"Hades" Symphonic Poem – Mario Totaro

FORM Orchestra conducted by Alessandro Cadario.

I – (♩ = 50) – (♩ = 72) – (♩ = 50) – (♩ = 72) – (♩ = 50) – (♩ = 84) – (♩ = 50) – (♩ = 84) – (♩ = 50) – (♩ = 40): 0:00

Totaro’s “Hades” was composed in 2008, being later revised in 2018 reducing the density of the orchestration. It was premiered by the Marchigiana Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Alessandro Cadario.

The work is heavily inspired by Virgil’s “Aenead”, specifically by Book VI, in which Aeneas, with the guidance of the Cumaean Sibyl, descends into the underworld: Hades. The score is preceded by the following fragment of that book, which introduces the long episode of Aeneas’ descent into Hades.

“You gods, who hold the domain of spirits!
You voiceless shades!
You, Chaos, and you, Phlegethon, you broad, hushed tracks of night!
Suffer me to tell what I have heard;
suffer me of your grace to unfold secrets buried in the depths and darkness of the earth!”

The work opens with a grave roll of timpani and bass drum, performed pianissimo in crescendo and diminuendo like a breath coming from the subsoil. It evokes the edge of the infernal abyss, overlooked by Aeneas and the Sibyl before starting the descent into the darkness, along a path littered with immaterial and frightening beings. These monstrous beings are represented with a disturbing accumulation of mass and volume. The itinerary then continues with the crossing of the Fields of Mourning, the abode of “those whom a painful love consumed with cruel yearning”, among these Queen Dido, loved and abandoned by Aeneas, whose soul emerges at the plaintive oboe. The work concludes with the landing at the Elysian Fields, the place of “happy souls”, in an atmosphere illuminated by the reverberant sounds produced by the harp, bells and strings in col legno refreshed by the sweet breeze of Zephyrus blowing between an aerial mixture of horns, flutes and clarinets.

Picture: “Aeneas and a Sibyl in the Underworld” (c1600 ) by the Flemish painter Jan Brueghel the Elder.

Source: https://bit.ly/3tw09iU

Unfortunately the score is not freely available.

source