Liszt Dance Macabre op40 Sheet Music, Program Notes and recordings

A Ghoulish and Brilliant Orchestral Waltz

When Camille Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre was first unleashed upon the Parisian public in 1875, it was met with a mixture of shock and morbid fascination. In an age that still prized a certain degree of decorum in the concert hall, this vividly programmatic and ghoulishly realistic depiction of rattling skeletons and a fiddling Grim Reaper was a step too far for many critics. Yet, the work’s brilliant orchestration, its wicked sense of humor, and its utterly infectious waltz theme proved irresistible. The symphonic poem, once a critical failure, quickly became Saint-Saëns’s most famous and popular orchestral work. One of its greatest champions was none other than Franz Liszt, the master of the macabre, who was so taken with the piece that he created a brilliant and famously difficult transcription for solo piano, helping to spread its fame across Europe.

The Medieval Legend and a French Poem

The "Danse Macabre" was a popular artistic allegory in the late Middle Ages, a reminder of the universality of death. Paintings and woodcuts would depict skeletons from all walks of life—from popes and kings to peasants and children—dancing together to their graves. Saint-Saëns based his work on a more modern and sardonic version of this legend, a poem by his contemporary Henri Cazalis. The poem describes Death appearing at midnight on Halloween, standing on a tombstone and tuning his fiddle to summon the dead for a ghostly dance, which lasts until the cock crows at dawn.

Musical Storytelling: A Narrative unfolds

Saint-Saëns’s work is a masterpiece of musical storytelling, following the narrative of the poem with vivid, almost cinematic, precision. The piece begins with a single, soft note played twelve times by the harp, representing the twelve strokes of the clock at midnight. A quiet, sinister plucking in the cellos and basses sets a spooky, graveyard scene. Then, the solo violin, representing Death’s fiddle, enters. Saint-Saëns uses a clever orchestral trick here called scordatura: the concertmaster is instructed to tune the top string of the violin down by a half-step, from an E to an E-flat. This creates a dissonant, open-string interval known as a tritone—an interval so unsettling that in the Middle Ages it was called the diabolus in musica, or "the devil in music. "

After Death "tunes up," he strikes up his main dance tune. The flute introduces the first, lilting waltz theme, a graceful but slightly eerie melody. This is followed by the second theme, a more forceful and dramatic melody introduced by the solo violin. These two themes alternate and are developed with increasing intensity, as more and more skeletons join the ghostly dance. The music builds to a wild, almost chaotic, frenzy.

At the height of the dance, Saint-Saëns introduces a new, more somber theme in the woodwinds. It is a distorted quotation of the "Dies Irae" ("Day of Wrath"), the ancient Gregorian chant from the Mass for the Dead. This melody was used by many Romantic composers, including Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt, as a musical symbol of death and judgment.

The dance resumes, building to one final, massive climax from the full orchestra. Suddenly, just as the frenzy is at its peak, a solo oboe sounds a simple, clear note, representing the crowing of the cock at the break of dawn. The spell is broken. The dancing skeletons scurry back to their graves, represented by a final, scurrying passage in the strings, and the work concludes with a few quiet, weary chords as the morning light returns.

Innovative Orchestration: The Xylophone

The most shocking and original sound in the entire work for its 1875 audience was Saint-Saëns’s brilliant use of the xylophone. This was the first time the instrument had been used in a major orchestral work. As the dance grows more frantic, the dry, brittle, and hollow sound of the xylophone is heard clattering above the orchestra, a perfect and wonderfully literal imitation of the sound of rattling skeletons. What was once condemned as a grotesque and hideous noise is now celebrated as a stroke of orchestrational genius.

A Halloween Classic

Danse Macabre has transcended its origins as a 19th-century French symphonic poem to become a universal symbol of the spooky and the macabre. Its vivid storytelling, its brilliant orchestral effects, and its irresistibly catchy waltz theme have made it a perennial favorite, especially around Halloween. It is a work of immense charm and wit, a perfect fusion of Gallic elegance and ghoulish fun that continues to thrill and delight audiences of all ages.