Unsung Classical Music in Literature and other Contexts

[eschiss1]

Not counting examples from when the composers were still sung (e.g. books, fiction and nonfiction, mentioning Raff when he was alive and famous.) Thinking more of examples of, for instance, - well, this.

SF and Fantasy author Alan Dean Foster, who may be known to fans of Havergal Brian for having written an essay on the symphony no.4 Das Siegeslied that is (or was?) posted at the Brian Society site, has also at least once had a character mention offhandedly, if memory serves, Joly Braga Santos in one of his novels (and the rather better-known - to us - Vaughan Williams in another.)

(But then, his musical tastes are very broad and deep, in pop and in classical.) Star Trek had fictional examples with fictional names (and some actual Brahms), true, and the latest Sherlock Holmes movie went for music which, while sung, I was still not familiar enough with (some Schubert lieder- I know some Medtner lieder better) -

and let's not mention what "An Education" did to Elgar (playing Elgar's 3rd in the 1970s, was it? Ok, I suppose I just did mention it... that was meant to be well-known music and wasn't even done right...)

The Foster is, anyway, one example of the sort-of-thing I mean...? Probably not too very many examples of unsung music in the arts, anycase, but I may be much mistaken here.

[Jimfin]

Agatha Christie mentions 'The Immortal Hour' in one of her books and even quotes it, but again, I guess it was pretty 'sung' at the time, or had been recently.
     I don't think I read enough literature of a sufficiently recent date for most of the composers on this site to be mentioned. I did once start writing a novel where one of the characters was a Havergal Brian fan, but it never got very far...

[alberto]

As Eric mentions also the movies, one could list various examples of "relatively" unsung music employed.
For instance "Chariots of Fire" used Parry's Jerusalem and if I remember right a couple of Gilbert & Sullivan.
In "The talented Mr. Ripley" (director A.Minghella) the protagonist even sang a snippet from "the Gondoliers" : not everyone's in the world stuff .
The only really "unsung" classical music in movie I remember is some Mascagni: in "Raging Bull" (director Martin Scorsese) there were the "Barcarola" from "Silvano" and the Intermezzo from "Guglielmo Ratcliff" (there was also the -very known-Intemezzo from "Cavalleria rusticana").
For instance "La mamma morta" from Giordano's Andrea Chenier (movie: Philadelphia) I would rate rather sung.
Less so "Along an overgrown path" by Janacek in "Unbearable lightness of being" (director Milos Forman).

[JimL]

IIRC, I believe I remember being rather excited to hear the opening bars of de Beriot's 8th VC at some point during a movie I saw some years back.  I think it was The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet.  It was off the MP CD, too, I think.

[Jimfin]

This is very vague, but years and years ago (maybe around 1988) I was watching some kind of documentary on TV and the closing music was the second movement of Tippett's second symphony. I was fairly incredulous. And Haruki Murakami's latest novel 1Q84 features Janacek's Sinfonietta very prominently (not really unsung, but for the general public still a name that has people reaching for the dictionary, compared to Beethoven or Brahms). Dowland also gets a mention

[eschiss1]

Well, where Dowland is concerned, there's the title of "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said" by Philip K. Dick (though I'm now no longer sure if that's a reference to Dowland or someone better-known influenced by Dowland- ah well- and when that was written I think Dowland was having a minor resurgence. ... Still.)