Danse Macabre
(The Dance of Death)
Artist: Unknown
16th Century Germany
Danse Macabre (first performed in 1875) is the name of opus 40 by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns. (Click the artwork above to hear in an updated heavy metal guitar version by Joe Parrish-James of Bedfordshire.)
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. His skeletons dance for him until the first break of dawn, when they must return to their graves until the next year.
The piece opens with a harp playing a single note, D, twelve times to signify the clock striking midnight . . . and ends in soulful pianissimo phrases, representing the dawn breaking and skeletons returning to their graves. We love the use of the xylophone in the orchestral version to imitate the sounds of rattling bones. Click the kitty below to hear the more conservative orchestral Danse.
Zygmunt Nitkiewicz, Conductor
The Marcin Jozef Zebrowski Music School
Czestochowa, Poland (2013)
The Marcin Jozef Zebrowski Music School
Czestochowa, Poland (2013)
