol has also disappeared. Left melancholy is still searching for its music.
12 March 2026
Piano Poetry Pantelis Politics 