SINCE Shakespeare gave us singing grave-diggers in "Hamlet," since Dickens gave us the asthmatic Mr. Omer in "David Copperfield," since the very advent of the pine box, undertakers have been regarded with dread.
"When Brahms is feeling really frisky," one waggish contemporary said, "he sings 'The Grave Is My Joy.' " In some strange way, Brahms even feared the grave itself would be forgotten, the past buried in oblivion; his own failures he took as evidence of greater failures yet to come.
The mezzo-soprano Patricia Bardon was not the most earthy-voiced Erda, but she sang with grave beauty.
You and I could be standing over Shakespeare's grave, singing his praises, and it doesn't mean a thing.
"Die Krahe" ("The Crow") is perhaps the creepiest song in "Winterreise," and Mr. Goerne plays up its macabre imagery to full advantage, singing it with grave deliberateness.
A newly cast white concrete tomb, painfully bright in the midday sun, slowly disappears beneath a crowd of mourners, and the women begin singing spirituals: "No Grave Can Hold My Body Down".
I cherish the memory of my afternoon in Auburn, visiting the Seward House, making a pilgrimage to Harriet Tubman's home, then visiting her grave and singing "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" to a silent audience.
It's also notable that a surprising number of the landmark pieces of TV drama - Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; One Foot In The Grave; The Singing Detective and Inspector Morse - have centered on morose middle-aged men.
(where John Updike grew up), Ms. Marvel recalled that the first time she was allowed to leave her yard as a child she visited a cemetery down her street and soon began lying atop graves "and singing for the people underneath".
His favourite song, Vieni o Maggio, written by anarchist Pietro Gori, was sung over his grave.
