Weekly SpinOn: Melancholy

This week we look at a word with a long history. Melancholy comes from the Greek μελαίνη χολή (melainē cholē), meaning “black body fluid.” In ancient medicine it described one of the four fluids believed to shape human temperament. A melancholic person was calm and serious, often inclined to study or reflection. The philosopher Aristotle already connected this mood with creativity and asked why so many poets and artists shared it.

By the nineteenth century, the idea had changed completely. Melancholy became part of modern culture — no longer a medical state, but a mark of the individual mind. The figure of the melancholic artist became a Romantic phenomenon: sensitive, solitary, and turning emotion into art. Writers such as Goethe and Lord Byron, and painters like Caspar David Friedrich and Edvard Munch, gave this idea its form. This week’s playlist looks at how melancholy appeared in music, from early Romanticism to the turn of the century.

Track 1: The Hebrides (Fingal’s Cave), Op. 26 – Concert Overture – Felix Mendelssohn

Our first track takes us to the early nineteenth century and to the north of Scotland. The story of this concert overture begins with a real journey. In the summer of 1829, Felix Mendelssohn, then twenty years old, travelled through Scotland with a friend. During the trip he visited the island of Staffa and its basalt sea cavern known as Fingal’s Cave. The site was already famous among European travellers for its unusual hexagonal columns and its echoing sound. Mendelssohn was so impressed that he wrote to his family, enclosing the opening bars of a new composition and explaining that the visit had inspired it. Rather than writing an opera or a symphony, he decided to capture the memory of that place in a single orchestral movement — what was then called a concert overture. He later completed and revised the work, publishing it in 1832 as The Hebrides, Op. 26.

Mendelssohn’s generation often linked nature and emotion. Many of his contemporaries had read Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818), which described the northern coasts as places of freedom and solitude. Byron’s line “There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, / There is a rapture on the lonely shore…” (Canto IV, 1818) was well known and expressed the Romantic fascination with travel and reflection. Mendelssohn turned the same experience into sound, showing how direct observation could become art.

In his recording with the Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan performs the overture with clear structure and steady tempo, emphasising its classical balance within a Romantic setting. The Hebrides opens this week’s programme as an example of how composers began to connect landscape, literature, and personal feeling — the first step in the musical history of melancholy.

Track 2: Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54 – II. Intermezzo: Andantino grazioso – Robert Schumann

The link between our first and second tracks is closer than it might seem. When Clara Schumann premiered her husband’s Piano Concerto in A minor in 1845, the conductor was Felix Mendelssohn. Both composers belonged to the same Romantic generation that sought to combine musical form with emotional truth. Yet where Mendelssohn’s Hebrides looks outward toward nature and travel, Schumann turns to the landscape of the mind.

The Andantino grazioso is a dialogue between piano and orchestra — thoughtful rather than virtuosic. It shows Schumann’s belief that music could give shape to private emotion and reflection. During these years he experienced periods of anxiety and fatigue, which today might be seen as early signs of depression. In the nineteenth century, though, such moods were described as melancholy: a temperament associated with sensitivity and artistic depth rather than illness.

Writers like Goethe, whose The Sorrows of Young Werther had defined the emotional tone of an earlier generation, provided the literary background for this view of the artist. Schumann admired Goethe’s work and shared his belief that strong feeling could also lead to insight. “I have so much in me, and the feeling of her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her it all comes to nothing,” wrote Goethe in Werther — a sentence that captures the conflict between passion and restraint at the heart of Romantic art. Painters such as Caspar David Friedrich, especially in his Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (c. 1818), translated the same quiet introspection into images of stillness and distance. Schumann’s music belongs to this world of reflection and emotional poise.

The recording chosen for this playlist was made with Krystian Zimerman and Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic between September 1981 and January 1982 in the Philharmonie Berlin, and released by Deutsche Grammophon in 1982. Paired with Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16, recorded in the same sessions, it remains their only studio collaboration — a performance noted for its clarity, balance, and restraint, perfectly matching the spirit of this movement and the idea of the melancholic artist.

 

Track 3: Tristan und Isolde – Liebestod – Richard Wagner

After the calm and personal melancholy of Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner brings a completely different sound to the same theme. In the Liebestod (“Love Death”) from his opera Tristan und Isolde, completed in 1859 and first performed in 1865, melancholy becomes passionate and absolute. The long melodic lines and unresolved harmonies that define this music reflect Wagner’s study of Arthur Schopenhauer, whose writings on desire and suffering deeply influenced the score.

Schopenhauer saw human life as ruled by longing and therefore by a constant state of pain — a thought that Wagner turned into sound. In the Liebestod, Isolde’s final vision becomes the transformation of passion into peace, of pain into stillness. The result is a broader and more dramatic form of melancholy: one that seeks release through transcendence rather than resignation.

The Liebestod also stands as one of the milestones of nineteenth-century harmony. Its long suspensions and delayed resolutions opened the way for later composers from Mahler to Debussy. The recording chosen for this playlist was made by Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic in the Philharmonie Berlin in 1984 and released by Deutsche Grammophon. It was Karajan’s final return to this music, more than a decade after his complete Tristan und Isolde of the early 1970s. In this orchestral version he shapes the score with luminous transparency and controlled tension, turning intensity into balance — passion into the stillness of melancholy.

Track 4: Valse Triste, Op. 44 No. 1 – Jean Sibelius

Our final track leads the idea of melancholy into the twentieth century. Jean Sibelius composed his Valse Triste in 1903 as part of the incidental music for his brother-in-law Arvid Järnefelt’s play Kuolema (“Death”). The short orchestral piece, later performed on its own, became one of Sibelius’s most familiar works. Its atmosphere is quiet and fragile: a waltz that seems to remember rather than celebrate.

This form of melancholy is different from that of Schumann or Wagner. It is neither personal confession nor passion, but distance — a feeling expressed through simplicity and restraint. The same mood appears in the art and literature of the Nordic world around 1900: in the paintings of Edvard Munch, who created several works titled Melancholy between 1891 and 1896. One of them, painted around 1892, shows a solitary figure by the sea, his head resting in his hand — an image that also inspired this week’s cover.

Munch was part of the same artistic circle in Berlin as August Strindberg (1849–1912), who combined literature, philosophy, and psychology in a way that anticipated modern psychoanalysis. His plays and novels, such as Miss Julie, Inferno, and The Ghost Sonata, explored solitude and inner conflict — ideas later developed by Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. Together, Munch, Strindberg, and Sibelius defined a Northern form of melancholy that moved from Romantic emotion to psychological observation.

Herbert von Karajan was one of Sibelius’s most devoted interpreters. The composer himself named him, together with Thomas Beecham, among the conductors who best understood his music. Karajan recorded almost all of the Sibelius symphonies — with the single exception of No. 3 — over a span of three decades. He returned to Valse Triste in 1984 with the Berlin Philharmonic, in sessions held at the Philharmonie Berlin for Deutsche Grammophon, the same year as his recording of Wagner’s Liebestod. It was part of his lifelong commitment to Sibelius’s music, which he helped to establish in the European concert repertoire.

—  Pia Bernauer (Karajan Institute)