The magnificent melody of Saint-Saëns’s danse macabre enchants classical music fans with its beauty. But it is above all its message and moral that captivate! Perhaps you’re wondering what this music means, and which are the key instruments in this composition?
Welcome to our online store! Death and everything connected with it is our area of expertise. Today, we’re delighted to introduce you to one of the great classics of music history: Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre.
In this article, we’ll explore together the meaning of this extraordinary melody. How does the composer manage to make skeletons dance and the devil speak through musical instruments? And above all, what’s the moral of this story, and how can we make the most of it? Let’s start right after listening to the piece of music in question: 🔥THE MOST POPULAR PRODUCTS🔥
Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns
Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was a French music composer of the second half of the 19th century. Saint-Saëns was considered a composer deeply rooted in tradition. His work is more in keeping with the classical and romantic music that preceded him, and less with the impressionism and modern classical music that dominated the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is often considered one of the greatest French composers of all time.
Danse macabre is one of several symphonic poems Saint-Saëns composed in the 1870s, all inspired in part by examples by Franz Liszt (whose own Totentanz dates from 1849) and exploring both Liszt’s concept of thematic transformation and innovative instrumentation.
Saint-Saëns developed the song as a sound poem in 1874, giving much of the vocal part to a solo violin, and using the xylophone to represent clashing skeletal bones. Towards the middle, he also introduces Dies irae, a Gregorian theme taken from the Requiem Mass, which composers often use to evoke scenes of death and judgment.
Here’s what to remember about this music:
- Composed in 1874
- Length: about 8 minutes
- Orchestration: piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals, triangle, xylophone), harp and strings
- First performance by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra on August 25, 1922
Camille Saint-Saëns was a man of many facets. A scholar and writer with varied interests, he was also a great traveler, a versatile musician excelling as keyboardist, composer, conductor, teacher and publisher. He lived in contempt for the works of Debussy and Stravinsky (among others) and is often considered a conservative, even reactionary, composer. However, in the early and middle years of his career, Saint-Saëns was a fervent advocate of the more progressive wing of contemporary music (notably Schumann, Wagner and Liszt), and his own music was often highly original in form and orchestration.
Between his thirties and mid-forties, Saint-Saëns wrote four symphonic poems. The third, written in 1874, has become the most famous. It is, of course, the “Danse Macabre” we’re talking about today. The composer worked from a real poem by Henri Cazalis.
Here is the text, translated from English as “Scordatura”:
Zig, zig, zig, death in cadence,
Striking a grave with his heel,
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 lime trees.
In the darkness, white skeletons pass,
Running and jumping in their shrouds.
Zig, zig, zig, everyone searches.
We hear the dancers’ bones crack.
But hist! suddenly, they’ve left the circle,
They push, they fly, the rooster has crowed.
The composer has masterfully captured the creaking of the bones and the diabolical malice of the poem. The “Danse macabre” was initially rejected by the public as too dark and demonic. 😈 But time has shown this criticism to be laughable. Danse macabre has become the composer’s most performed work.
Signification of the “Danse Macabre”
Music
In Saint-Saëns’s evocative world, the solo violin represents the devil playing the violin for the dance. In a subtle musical joke, the violin’s top string is intentionally tuned a semitone lower, forming a tritone, also known as the “devil’s interval”. In the soloist’s challenge, this means adjusting all the notes on this string. So, in our performance today, our solo violin is the “devil of the day”! 👹
The dance begins at the stroke of midnight (perhaps on Halloween) in a cemetery. Not to be confused with the Day of the Dead. Listen for the twelve strokes of the distant bell echoing softly with the harp right from the start. The skeletal dancers are represented by the fragile, bony sounds of the xylophone, which respond to the violin theme. Soon, the skeletons emerge from their tombs and begin to dance to the supernatural tune of the devil. The skeletal dancers are represented by the fragile, bony sounds of the xylophone.
A solo flute takes the lead in the melody, and the first and second themes are taken up by different sections of the orchestra. The music becomes increasingly energetic as each section takes up the different themes. The woodwinds quote the Dies Irae (a traditional requiem melody about the “Day of Wrath” that is often used in musical representations of “Death”), played lightly by the woodwinds and harp for about two and a half minutes in a major key. They have fun dancing, which adds to the premonitory character of the piece. 💃
The orchestra comes together to reach the work’s climax, while the solo violin constantly plays slightly above to keep the melody moving. There is a brief, abrupt break in texture before it begins to rebuild. The coda section represents dawn breaking, with the oboe imitating the crowing of a rooster. The skeletons quickly return to their graves… until next year!
The devil does his work, and the frenetic dance accelerates until it stops abruptly, giving way to the crowing of the rooster (listen to the oboe). The night draws to a close, dawn breaks and all sink into the depths to escape the sunlight, while the devil sadly completes his melody and flees.
Legend of the Dance of Death
According to legend, Death appears at midnight on Halloween and calls the dead to dance for her while she plays the fiddle. She is represented by Saint-Saëns’s out-of-tune solo violin. The story follows the skeletons dancing until dawn, when the graves fill up again for another year. This quintessential Halloween story is told around the world, and Saint-Saëns’ work is a musical representation of it.
Saint-Saëns used the xylophone melody from Danse Macabre as a parody in his later work, Carnival of the Animals, whose theme is repeated in the “Fossils” movement. The music of the Danse Macabre evokes darkness, skeletons, wind, graves and much more, making it a sumptuous feast for Halloween!
It is considered a “sound poem”, telling a story or fable through the music itself. Different instruments represent different characters: the violin is the devil, the oboe is a crow, the xylophone is a rattling bone. Danse Macabre is based on an ancient medieval allegory of the “dance of death”, a dance that everyone knew, as everyone had to die one day.
Morality of the Danse Macabre
An emperor, a beggar, a monk, a mother, a musician… No matter what position we occupy in life, the dance of death brings us all together. Can we, as living beings, dance with the same unbridled frenzy as those white skeletons crossing the darkness? Life is fragile, its earthly glories vain… ☠️
With vivacity and verve, the author depicts the fantastic tale of Death’s frenzied dance. The musical material of Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre proved ideal for multiple pianistic treatment, and to date we have created no less than seven different compositions from the original score. In all these interpretations, we exploit the capabilities of the piano, illustrating the atmosphere with swirling harmonic figurations and the rattling of bones with percussive rhythms and effects.
In this story, skeletons accompany living human beings to their graves in a lively waltz. Kings, knights and commoners join them as a reminder that, whatever one’s status, wealth or achievements in life, death comes for all. At a time when epidemics of the Black Death and the incessant battles between France and England during the Hundred Years’ War claimed thousands of lives, macabre images like the Dance of Death were a way of coping with the ever-present prospect of mortality. 💀 🔥THE MOST POPULAR PRODUCTS🔥
