Danse Macabre (Saint-Saëns)

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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 crack—

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 true potential 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.

External links

[Danse Macabre Teaching ideas] from Music ED Resources]
[MP3 file of Danse Macabre]

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