Lately, I find myself waking each morning with a sense of dread. I wonder whether the world has grown even darker overnight. Another region in flames? More lives shattered? More aging men being thrown into a European war that nobody seems able, or willing, to stop? More civilians disappearing beneath the explosions of missiles, bombs, and drones, deployed in the name of security, retribution, or righteousness?
Then there’s my own homeland, where I see harmless immigrants being rounded up in harsh and humiliating ways. U.S. soldiers now stand in the streets, not to protect freedom, but to protect ICE as it carries out a hate-fueled agenda from the White House. Our military is being used to defend cruelty, not confront it. I see little but fear and resentment coming from our leaders. No humane vision. Just policies built on irrational biases and flawed and unsteady personalities.
All of this is difficult to face. I wonder what kind of mind is required to survive this time without going numb, or mad, until, perhaps, the tide turns and sanity emerges. This essay is a small, personal offering: a list of classical music pieces that have helped me remain emotionally intact amid escalating violence and the moral collapse of my country’s government.
This is not music that distracts from suffering, it helps me face it. It offers strength when mine begins to falter. Each piece reminds me there are better responses to cruelty than silence or surrender.
Arvo Pärt – Fratres
Fratres means “brothers” in Latin. The piece opens with a grim urgency, a desperate search, a sense of concern that borders on anxiety. This tension is suddenly broken by the entrance of the piano, which ushers in a brief passage of calm: slow, peaceful, and contemplative. Yet this respite is short-lived, as the music returns to its frantic urgency, only to yield again to reflection.
The violin’s increasingly shrill and intense voice may represent the very limits of psychological anguish, the unbearable pain of bearing witness to suffering. In the final section, the music resolves into a sorrow that feels transformed, not resigned, but wiser. It suggests a new perspective, perhaps even a quiet strength, in facing the presence of malevolence in the world.
Dmitri Shostakovich – String Quartet No. 8 in C minor
Composed in just three days in 1960, while Shostakovich was visiting Dresden, a city still devastated by Allied firebombing, this quartet was officially dedicated “to the victims of fascism and war.” It’s also a self-elegy: a cry from a composer under immense pressure to join the Soviet Communist Party. The DSCH motif (he signs his name musically in the piece) appears in every movement, as if he’s asserting: Stalin hasn’t killed me yet, I still exist, and I still refuse to be complicit.
This work is an example of radical, principled honesty. It offers no comfort, but, instead, uncompromising clarity. It doesn’t resist through hope but through a commitment to truth. It demands that we look directly into that which is wrong fearlessly and refuse to accept it or participate in it. That attitude becomes its form of resistance.
Henryk Górecki – Symphony No. 3 (“Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”)
This symphony expresses grief in a way that is solemn and dignified, possessing a hope that even those who cause suffering might still be reached through our shared humanity. The grief running through these works is unmistakable, but it never descends into despair. It feels like a kind of sacred grief, the kind that confirms your humanity is still intact, even as others may have silenced theirs, that the humanity you have retained is essential, somehow, for the world.
The sorrow conveyed is for the harm inflicted by those who readily justify acts of cruelty and do not comprehend why they harm others or the horrific consequences of their actions. Rather than succumbing to bitterness or hatred, the music offers a vision of justice shaped by compassion. The singing often feels ghostly or otherworldly, calmly acknowledging the presence of malevolence in the world without being consumed by it.
One movement is built around a message scrawled by a teenage girl on the wall of a Gestapo prison cell. Another draws on a 15th-century lament from the Virgin Mary, another on a folk song about a mother searching for her lost son. In these works, mourning becomes luminous, quietly affirming that sorrow can also be an expression of love.
J.S. Bach – Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D minor
Written after the death of his wife, this piece is just one violin, alone in its sorrow, but it grows into something monumental. The Chaconne is built on a repeating bass line, over which Bach spins variations that span aspects of our emotional spectrum: grief, awe, serenity. At its core is a sense of searching, for understanding, meaning, order, grace. It’s not just music to survive by, it insists that survival can be sacred.
Olivier Messiaen – Quartet for the End of Time
Messiaen composed this while imprisoned in a Nazi POW camp, using the only instruments available: clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. Inspired by the Book of Revelation, especially the scene in which the Angel of the Apocalypse raises his hand to heaven and declares that there shall be no more time, and “the mystery of God should be finished”, the piece suggests that something hidden, incomplete, or unfolding in divine purpose is about to reach its culmination. It is a statement of defiance in the darkest days of the war, under the bleakest conditions, with human hatred seemingly triumphant.
This is conveyed through the music’s ambiguity and spiritual disorientation: the confusion, sorrow, and aching suspension that arise when one briefly questions faith in God, in others, and in the moral arc of the world. Yet beneath this is something quietly unbreakable. This is spiritual survival as resistance, a refusal to let brutality define the soul’s boundaries.
Samuel Barber – Adagio for Strings
Made famous in the film Platoon, Barber’s Adagio is often called America’s unofficial anthem of mourning. Originally part of his 1936 string quartet, it’s been played after the deaths of FDR, JFK, and in the wake of 9/11. But its real power is personal. The long, arching phrases rise and fall, building slowly toward a climax that never quite resolves—then dissolving into silence. It’s a willful surrender to the emotional pain of loss. The piece doesn’t resist grief; it allows it to exist, unashamed. And that, too, is a form of strength.
It reminds me of Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3. After Macduff learns that his wife and children have been murdered, Malcolm tells him: “Dispute it like a man.” Macduff replies: “I shall do so; / But I must also feel it as a man.” The exchange flips the traditional notion of masculinity as emotional denial or unfeeling reaction. Macduff insists that feeling grief doesn’t contradict strength, it completes it. True personhood, not just manhood, means being fully open to mourning deeply AND seeking justice.
Ludwig van Beethoven – Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111
Beethoven’s final piano sonata. Dark realization to racing thoughts to serenity to racing thoughts again and anger. The first movement is stormy and defiant. But the second movement, the Arietta, begins as a gentle hymn and slowly opens into radiant variations. The sonata begins in struggle and ends in transcendence, not by denying pain, but by transforming it. It’s the arc from resistance to release. The Arietta doesn’t soothe as much as elevate.
Jean Sibelius – Finlandia
Composed as protest against Russian censorship, Finlandia became an anthem of Finnish resistance. It begins with brooding oppression and outrage, but rises into one of the most noble melodies ever written. It offers a different kind of strength, not from raw anguish or intimate grief, but from communal dignity. It conveys courage not through rage, but through quiet resolve.
Benjamin Britten – War Requiem
A devastating blend of sacred Latin mass and World War I poetry by Wilfred Owen. Britten, a pacifist and conscientious objector, doesn’t let us look away from war’s lies. The Latin prayers mourn the dead, Owen’s poems mourn the machinery that keeps causing death. War Requiem doesn’t console, it confronts and denounces. It mourns the fallen, but also accuses the systems that made them fall.
Caroline Shaw – To the Hands
Composed in 2016, this is a luminous meditation on displacement and shared humanity. Shaw responds to a 17th-century cantata about Christ’s wounded hands, but reframes those wounds in a modern context: refugees, borders, disconnection. One movement hauntingly recites statistics from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, turning raw data into lament. Another quotes Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus,” reasserting a call to radical welcome. It’s a plea for compassion rooted in truth.
Sofia Gubaidulina – In Croce
For cello and bayan (a Russian accordion), this piece is a confrontation with faith under extreme doubt and pressure. The title means “On the Cross,” and the instruments begin in opposite registers, then cross paths violently, ending in each other’s sonic spaces. It’s a musical crucifixion and resurrection, an insistence that the spirit can endure, even when stretched to its limits.
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These pieces don’t try to make us feel better. They offer no easy hope, no comforting illusions. Instead, they insist we stay awake to suffering, and through that awareness, they invite a deeper transformation: one that enables us not only to survive, but to stand against the causes of suffering. They call us to rise, to teach, to care, to write, to love. To still believe in joy.
To survive spiritually, we must allow ourselves to feel the full weight of others’ pain while striving to become incapable of causing pain ourselves, and striving to reach those who inflict suffering with a deep and unwavering humanity.
These works teach us not to run from, numb, or deny the emotions stirred by cruelty and the ignorance that feeds it. Those who inflict pain count on good people turning away, unable to bear witness. But we must feel grief honestly, because only by entering that grief can we reach the place where grief transforms into something incandescent and our humanity stands in defiance, and begins a moral, redemptive engagement with a broken but still redeemable world.
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