A new day dawns; so many great composers have wanted to capture the moment - the sunrise, the birdsong, the sheer wonder of it all. Forget Nocturnes and L’Apres-Midi d’une faune, famous composers are often ‘mornings people’. Here’s a selection of 14 who wrote some of their greatest music in celebration of the early daylight hours.
Richard Strauss: Also Sprach Zarathustra–Prelude (Sunrise)
Almost universally known as the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi film classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Richard Strauss’ prelude to his philosophical symphonic poem Also Sprach Zarathustra is actually called "Sunrise". The music begins with a low C on the organ—so low that often the vibrations can be felt through the floor.
The score is prefaced with a quote from Nietzsche’s book of the same name, and reads "…one morning, [Zarathustra] rose with the dawn, stepped before the sun, and spoke to it thus: 'Great Star! What would your happiness be if you had not those for whom you shine!'"
Led by the trumpets, the grandeur is overwhelming. No wonder Elvis Presley used it to open his concerts.
Richard Strauss: An Alpine Symphony
Around the time that Strauss wrote An Alpine Symphony, he boasted that his powers of expression were such that he could, if necessary, describe a knife and fork in music. But cutlery wasn’t as great a source of inspiration for him as was Sunrise. Using a massive orchestra numbering around 137 players, the Alpine Symphony recreates an all-day mountain-climb in the Bavarian Alps, the listener setting out in the dark of the wee small hours before witnessing a spectacular musical sunrise—one of several in Strauss’ music, but perhaps the greatest. The orchestral colours are so rich that in 1981 Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic used this work for their first-ever test pressing of a CD.
Haydn: ‘Le Matin’ Symphony
The 28-year-old Haydn wrote his Symphony no. 6 in 1761, soon after joining the Esterhazy court, where there was a permanent chamber orchestra. Out to impress his new employer, he wrote a symphony whose slow opening was so dazzling that it immediately suggested a vibrant sunrise and the symphony as a whole came to be known as "Le Matin". And even though Haydn had no such programmatic intention, the remaining movements were then dubbed "noon" and "evening".
Edvard Grieg: Peer Gynt "Morning Mood"
Grieg’s music for Peer Gynt is so ubiquitous within popular culture that most people know it, even though hardly anyone will have seen the play by Ibsen for which it was written (it’s notoriously difficult to stage). Morning Mood is actually the Prelude to Act 4 of the play, and for all the Scandinavian travelogue associations its immense popularity has given it, it’s actually intended to evoke sun breaking, not on Norwegian fjords and mountains, but on the Sahara desert where Peer’s adventures have taken him. Grieg wrote, "This piece should be regarded as pure music." No one listened to him. It remains one of the most famous and loved depictions of the morning in music.
Ferde Grofé: Grand Canyon Suite–I Sunrise
Around the time of the Great Depression, American composer Ferde Grofé visited the Grand Canyon for a few days and came away with such strong impressions that he decided to capture the entirety of a day in the canyon in music. The sun rises slowly in the first section, and as the morning arrives, so too do the brilliant orchestral colours that one might expect from the man who orchestrated Rhapsody in Blue for George Gershwin. In Grofé’s memoirs, he admitted that many of his inspirations originally had nothing to do directly with the Grand Canyon itself. One theme, for instance, was actually a lullaby that he used to croon to his infant son, and another section was inspired by a storm over a Wisconsin lake.
Debussy: La Mer and Vaughan Williams: A London Symphony
Both works depict the course of an entire day, at sea in the case of Debussy, in London in the case of Vaughan Williams. But oddly enough, they begin almost identically, low down in the orchestra as the new day dawns. Similar chords, moods, melodies and inspiration. Oh dear! Vaughan Williams, whose work came nearly ten years after Debussy’s, was mortified at the similarity. Entirely unintentional, he was trying to depict a pea-souper of fog on the Thames, but somehow those first bars sound uncannily similar to Debussy’s De l'aube á midi sur la mer (From Dawn To Midday on the Sea). Proof positive that England and France share a common sea-border in the English Channel! Of Debussy’s work, Erik Satie famously quipped that he “particularly liked the bit at a quarter to 11.”
Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes–Four Sea Interludes
One of Benjamin Britten’s greatest orchestral triumphs, the four Sea Interludes were originally used during scene changes in his opera Peter Grimes, painting dramatic musical pictures of the sea at different times of the day. The first two Interludes depict dawn and Sunday morning respectively. During Dawn, the music captures a street by the sea where townspeople and fisherman begin their daily work, the high flutes and violins suggesting the cold, glassy greyness of the surroundings. Then in the second interlude, the tolling of Sunday morning church bells is captured by clashing pairs of French Horns as the morning proper gets underway.
Maurice Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé
The storyline for Ravel’s ballet masterpiece was based on the second-century Greek writer Longus' Daphnis and Chloë, set amongst the shepherds and shepherdesses of classical times. The second orchestral suite from it begins with the sunrise (Daybreak), surely one of the most graphic portrayals of nature in the orchestral literature, masterfully derived from a simple rising sequence. Then, in a further masterstroke, Ravel adds a wordless chorus, as daybreak reaches its ecstatic climax, all rippling horizons and glistening textures.
Modest Mussorgsky: Dawn Over the Moscow River
And so the curtain rises during the Prelude to Mussorgsky’s opera Khovanschina, and there we find ourselves, pre-dawn, in the city of Moscow at the end of the seventeenth century, the period which marked the rise of Peter the Great. Mussorgsky sketched it out in rough form but died before completing it. Rimsky-Korsakov then stepped in to fill in the gaps and orchestrate it himself, retaining the sound of cocks crowing and bells tolling and maintaining Mussorgsky’s inimitable operatic instincts which dramatise morning over the city in three-dimensional musical detail.
Frederick Delius: Florida Suite–Daybreak
To appreciate Delius’ most graphic depiction of mornings in music, you need to imagine him sitting on the verandah of his family’s orange plantation in Florida, looking out at the brilliant blue skies as the sun rises on a warm summer’s day. As he proved in so many of his other works, depicting these sorts of idyllic landscapes in music was Delius’ forte as a composer – so much so that this incredibly realistic and seductive depiction of a Florida morning was actually written while Delius was stuck in the middle of a cold and grey Leipzig. (Sorry to ruin that for you!)
Ottorino Respighi: The Fountains of Rome and Pines of Rome
Respighi’s two most famous tone poems both depict different locations in Rome at different times of the day. The first part of Fountains of Rome is inspired by the Fountain of Valle Giulia, depicting a pastoral landscape as droves of cattle pass and disappear in the fresh damp mists of a Roman dawn. A sudden loud and insistent blast of horns above the trills of the whole orchestra introduces the second part, The Triton Fountain in the Morning. The Pines of Rome does a similar thing, although this time dawn occurs in the final movement, The Pines of the Appian Way, as Respighi recalls past glories of the Roman Republic in a representation of dawn on the great military road leading into Rome.
Sibelius: Night Ride and Sunrise
Sibelius gave different accounts of the inspiration for his music to Night Ride and Sunrise. One, told to Karl Ekman, was that he wrote it following his first visit to the Colosseum in Rome in 1901. Another account, given in his later years to his secretary Santeri Levas, was that it emerged from a sledge-ride from Helsinki to Kerava that he took "at some time around the turn of the century", during which he saw a striking sunrise. Whatever its origins, listen out for the first rays of the rising sun, strikingly captured toward the end in the horns. This was the first complete piece of classical music ever aired on ABC Classic FM, on day one of broadcasting back in 1976.