Baroque music, in particular, seems to satisfy the cravings of a deranged mind. And on the BBC’s Sherlock, Moriarty waltzes to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie on his iPod as he steals the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London. Alex Forrest, in Fatal Attraction, plots her revenge while listening to Madama Butterfly. Sociopath Lou Ford relaxes to Richard Strauss throughout The Killer Inside Me. Norman Bates practices the Moonlight sonata in Psycho II. On screen, orchestral melodies accompany the meditations of mad geniuses and pouting serial killers. When Emmit jumps from accidental to deliberate wrongdoing, chooses Darkness over Light-that’s the moment to break out the Beethoven.įor Hollywood, classical music has become the trademark of villains. The piano enters exactly when Emmit decides to cover up the kill, to conceal rather than confess his crime. Crucially, the Appassionata does not play during the Stussy brothers’ actual brawl (which is an act of passion rather than premeditated malice).

Violence (not the comic-book carnage of Marvel movies or horror-film gore but slow, sadistically intimate violence meant to make you squirm)īy evil, I am not talking about petty misdeeds or brainless bludgeoning but grand, virtuosic, biblical Evil-the archetypal iniquity that lurks in dark places and tempts innocents out of Eden.

Illicit wealth and power (Varga runs a secretive crime syndicate that coerces Emmit into joining a money-laundering scheme).

Continental sophistication (a villain quoting a Russian politician on a German composer).

All the jarring themes and associations are here: This speech strikes every dissonant chord afflicting classical music’s image in the current cultural psyche.

Better to beat the person unmercifully over the head.’ ” It affects one’s nerves and makes one want to say kind, stupid things and stroke the heads of those who-living in such a foul hell-can create such beauty. 23 ? … He said, ‘I know nothing that is greater than the Appassionata. But Varga poses a question: “Do you know what Lenin said about Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. The camera crawls down a shadowy hall, descending into a subterranean lair. Then a piano starts to play … As the familiar notes of a Beethoven sonata are heard, there’s a cut to darkness. Terror flushes across Emmit’s face before he slowly reaches for his phone. In the latest season of Fargo, after accidentally killing his deadbeat brother, Minnesota businessman Emmit Stussy gazes in dejection at the bloody corpse. Anthony Hopkins's Hannibal Lecter revels in his latest slaughter to the sounds of Bach's Goldberg Variations.

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