Danse Macabre (Saint-Saëns)
Danse Macabre (first performed in
1874) is the name of
opus 40 by
French composer
Camille Saint-Saëns.
The composition is based upon a poem by
Henri Cazalis, on an old
French superstition:
Zig, zig, zig, Death in a cadence,Striking with his heel a tomb,Death at midnight plays a dance-tune,Zig, zig, zig, on his violin.The winter wind blows and the night is dark;Moans are heard in the linden trees.Through the gloom, white skeletons pass,Running and leaping in their shrouds.Zig, zig, zig, each one is frisking,The bones of the dancers are heard to crackâ€"But hist! of a sudden they quit the round,They push forward, they fly; the cock has crowed.According to the ancient superstition, "
Death" appears at
midnight every year on
Halloween. Death has the power to call forth the
dead from their
graves to
dance for him while he plays his
fiddle (represented by a solo violin with its E-string tuned to an E-flat in an example of
scordatura tuning). His
skeletons dance for him until the first break of
dawn, when they must return to their graves until the next year.
The piece makes particular use of the
xylophone in a particular theme to imitate the sounds of rattling
bones. Saint-Saëns uses a similar
motif in the
Fossils part of his
Carnival of the Animals.
When
Danse Macabre first premiered, it was not received well. Audiences were quite unsettled by the disturbing, yet innovative, sounds that Saint-Saëns elicited. Shortly after the
premiere, it was transcribed into a
piano arrangement by
Franz Liszt, a good friend of Saint-Saëns, who recognized the genius of
Danse Macabre and greeted it with much enthusiasm. It was again later transcribed into a popular piano arrangement by
virtuoso pianist
Vladimir Horowitz.
Danse Macabre has been used as background music in horror
television series such as
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (in the mostly
dialogue-free
Hush), and was used as the haunting theme tune to the
British series
Jonathan Creek. The
Dutch amusement park Efteling uses it as the background theme for their
haunted house ride.
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Danse Macabre Teaching ideas from Music ED Resources
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MP3 file of Danse Macabre
