Classical Exit

Music

When I talked about which song you’d like to hear on your deathbed, I was of course referring to the spirit of the initial poll, which asked Brits which popular song they’d like to hear as they shuffled off this mortal coil.

No mention of classical music, of course, which didn’t stop several of you from listing your classical choice.

But in the spirit of that, here are my Top 5 Choices for Classical Deathbed Music — the music I’d want to hear in my last conscious awareness — and there are five only because I don’t want to list fifty (which I could), and in any event, I find it absolutely impossible to pick only one.  Any one of the following would be just fine by me, and all I can say is that I’d sorely miss hearing the other four.

Faure’s Requiem (appropriately enough)

Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, 2nd Movement

Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody On A Theme Of Paganini

Chopin’s Nocturnes

Strauss’s Die Fledermaus Overture (just a short piece, in case it’s all I’d be able to have, and Zubin Mehta conducting the Vienna Phil?  Worth every moment.)

9 comments

  2. Moonlight Sonata 1st movement – though I might end up trying to hang on longer for the third movement….
    Chopin Nocturne no 20
    Claire de Lune
    Prelude to Das Rheingold
    Entry of the Gods into Valhalla (me carrying their luggage of course…)
    Girl with the flaxen hair
    Scheherazade
    Summer from the four seasons
    Miussorgsky The Great Gate of Kiev
    Adagio from Gayne Ballet Suite
    In the Steppes of Central Asia by Borodin
    The swan of Tuonela by Sideline
    Reverie by Debussy

    Forget dying, there are too many pieces to leave behind.

  3. The Seventh Symphony thing – don’t forget its accompanying video, the closing scene of /Zardoz./
    .

  4. Having some kind of weird humour I have selected ” Requiem pour un Con” from Serge Gainsbourg wich was the music of the movie ” Le Pacha.” with Jean Gabin. And no It ain’t no joke.

  5. I think it’s hard to beat what they used for Edward G. Robinson’s last big-screen appearance in “Soylent Green”, the first movement of Beethoven’s 6th (the “Pastoral”).

    1. A prerequisite for that is at least four choirboys to work the air supply bellows for the organ.

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