Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre: Death Plays the Violin
Midnight, a mistuned violin and a xylophone of bones: the story of Saint-Saëns's Danse macabre and its roots in the imagery of the late Middle Ages.
As midnight strikes, a harp sounds twelve notes. Then a solo violin strikes up a shrill dance, and from every grave rise skeletons who dance until dawn. This is the scene described by Camille Saint-Saëns's Danse macabre, Op. 40, a symphonic poem composed in 1874 and first performed in Paris in January 1875. The piece, initially received with some puzzlement, soon became one of the most popular French orchestral works.
From Cazalis's Poem to the Symphonic Poem
Saint-Saëns started from a poem by Henri Cazalis, a physician and poet who also published under the pseudonym Jean Lahor. In 1872 the composer had set it as a mélodie for voice and piano. Two years later he drew from it a purely orchestral version that follows the story without the need for words: Death, beating time on a tombstone, plays the violin and summons the dead.
Cazalis's poem dwells on an ancient theme, that of equality before death. In the nocturnal dance kings and peasants, ladies and beggars mingle, with no more distinctions of rank. The same idea had inspired for centuries the dances of death painted in the cemeteries and churches of Europe. The subject, in other words, was familiar to French audiences long before Saint-Saëns turned it into music.
The Devil's Violin and the Xylophone
The most famous invention in the score is the tuning of the solo violin. Saint-Saëns prescribes that the highest string, the E, be lowered by a semitone to E flat. Played open together with the A string, the two notes form a tritone, the interval that theoretical tradition associated with the diabolical. Death's fiddler therefore plays, quite literally, an altered instrument.
To depict the rattling of bones, Saint-Saëns brought the xylophone into the orchestra, at the time an instrument little used in symphonic music. He would take it up again, with ironic intent, in the Fossils movement of The Carnival of the Animals in 1886, quoting the very theme of the Danse macabre. Later in the score the Gregorian melody of the Dies irae, the medieval sequence on the Last Judgement, also appears in distorted form.
Dawn and the Tradition of the Dance of Death
The dance builds to a frenzied paroxysm, then breaks off abruptly. An oboe imitates the crowing of the cock announcing dawn, and the dead hurry back into their graves. The solo violin sketches a last melancholy phrase, and the music dies away. This sudden return to calm, after so much noise, produces an almost comic effect, but also a melancholy one, as if the night of the dead had been only a dream vanishing in the light.
The dance of death as an artistic subject was born in the late Middle Ages. One of the most famous was painted in 1424-1425 in the cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris, now lost, and in 1538 Hans Holbein the Younger's series of woodcuts on the images of death was published in Lyon. In many of these depictions a skeleton plays an instrument and leads the line of the living.
Saint-Saëns brought that imagery back into the concert hall, replacing the moral sermon with irony and Romantic theatricality. Franz Liszt made a piano transcription of it in 1876, confirming the fascination the score immediately held for contemporaries. In the twentieth century the piece appeared in many films, cartoons and television programmes, and for many people it has become the very sound of Halloween night.