No more calls, we have a winner

"Spiegel im Spiegel" by Arvo Pärt is the most desolate, haunting, tragic, sad music in the multiverse. Ever.

I first heard it last year at the Washington Ballet's sort of annual 7X7, which is seven pieces each by a different choreographer built around a theme. Last year's theme was "Love" and "Spiegel im Spiegel" was used for a piece about the end of a relationship. I don't quite know what this year's theme was, but the piece - Fractures - using "And now I will read some Sylvia Plath and then I will stick my head in the oven. A drink? Oh, dear lord, yes." (which is the translation for "Spiegel im Spiegel" in my world) again had notes of betrayal and loss and abandonment and despair. It was beautiful and tragic and afterward I didn't want to applaud, I just wanted to sit there filled with melancholy, but the dancers could see me, so I applauded. Which is for the best, because they were very, very good.

Of course, the most depressing music with lyrics remains "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," just as Richard Jeni postulated. No one is questioning that.