Rattling Bones at Midnight with Saint-Saëns's Danse macabre
The Best Moments
Danse macabre, Op. 40
I'm Camille Saint-Saëns, and here I've gathered the best moments of my Danse macabre. You'll notice the wild dance suddenly break off when an oboe imitates the cockerel's crow at dawn and sends the dead back to their graves, a small moment well worth waiting for. On this site my fellow composers and I also teach you to recognize our pieces whenever they are played, so why not test yourself in the Trainer right away?
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Midnight Strikes, Nobody Hits Snooze
I open the piece with a harp playing one note, a D, twelve times, which is simply a clock telling you it's midnight and you really shouldn't be out. Then the solo violin creeps in with its top string tuned down to E♭, so it sounds slightly wrong on purpose, as if Death were tuning his fiddle before he calls the dead up out of their graves.
Skeletons With Percussion
I give the middle of the piece to the dancing dead, and the xylophone clatters away because that is exactly what bones sound like when they knock together. Right in the middle the woodwinds slip in the old Dies irae plainsong, but I put it in a major key, which makes that solemn tune sound oddly cheerful, and I think it's the funniest moment in the piece.
Cock-a-Doodle-Doom
I end the night the way every good ghost party ends, with a rooster spoiling the fun, and it's an oboe that plays his crow. The dead hurry back to their graves as dawn comes, and although the critics at the premiere in 1875 grumbled about the screeching violin and that xylophone, people have loved the piece ever since.
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I hope you enjoyed learning about the best moments of Danse macabre as much as I enjoyed telling you about them. When I look back on the piece now, what strikes me is how a song I began in 1872 grew into something far bigger than I first imagined. It was not welcomed warmly at the premiere in 1875, and yet the audience that once frowned at that screeching violin and rattling xylophone eventually came to love them. I find that rather comforting, because it reminds me that a new sound sometimes needs a little time before people are ready for it. Violinists even stopped minding the odd tuning, and that tells you how completely the piece won them over. There is still a good deal more to discover in Danse macabre. You could follow how it travelled from the orchestra to the piano, in the hands of Franz Liszt and later Vladimir Horowitz, or listen for the way I brought the bone-rattling xylophone back in The Carnival of the Animals. You might also enjoy hearing how the medieval idea of a dance of death found its way into film, ballet and even a television tune. If any of that makes you curious, please click on the links provided and keep exploring Danse macabre. Then put the music on once more near midnight, and see whether you hear something new before the cockerel crows.
Recording: Louis Fourestier, Public domain