On November 13th, 1940, Walt Disney Productions premiered one of their most important and artistic films of all time: “Fantasia.” The animated masterpiece introduced classical music to generations of audiences, especially the imaginative minds of children.
Disney wanted the film to be “music you hear, and pictures you see.” He worked with the Philadelphia Orchestra and conductor Leopold Stokowski, who helped select pieces by Bach, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Beethoven, Schubert, and others.
“The beauty and inspiration of music must not be restricted to a privileged few but made available to every man, woman, and child,” Stokowski said of the project. “That is why great music associated with motion pictures is so important, because motion pictures reach millions all over the world.”
Today, on the 85th anniversary of “Fantasia,” we’re taking a look a the most dramatic piece of the entire movie: “Night on Bald Mountain” by Modest Mussorgsky.
Composed in 1867, the piece was written as a tone poem — a piece of music that depicts a narrative theme, often inspired by literature. “Night on Bald Mountain” is one of the first Russian tone poems, written to sonically represent a witches’ sabbath that occurs on St. John’s Eve. Of course, Disney and his animators perfectly captured the scenario.
Any child who has ever seen “Fantasia” can vividly recall the scene.
“The Mussorgsky segment, inspired by a Slavonic legend about evil spirits gathering on Walpurgis Night, has become a scary Halloween standby through its inclusion in Disney anthologies, and the towering demon never fails to frighten,” Your Classical states. “He was a hallmark creation of the animator Vladimir Tytla, a master at rendering the human form — here, as it emerges from the top of a mountain, with wicked horns and bat-like wings.”
The Fantasia scene opens on an ominous mountain looming over a town, mimicking the piece’s chromatic-laced triplets in the violins. It slowly zooms in as the low brass sets a pulse with alternating quarter notes. Finally, we see Chernobog, the evil Slavic deity, sitting atop the peak. He spreads his wings in tandem with the first notes of the brooding, low brass melody.
As brilliant as Mussorgsky’s writing was, he died before “Night on Bald Mountain” could ever be fully realized. Stokowski arranged the piece based on an earlier arrangement by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, though he based the orchestration on Mussorgsky’s original writing.
“There is much more to the eerie content of this tone poem than just Mussorgsky’s characteristically vivid tone-painting of craggy peak at night in bad weather,” Michael Clive writes for the Utah Symphony. “He larded his score with bone-chilling elements, including the sinister roll of the bass drum and scary descending phrases that slither like serpents.”
In the end, Chernobog casts all his minions back to hell before he himself is dispelled by the tolling of a church bell, leading to the finale of “Fantasia”: Schubert’s “Ave Maria.”
“Fantasia” was a marvel of its time, and although technology has advanced significantly, its marriage of music and animation stands as a testament to the power of mixing media.
