Grief in a Major Key

On sad songs in major keys, from Schubert to the Spice Girls (via Deep Impact).

The new TV serialisation of Amadeus is predictably bad. That is not to say that Will Sharpe isn’t charismatic here (there, and everywhere).

There’s a moment, which is not in the play or the film, where Mozart is shown sketching his Mass in C minor. We see him writing in C major, then, after the death of his child, shifting to C minor. It’s meant to be a glimpse of his genius, but has all the logic of a GCSE music lesson. Sadness = minor.

But as Mozart would know, major keys are where the real pain lies.

He shows us this himself at the climax of The Marriage of Figaro. As the Count begs for forgiveness, the chords are tender, warm, without the slightest hint of a flattened third.

The Countess forgives him while her heart is breaking. She loves him and is hurt by him and neither feeling cancels the other out. Only major keys can hold these contradictions without resolving them.

If you are ever soundtracking a film and want the audience to feel grief, trauma, pain, pick a piece in a major key. It will hurt more.

(But, do not dredge up Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight from the drain of whichever terminal-illness-themed TV advert it has last appeared in to score the emotional climax of your film. Let’s collectively agree not to do that again.)

I’m not sure why I became obsessed with classical music around the age of 5, or how I turned that into a coherent enough thought to ask my parents to buy me a copy of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.

However, by the age of 10, Mozart and Handel had started to loosen their vice-like grip, and, after a slightly regrettable few months in which I discovered Eastenders and Coronation Street, and was suddenly more into soap operas than actual operas, I had decided my next identity was… film buff.

This largely consisted of memorising the contents of the 1012-page Virgin Film Guide, which was essentially a paperback version of a fairly mid human being’s Letterboxd profile. A pre-internet encyclopaedia of cinema: thousands of short reviews, all arranged alphabetically. The kind of book that made it feel possible to ‘know films’ simply by absorbing enough pages.

I did attempt to watch a fair few of them too, which is why, on paper, Deep Impact with its ‘infrequent strong language and moderate disaster scenes’ should have been relatively light work.

Just weeks earlier I’d got through The Talented Mr Ripley largely unscathed by the various bludgeonings, if in equal measure confused and intrigued by the barely concealed homoerotic subtext.

Deep Impact, however.

I’m not sure any other work of art has traumatised me to the same degree.

It was the spring half-term holiday, my grandparents were visiting. A week of pub lunches and trips to the local living history museum, more confirmation that my interests at that time largely aligned with those of people in their early seventies. We watched Deep Impact one evening, early in the week.

It must have been the BBC premiere. Since then it’s become one of those films they seem to show repeatedly across BBCs One, Two, Three and Four. A true chameleon of a picture, apparently capable of speaking to all audiences, unified as we are in broad agreement that it would probably suck to be wiped out by a giant, unforgiving hunk of space rock.

I still remember the sense of crushing dread that accompanied me for the rest of that week.

It wasn’t the big loud bit that haunted me. It wasn’t the asteroid or the ‘moderate disaster scenes’. It was Vanessa Redgrave, quietly accepting her death, excluded from the salvation lottery for being over 50 years old. The steadiness of it. The calm. The sense that the end of everything might arrive not in darkness, but as an ordinary day continuing right up until it didn’t.

The whole film is a visual rendering of sadness in a major key. A disaster scored in sunlight.

Everything suddenly seemed so sinister. The pub garden. The egg and chips. My grandparents’ delight in our company.

It was an existential crisis. Small. But still a little too large for 10-year-old me, who was suddenly reconciled to how fragile and weird this all was.

I didn’t have the language, or vague grounding in early 20th-century French philosophy, to process it back then.

In later life, it’s morphed into that feeling on a summer afternoon when there’s a beating sun and light breeze and you half-step out of yourself and realise how ephemeral everything is and you feel a kind of bereft gratitude. Only a major key can capture that.

The feeling where you’re completely present and already nostalgic. The sudden clarity with which you feel yourself as alive and aware and temporary all at once.

The world doesn’t modulate when you feel it. It holds the joy and the loss and the absurdity and the love and the ending all in the same chord progression, refusing to commit to any single emotion because that’s what being alive actually feels like.

Some of my favourite moments of sadness in a major key:

Schubert - String Quintet in C Major

If this is the place for proclamations, I’ll add this is probably the greatest piece of chamber music ever written, or at least, the one that kneads away at your very core with the most persistence and the least mercy.

In the ‘Adagio’, for bars at a time, the music achieves a supernatural stillness and beauty so complete that it almost becomes unnerving.

The exposition is dominated by a steady dotted-rhythm figure in the first violin, suspended above the slowly shifting chords in the remaining quartet. But again and again the melody builds to a small three-chord phrase (00:09–00:12 and 00:36–00:39), which feels like a glimpse of a kind of contentment so complete it almost seems implausible, while at the same time reminding you that you’re only visiting it.

After modulating from E major to F minor in the development section, alphabetically logical, but musicologically brazen for 1828, Schubert returns to the opening material. But the stability is compromised. The first violin and second cello now weave around each other as though carrying the knowledge of what happened in the turbulent mid-section. Same chords, same key, but gently scarred by what came before.

Schwartz - ‘Thank Goodness’ from Wicked

To change gears briefly, you’ll see that Stephen Schwartz picks up the mantle of major-key ambivalence from Schubert here. Using, actually, the exact same harmony to show Glinda’s conflicted joy.

Corelli - Violin Sonata Op. 5 No. 6

I’ve always found that Corelli outranks the other 17th-century composers on the wistfulness charts. (Of course Bach can do this sometimes too). His major-key writing does not cleave to the baroque brightness of Vivaldi and seems riddled with nostalgia and finality.

Or it’s just that this album of violin sonatas soundtracked the breakup of a particularly painful situationship and this excerpt sounds curiously like the final cadence of the EastEnders theme tune.

Spice Girls - Goodbye

Not known for her subtlety, Geri did once suggest that this track had originally been penned to commemorate the Dunblane massacre. Thankfully, the remaining quartet opted for something a little more proportionate and turned it into a eulogy for Geri’s departure from the band.

As Mel C implores throughout ‘time will never change it’. But is there anything more spine-tingling than the final escalated plea that ‘time will never, never, ever change it’, set to distinctly Schubertian chords?

The answer is ‘no, no, no, no’.

The Capricorns - Sunset Over Malibu

An addictive and deceptively painful slice of early-00s indietronica, richer in pathos and emotional precision than far grander artistic statements. Perfectly proportioned for teenage catharsis.

Elgar - ‘Nimrod’ from Enigma Variations

I’m not a huge fan of Elgar, and generally consider him to be the aural equivalent of a Princess Diana commemorative tea towel.

The Cello Concerto is mawkish, and the perfect counterexample to my argument. I can’t find a huge range of ways to feel about eight never-ending minutes of E minor. I’ve always had a soft spot for ‘Nimrod’ though. Resolutely in E-flat major, and so terrifying in its vastness it reminds you of how tiny you are.

Sibelius - Symphony No. 7

I considered removing the Elgar piece, but it sets up a useful order of magnitude. Sibelius’ final symphony is a reckoning that will dwarf your entire being if you let it. All I hear is the sound of everything I fear I’ll never know.

Mozart - Ave Verum Corpus

I knew Mozart had written this in gratitude for his wife’s recovery from illness, but, not being religious I was slightly shocked when I finally looked up the meaning of the words. ‘From whose pierced side flowed water and blood: Be for us a foretaste [of the Heavenly banquet] in the trial of death!’ and so forth…

Mozart sets this in D major and somehow makes the serenity more unbearable than any minor key could manage. The cadences feel like acceptance rather than comfort. I’ve stared at the score, which is startling in its simplicity. Nothing exceptional at all happens as the first section slowly draws to a close, climaxing on the same chord used by Schubert, Schwartz and the Spice Girls, at around 01:18, and yet it feels entirely singular.

If I have an argument at all, it’s here. Major keys carry grief more brutally than the minor, because they don’t ‘match’ the pain. They sit beside it, dignify it and let contentment and its undoing occupy the same bar.

I’m not sure if there’s truly a word for that feeling, but there is a key signature.

The Magnetic Fields - 100,000 Fireflies

An encore. One that nails the brief almost too well. What do I need to say? Other than switch the chords to minor and all you’ve got is maudlin introspection. But this, this will always hurt.