The opening refrain of Chopin’s Funeral March is one of the most memorable musical ideas ever penned: he captured forever the ritual spirit of death and created the universal Dead March. As a solo piano piece (1837) it nevertheless needed context, and by the kind of creative miracle known only to the greatest, it eventually emerged in 1839 at the heart of a piano sonata like no other. By all normal precepts, this daring solution shouldn’t work. Even Schumann, normally such a sympathetic commentator, was sceptical: he thought Chopin had simply thrown ‘four of his maddest children under the same roof’. But there is method even in madness, and here the radical reinvention of Classical sonata form in the first movement and of the Beethovenian scherzo in the second provides the perfect preparation for the iconic march itself – after which ‘a short Finale, about three pages of my manuscript paper’, wrote Chopin, is all that’s needed. ‘The left hand and the right hand gossip in unison after the March,’ he said – as well they might!

Recommended recording Sergei Rachmaninov pf (RCA)

1. A sad pavan for a great man

Byrd The Earl of Salisbury – Pavan and Two Galliards (1612)

The melancholy side of the Elizabethan mind found a natural outlet in memorial music, and the untimely death from cancer in 1612 of Robert Cecil, Elizabeth I’s great minister of state (ennobled by James I as Earl of Salisbury), found both Byrd and Gibbons creating keyboard masterpieces to mourn his passing. Byrd’s moving Pavan has a plangency ideally suited to the delicate keyboard instruments of the period, and this slow dance would be best heard in the candlelit shadows of a long gallery such as the wood-panelled Combination Room of St John’s College, Cambridge – Cecil’s alma mater.

Recommended recording Aapo Häkkinen hpd (Alba)

2. Music as mourning

Haydn Symphony No 44 in E minor, ‘Trauer’ (c1771)

This remarkably intense symphony has long been singled out as one of Haydn’s finest – and only partly as a result of its ‘Mourning’ nickname bringing it to prominence. It comes at the peak of his Sturm und Drang period, when an unprecedented burst of emotion and tension gripped his scores. And then there was also the ‘story’ attached to it – that Haydn himself was so affected by the austere and consolatory beauty of the slow movement that he asked for it to be played at his own funeral. Sadly, it wasn’t – and the story is probably apocryphal. What was played at his memorial service was Mozart’s Requiem.

Recommended recording Berlin RIAS SO / Ferenc Fricsay (DG)

Mozart Requiem (1791)

The astonishing potency of the unfinished Requiem has ensured it a posthumous reputation which turned a mysterious commission into a musical myth. In Paris on October 30, 1849, special permission had been granted by the archbishop for it to be performed to see Chopin himself on his way, as he had specifically requested. The roster of performances at distinguished funerals is quite remarkable: after Haydn came (among others) Dussek, Paisiello, Weber, Beethoven, Schubert, Rossini, Berlioz; Schiller and Goethe head up the poets. At the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, Chopin was laid to rest to the strains of his own Funeral March in its first orchestration by Henri Reber.

Recommended recording Sols; St John’s College Ch; ECO / George Guest (Chandos)

3. Funeral marches for heroes

Beethoven Piano Sonata No 12 in A flat, Op 26 (1800-01)

Chopin was always ardent in his admiration of and indebtedness to Bach and Mozart, but his connection with Beethoven somehow seems more elusive. The fastidious Pole was musically capable of revolutionary fervour himself, but his general demeanour in the Paris of his adoption was one of aloof detachment. However, it is well documented that he especially admired and regularly taught the Op 26 Sonata, with its third-movement ‘Marcia funebre sulla morte d’un eroe’. Beethoven was at the height of his Napoleonic hero worship when the sonata was published, and there can hardly be any doubt that Chopin had this example in mind when he came to frame his own ‘Funeral March’ Sonata in 1839.

Recommended recording Bernard Roberts pf (Nimbus)

4. Weddings and funerals

Mendelssohn A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op 61 – Wedding March (1842)

If the opening gesture of Chopin’s Funeral March is instantly recognised by billions worldwide, Mendelssohn’s march for a theatrical wedding is another musical gambit which runs it close in the familiarity stakes. The idea (that hoary old chestnut) that he never equalled the brilliance of his Op 21 Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1826) is rather smashed by the quality of the incidental music he wrote in 1842 to a commission from the king of Prussia, in which he uncannily matches his 17-year-old magic 16 years later. And by using the march at her wedding to the Crown prince of Prussia in 1858, Queen Victoria’s eldest child, Vicky, enshrined the music in public ceremony forever after.

Recommended recording CBSO / Edward Gardner (Chandos)

Liszt Funérailles (1849)

This is the seventh of 10 piano pieces that Liszt published in 1853 as a collection called Harmonies poétiques et religieuses. Because the title Funerailles (‘funeral)’ was followed specifically by the date ‘October 1849’ it was often assumed that Liszt was composing a deliberate act of homage to his near contemporary Chopin, who died on October 17 that year. And as the music contains some near quotations from Chopin’s great Op 53 Polonaise, the connection could seem pretty obvious. But Liszt was adamant that he was creating a memorial to friends of his who had died in the Hungarian uprising against the Habsburgs in 1848. Nevertheless, it captures something of Chopin’s own revolutionary Polish fervour and is thus a splendid tribute to the great master.

Recommended recording Krystian Zimerman pf (DG)

5. Death on stage and in life

Wagner Götterdämmerung – Siegfried’s Funeral March (1874)

If any composer might have been expected to rise to the occasion of writing a supreme funeral march for the opera house then it had to be Wagner. Where Handel steals the show in oratorio with his magnificent Dead March from Saul, the demise of Wagner’s hero Siegfried in the final stages of The Ring calls forth a supreme moment: an overwhelming fusion of Handelian grand simplicity, Beethovenian power and something of Chopin’s archetypal eloquence brings the opera to an emotional and dramatic climax which arguably remains unsurpassed in the theatre.

Recommended recording LPO / Sir Adrian Boult (Warner/EMI)

Elgar Symphony No 2 in E flat, Op 63 (1911)

When King Edward VII died on May 6, 1910, the Elgars were just returning from a performance of part of Siegfried at Covent Garden as they heard the sad news being called out in London’s streets. Elgar immediately offered to write a funeral march for the dead monarch (as Purcell had done so unforgettably for Mary II, who died in 1694), but time was too short, he was told, so he kept and captured some of his feelings at this loss (and others) for the slow movement of the Second Symphony in 1911 – one of the most eloquent acts of elegy in the symphonic repertoire. It could be argued that what he wrote immediately afterwards, the Coronation March for George V, was in fact more suited to a funeral, and with hindsight it memorialises an entire epoch which the Great War soon swept away. In 1932, Elgar emerged from retirement to orchestrate Chopin’s Funeral March, and this masterly and eloquent treatment was heard at his own memorial concert at Queen’s Hall, London, in 1934, conducted by Adrian Boult.

Recommended recording LPO / Sir Adrian Boult (Lyrita)

6. Another keyboard giant

Rachmaninov Piano Sonata No 2 in B flat minor, Op 36 (1913, rev 1931)

As a recording artist Rachmaninov was and remains the greatest of the Romantic pianist-composers to be captured by the microphone: but what wouldn’t we give, though, to hear Chopin himself or Liszt! The great Russian’s discography may well have been forced upon him by exile in America and Europe, but it miraculously captures a keyboard giant at the height of his powers. The interaction of Rachmaninov with other composers also had a profound effect on his own compositions. Having composed his prodigious Second Sonata (in Chopin’s own key of B flat minor) in the pre-Soviet tail end of Tsarist Russia in 1913, he revised it in 1931 by removing about six minutes from a 25-minute work – and many regret the excisions. But even though he’d become paranoid about the length of his scores in a less sympathetic age, his reasoning now was musical: ‘It is too long: Chopin’s Sonata lasts nineteen minutes, and all has been said.’

Recommended recording John Lill pf (Nimbus), 1913 version

Recommended recording Simon Trpčeski pf (EMI/Warner), 1931 version

This article originally appeared in the 2021 Awards issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today