It’s December 5, 1830, and 26-year-old French composer Hector Berlioz is debuting his Symphonie Fantastique at the Paris Conservatoire. The work is set to a loose narrative that follows its creator’s descent into opium addiction, sacrilegious nightmares and infernal Sabbaths, all inspired by Berlioz’ doomed and unrequited passion for Anglo-Irish actress Harriet Smithson. He will, however, later marry her. The young Frenchman has detailed all his symphony’s programmatic elements in small pamphlets, which sit neatly on the chairs of perplexed Parisian businessmen, rising bourgeois critics and a young Franz Liszt. The audience is a motley and aristocratic assembly unaware that in the following 50 minutes they will encounter a definitive piece of 19th century Romantic music full of lonely, Satanic, druggy visions. What the audience cannot also yet know is that Berlioz’ score, and more specifically his deranged fifth movement, is about to introduce something far larger into popular culture: the modern musical afterlife of Dies Irae.
Thomas de Celano, friend and biographer of St. Francis (of the Franciscan order) is believed to have penned the doomy hymn in the mid 1200s. Falling at the end of the Catholic funeral mass, it explicitly details a violent and terrifying day of judgement. There are entire deeply rewarding and often maddening academic rabbit holes dedicated to Dies Irae and its endurance, just as there is an exhaustive list of music that has used it.
In researching this piece, I went on my own odyssey to track down a doctoral dissertation about Dies Irae’s use in secular music, written by a man called Forrest Irving Wanninger. The paper, which I had to call a perplexed librarian at Illinois’ Northwestern University to procure, remains the most conclusive piece of literature on the chant. Wanninger wrote it in 1962 and died in 1998. His work remains largely unnoticed, but his strong connection with the chant is beautiful and palpable. Wanninger was a Second World War veteran, and he goes into great depth about an obscure translation from an anonymous soldier in the Civil War, who wrote his own version of the chant, presumably because the man-made horrors he saw were worse than anything a monk could depict. I like to think that Forrest, in his early 50s at the time of writing his dissertation, saw something in the melody and translation that related to his own experiences.
From John Fahey to John Williams, the tune has quietly woven its place into our collective consciousness. It has become an instant semiotic of all things deathly among film composers, and even a means for American football teams to scare their opponents – The University of Georgia’s marching band play it at every game. Like Berlioz’ unsuspecting audience, you’re perhaps unaware what Dies Irae is, or at the very least unaware of the sheer amount of culture that it’s managed to permeate. But hark! Subscriber scan read on beyond the paywall for their guide to a rich and fulfilling musical underworld that spans chthonic composers, NBA commercials, Swedish metal, kitschy Romantics, horror films and hip hop.
Dies Irae
The best place to start is with a recording of the plainchant. This one, sung in Latin by English folk collective the Alfred Deller Consort, takes its notation from the 1961 edition of the Liber Usualis, a collection of Gregorian chants compiled in the late 19th century. Importantly, this is one of the most up to date and clear notations of Dies Irae, as the Vatican smacked it out of their masses later in the 60s for…
