The day is done, the sun has set. Imagine it sinking majestically in the sky, as depicted by Richard Strauss at the end of his vivid Alpine Symphony. Perhaps the end of daylight gives rise to a languid mood, evoked nowhere better than in Delius’s Songs of Sunset, or maybe it is a time of revelry, talk and merry-making, of dancing and drinking, as in Johann Strauss II’s fizzing Die Fledermaus. Let’s move quickly through the wakefulness of evening and head to later on, when daytime is a distant memory. Now, the moon and the stars are out; the owls and the bats have woken up. Darkness has settled in. The night has arrived.
And with it, a wealth of nocturnal music, written by composers throughout the centuries and across countries, which we’ll explore here in a musical journey through the night. It’s a time when not only the world looks different – a moonlit place of shadows – but somehow, we ourselves are also different, untethered from the safety of daylight. We enter altered states of consciousness, slipping into sleep and entering parallel universes in
