Classicalite’s Five Best: Musical Silences

It does sound a contradiction in terms, doesn't it?

But if theater can have the famous "Pinter pause," so music can have its silences.

And, whisper it gently to the idiots who applaud too quickly and ostentatiously the second a profound last movement has rustled to its close, but often in music, the absence of sound carries the very essence of a work.

So, here's a very hushed Classicalite's Five Best...

John Cage's 4'33''

Four minutes, thirty-three seconds, three movements, not a note. John Cage being brilliant, or mad. The most interesting question in many ways is, which recording is the best?

"Peter...Griiiiiimes!"

Benjamin Britten, master dramatist that he was, knew how to wield stillness and silence. And he never did so more powerfully than in the awful, gaping moments between the crowd's shrieking of the protagonist's name in Peter Grimes. It gives the audience time to understand the magnitude of the witch hunt about to ensue, and sonically speaking, gives each exclamation fresh strength--like waves crashing on the Aldeburgh rocks.

Siegfried's "Funeral March"

By the middle of the third act of Wagner's final Ring opera, he needed to pull something special out of the bag to equal, nevermind top, what had gone before. And at the start of the funeral march for the saga's naïve hero, there are three ascending notes, after which the music takes a breath--gathering almost the last of its emotional strength (almost, there is the small matter of an immolation still to come). Only then out pours the grief. Shattering.

Turandot, where the maestro laid down his pen

"Here the maestro laid down his pen," declared Arturo Toscanini at the world premiere of Puccini's final opera, declining to continue the performance. But on the next and every subsequent night that this popular opera has been performed, one of various completions (almost always that by Puccini's student, Busoni) has filled in the gaps. Yet, there is always an almost indefinable pause between the death of the slave girl, Liu, and the storming chords that signal the start of [Busoni's] completion. As the distinction between styles, complexity, all sorts of things become quickly clear, I always find that moment solemn beyond its marking of Liu's tragedy.

Vaughan Williams' "Finale" from Sea Symphony

This might seem an odd choice to some, and it is very personal, but I find the very end of Vaughan Williams' First Symphony--the way it bobs to the horizon and out of sight, as it were, the long meditative lead-up--all very effective. And to be truly affecting, it needs a long, thoughtful, satisfied silence at the end. Magical.