Liszt - Totentanz, S126i (Steven Mayer)

Liszt expressed a fascination with Death from an early age (“In my early youth, I often went to sleep hoping not to awake again here below“ he would write to Olga von Meyendorff) and in the 1830s he would frequent hospitals, gambling casinos and asylums, even going down into the prison dungeons in order to see those condemned to die—this was reflected in multiple works of his, La lugubre gondola, Pensée des morts, and Totentanz (Dance of the Dead) included, where the grotesquely macabre aspect of something