- Saint-Saëns composed this tone poem in 1874. The piece was originally a song to a poem by Henri Cazalis, which depicted Death as a dance-fiddler.1 Read the poem here.
- The Dance of Death had been a literary and artistic motif since the Middle Ages, with paintings depicting a personified Death as a skeleton leading the living to their graves, or leading skeletons in a dance.2
- There are several famous art examples of the Dance of Death in which skeletons are playing musical instruments. For example, Death plays a drum, a violin, and other instruments in some of the pages from Hans Holbein’s Totentanz.3
- Saint-Saëns quotes the Dies irae in this piece, something Franz Liszt also did in his own Danse Macabre.4 So did Berlioz in the “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath” from the Symphonie fantastique.5
- On June 3, 1879, the London Daily News offered this bad review of Danse Macabre (which also points out several of the effects to listen for in this piece):
“In his Danse Macabre, Saint-Saëns has succeeded in producing effects of the most horrible, hideous and disgusting sort. Among the special instruments in the score was the xylophone, the effect of which inevitably suggested (as doubtless intended) the clattering of the bones of skeletons. Another, and scarcely less hideous device, was the tuning of the first string of the solo violin half a note lower than usual, and the reiteration of the imperfect fifth many times in succession. The piece is one of the many signs of the intense and coarse realism that is entering into much of the musical composition (so-called) of the day. Manufacture would be the more proper term; and, in some cases, very clumsy manufacture.”’
London Daily News (June 3, 1879)6
- Saint-Saëns parodied this work in his Carnival of the Animals. In Danse Macabre he uses a xylophone to depict rattling bones, and then he does the same for dinosaur bones in the Fosils movement of Carnival.7
Sources
- Malcolm Boyd, “Dance of death,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed January 16, 2020, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000007153.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Betsy Schwarm, “Symphony fantastique, Op. 14,” Encyclopædia Britannica (November 6, 2016), accessed January 16, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Symphonie-fantastique-Op-14.
- Nicholas Slominsky, ed., The Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven’s Time (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 147.
- Daniel M. Fallon, Sabina Teller Ratner, and James Harding, “Saint-Saëns, (Charles) Camille,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed January 16, 2020, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000024335.
Cut IDs
23093