A Día de los Muertos Playlist: Classical Works for Grief and Memory

OperaWire has published a classical playlist of seventeen compositions for Día de los Muertos, the holiday running October 31 to November 2 across Mexico, the United States and other parts of Latin America. The list spans Aztec-inspired percussion, a 2006 folk requiem and Puccini arias, all chosen to help listeners process grief.

The holiday itself blends indigenous and Spanish traditions honoring loved ones who have died, the piece notes. It also overlaps with All Souls' Day, the Roman Catholic observance popular in Europe that combines commemoration and prayer for the departed.

Why music, according to neuroscience?

The playlist's premise rests on science as much as sentiment. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, as cited by OperaWire, says listening to music during grief triggers the brain to release prolactin — a comforting hormone also present between mother and baby during nursing — along with analgesic opiates that relieve pain and lift mood. Music, in this account, acts as a catalyst: pain, love, joy and tears surface, and grief moves through the body.

What's on the list from Mexico and Latin America?

The Mexican repertoire anchors the selection:

• Carlos Chávez, "Xochipilli." Subtitled "An Imagined Aztec," the title means "little flower" in Nahuatl. Scored for four wind instruments and six percussionists, it draws on sounds of sacred Aztec rituals honoring family. It was originally titled Xochipilli-Macuilxochitl, after an Aztec deity.
• Gabriela Ortiz, "Altar de Muertos." A four-part string quartet whose movements, Ortiz says, describe "diverse moods, traditions and spiritual worlds that shape the broader Mexican concept of death, as well as my own personal vision of it" — spanning joy, despair, darkness and the cyclic rhythms of life.
• Silvestre Revueltas, "Noche de encantamiento" from "La noche de los Mayas." The score for the film adaptation, a Mayan tragedy set in the Yucatán jungles.
• Diana Syrse, "La Muerte Sonriente." A choral work with indigenous instruments capturing what Syrse calls "nostalgic happiness"; the choir is encouraged to sing and dance, so grief and joy coexist.
• Gabriela Lena Frank, "Requiem for a Magical America: El Día de los Muertos" (2006). A folk requiem in ten movements for large wind ensemble (a full brass-and-woodwind band), depicting village scenes. Frank's notes call the festival an example of "folk Catholicism," a blending of post-Conquest and pre-Conquest beliefs.
• Manuel Ponce, "Por ti mi Corazón." The second movement of Tres Canciones Populares, blending devotion with the pain of lost love.
• María Grever, "Cuando Vuelva a Tu Lado." The yearning ballad inspired the English adaptation "What a Diff'rence a Day Makes."
• Richard Meyer, "Dia de los Muertos." A string-orchestra piece by the music educator, written partly for young musicians.

Which opera standards made the cut?

Puccini appears three times. Mimì's Act Three farewell from La bohème, "Donde lieta usci," teaches that "loving is also saying goodbye" — farewell "senza rancor," without rancor. From Tosca, "E lucevan le stelle" gives us Cavaradossi an hour before execution, lamenting "E non ho amato mai tanto la vita!" — never has he loved life so much as while losing it. The homesick miners' chorus "Che faranno i vecchi miei" from La Fanciulla del West recalls far-off home and loved ones.

Mascagni's Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana — played, unusually, on an empty stage with no singers — lets audiences digest betrayal, agony and grief after Turiddu abandons Santuzza and she exposes his affair with Lola to Alfio.

Rounding out the list: Richard Strauss's "Morgen!" from Op. 27, No. 4, a wedding gift to his wife Pauline Strauss-de Ahna with poetry by John Henry Mackay, promising "tomorrow the sun will shine again"; Ernesto De Curtis's Italian art song "Non ti scordar di me" ("Don't forget me"), with lines like "there's always a nest in my heart for you"; and the "Pie Jesu" movements from the requiems of both Duruflé and Fauré, pleading for eternal rest.

The playlist amounts to a compact case for classical music as mourning technology. Anyone with names to remember between October 31 and November 2 now has a soundtrack.