Taboo Music from the television drama (2017)

Taboo is a dark tale of love and death, treachery and revenge with supernatural undertones, set in pre-Victorian London. Max Richter explains, The score comes directly out of the trajectory of the central character: an avenging dark angel, as unstoppable as fate itself. The show plays as a very dark fairy tale. These aspects (the hallucinatory environment, and the irresistible force of Mr Delaney) are embodied by the two main themes. The first theme is a haunted waltz base on a falling chromatic line called a lament bass. For Taboo I have made a deceptively sweet-sounding version, so that we are lulled into a false sense of security. The second theme is that of our protagonist, Mr Delaney. His inexorable progress is evoked by the perpetual-motion ostinato figures in the orchestra, which pivot around a bass line that moves between the interval of a tritone called Diabolus in musica, because of its destabilising effect on harmony. Mr Delaney is some sort of Diabolus himself. (bron: Deutsche Grammophon)