The Elegy Played by the Furies

Track eight left a man who could not be buried. Track nine begins at a grave — and this time the rite is performed properly.

The scene is Greek. A woman comes to her father's tomb to pour a libation. Her father was a king; her mother killed him. She pours, and she asks the dead man to hear her. Her name is Electra, and everything that happens after this is revenge.

That is the moment this melody was written to hold.

In January 1873 the Théâtre de l'Odéon in Paris staged Les Érinnyes, a two-act tragedy in verse by Leconte de Lisle, cut down from the first two plays of Aeschylus' Oresteia. Édouard Colonne conducted. The incidental music was by a thirty-year-old called Jules Massenet. And in the second act, over Electra at the tomb, he did something very simple: he handed the whole scene to a single cello.

Then look at what he put behind it. Strings, timpani, a tam-tam — and three trombones. Three. Massenet was explicit about the arithmetic; describing the scoring he later expanded for the 1876 revival, he said he had added three trombones "to represent the three Erinnyes." The Furies. The avenging spirits who give the play its name — and who, before the evening is out, will come not for the woman at the grave but for her brother, the moment he does the thing she came there to ask for.

So the softest music in the theatre is underwritten by the three voices of vengeance, sitting in the dark, waiting their turn. Some editions of the piece carry a movement title that says it outright: Élégie jouée par les Érinnyes. The elegy played by the Furies.

Which is quite a thing to find behind a tune most people have only ever half-heard in a hotel lobby.

Now look at the credit on the album, because — as this series keeps discovering — it is doing more work than it appears to: Massenet: Mélodie-Elégie.

Two names. Not a title and a subtitle. Two different names for the same piece of music, given in two different decades, and neither of them ever managed to see the other one off.

• • •

In 1866 Massenet was twenty-four, recently back from Rome, and writing the kind of thing a young composer wrote in order to eat: a set of ten short piano pieces for the drawing rooms of the middle classes. A Nocturne. A Marche. A Barcarolle. A Rigodon. Nothing you would cross a street for.

The publisher Girod took the lot for two hundred francs. It was, Massenet said, the first money he earned with his music.

Number five in the set is a short thing in E minor. It is not called the Élégie. It is not, in any real sense, called anything: it is called "Mélodie." Melody. Which is roughly the musical equivalent of naming your child Child.

And then nothing happened. The set appeared in 1867, was revised the following year, and sank precisely as ten salon miniatures by an unknown young composer were expected to sink.

Seven years after he wrote it, he went back into that set and pulled out number five.

That is what the Les Érinnyes Invocation is: the drawing-room Mélodie, rescored for solo cello and pointed at a grave. And this time people noticed. The piece got out of the theatre and into the concert hall — the Concerts Pasdeloup took it up, a larger revival followed at the Gaîté in 1876 — and it began, slowly, to become the thing it is now.

But it still was not finished. In 1875 the librettist Louis Gallet wrote words to it — "Ô doux printemps d'autrefois…", O sweet spring of long ago, green seasons, you have fled for ever — and Hartmann published it in Paris as a song for voice, cello and piano, under a new name: Élégie.

And here is the part that should make you smile. It never gave up the first name.

In 1913 Enrico Caruso went into a studio to record it. Beside him stood a violinist of twenty-two called Mischa Elman, taking the cello's line on a violin. The disc is still findable and still playable, and this is what Victor printed on the label:

Élégie – Mélodie (Song of Mourning).

Both names. Same hyphen. Reversed.

A hundred and thirteen years later, Deutsche Grammophon prints Mélodie-Elégie on track nine and hyphenates it the other way round. Two record companies, two centuries, the same refusal to choose. This piece has been carrying both of its names for so long that the punctuation has become part of the title.

There is something else on that 1913 label worth noticing, and it is the reason this track belongs on a violin record at all.

The Élégie is not the violin's piece. It has belonged to the cello since 1873 — Massenet rescored it for a cello, Hartmann published it with a cello, and cellists have owned it ever since. But the record that carried it into the front rooms of the English-speaking world had a violin on it. Elman's obbligato is right there, second in line, playing beside the melody rather than in it.

Garrett puts it more warmly than that. "Another piece which I adapted for the violin," he says, "a beautiful piece by Jules Massenet called Élégie, which starts immediately with this beautiful octave slide which is almost made for my instrument."

Speaking in German, he says the other half of it out loud. The Élégie was, he notes, "im Ursprung nicht für die Geige geschrieben" — not originally written for the violin — and yet the melody sounds to him, he says, "as though it had been written for the instrument."

Which is a fairly exact description of what has been happening to this tune for a hundred and sixty years. It was written for nothing in particular. It has since sounded, to very nearly everybody who picked it up, as though it had been written for them.

• • •

Which brings us to the choice. Say "Massenet" to a violinist and you get one answer, immediately, without a pause: the Méditation from Thaïs. It is the violin's Massenet. It is on every gala programme, every encore list, every compilation with the word "romance" on the cover. We watched Liya Petrova play it on 26 July 2026, in the Kirche Saanen, on the Menuhin Strad.

Garrett recorded it seventeen years ago. It is track two of Classic Romance, with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under Andrew Litton — the safe, beautiful, obvious Massenet, done properly, in 2009.

It is on no track of this album.

Handed twenty-five tracks to fill, he did not go back for it. Which is precisely what he did to Paganini one track earlier: he already had the caprices on a record of their own, so he reached past every one of them and took the page with no tricks on it at all. Twice in a row now the famous name has arrived without the famous piece — because he has already played the famous piece, and this album is not for repeating himself.

And what he picked up instead runs for one minute and fifty-four seconds: Arr. Garrett / van der Heijden for Violin, Piano, Guitar & Orchestra, with Julien Quentin at the keyboard, Orchestra the Prezent and John Haywood — the same scoring, and within four seconds the same length, as the Tchaikovsky waltz back on track five.

This series keeps asking one question: what actually carries music past the people who made it? Track six's answer was that immortality doesn't check the name on the door. Track eight's was that it takes no instructions from the person most concerned. Track nine's is quieter than either, and perhaps kinder.

Immortality doesn't care what you call it. It doesn't care who was supposed to play it, or which drawer it started in, or how little you were paid for it. A young man wrote a small sad tune in E minor, gave it no particular name, and sold it in a bundle of ten for two hundred francs. It has outlived him, outlived his publisher, outlived the play it was rescued for — and outlived both of the names it was given.

When the line begins on track nine, that is a woman at her father's grave, three trombones holding their breath behind her, and a piece of music that never did decide what it was called.

Immortal — David Garrett for Deutsche Grammophon — arrives 9 October 2026: 20 tracks in the standard edition, 25 in the deluxe, on digital, CD and vinyl, with pre-orders open now on Deutsche Grammophon. One track at a time, we keep counting the album in.

Sources & notes: the Dix pièces de genre, Op. 10 — composed 1866, published by Girod in 1867 and revised the following year — and No. 5’s original title “Mélodie” via IMSLP; the two hundred francs, and Massenet’s memory of them as the first money he earned with his music, from the Palazzetto Bru Zane media base, which also traces the Érinnyes Invocation back to the 1866 piano piece; the premiere of Les Érinnyes (Théâtre de l’Odéon, 6 January 1873, Édouard Colonne) and the 1876 revival at the Gaîté from the same source; Electra at Agamemnon’s tomb, and Massenet’s three trombones “to represent the three Erinnyes” — his description of the scoring he later expanded — from standard reference accounts; the first publication of the Élégie with Louis Gallet’s words (Hartmann, Paris, 1875) via IMSLP; the 1913 Caruso–Elman–Kahn Victrola disc and the wording on its label from the digitised copy at the Internet Archive; Classic Romance (2009) and the track 09 credit from david-garrett.com and Deutsche Grammophon. David Garrett’s remarks are transcribed by us from Deutsche Grammophon’s promotional clips for the album; no official transcript has been published. We have deliberately not asserted a composition date for the Mélodie, nor a motive for Massenet’s return to it in 1873. English and French reference works disagree about whether the piece began life as a piano piece or as theatre music; we have followed the French sources, which are closest to the manuscripts.