LINK to a Youtube page of the TV show LEVERAGE. Please fast forward to 22:50. What song is Nathan playing?
Night on Bald Mountain, Mussorgsky.
Many thanks. I’ve heard this for years because it keeps cropping up in movies as all purpose ominous music.
Isn’t that the piece famously used in the “Halloween” segment of Fantasia?
(ETA: Picture. )
You betcha butt, it is.
Since this is about music, let’s move it to Cafe Society.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
The story of the work may be of some interest…
It’s from the opera “The Fair at Sorochinsk,” or “Sorochinsky Fair.” The original version of “The Night on the Bare Mountain” is a choral work, with made-up nonsense words, to evoke the chanting of a witches’ sabbath.
The opera is based on a play by Pushkin, which is based on a short story by Gogol.
One of the characters in the story is a little pig-faced demon who got kicked out of hell because he couldn’t scare anybody.
That’s the literary ancestor of the immense hellish Chernobog in the Disney animation! Talk about growing in the telling!
From the Disney Wiki, it’s supposed to be Walpurgisnacht, not Halloween.
Actually the earliest version of the music was a tone poem composed by Mussorgsky in 1867, some seven years before he began work on The Fair at Sorochinski. Mussorgsky was very pleased with it, but could not get it performed–his mentor, Balakirev, refused it. Mussorgsky later reused the music, rearranged as a choral piece, for the opera.
The Fair at Sorochinski, by the way, was incomplete when Mussorgsky died. Thus, he never heard any version of “Night on Bald Mountain” actually performed. The version used in Fantasia, and the one most familiar today, is a complete rescoring by Rimsky-Korsakov, done a few years after Mussorgsky’s death.
Mussorgsky’s original title for the tone poem version, back in 1867, was “St. John’s Eve on Bald Mountain.” So if one wants to be really picky, the music is about neither Halloween nor Walpurgisnacht, but the feast day of St. John (June 23/24 on the Julian calendar then in use in Russia). Either way, it’s always been intended to represent a witch’s sabbat.