Camille Saint-Saëns was many things. A scholar and writer of wide-ranging interests and an equally wide-ranging traveler, he was also a multifaceted musician who excelled as a keyboardist, composer, conductor, teacher, and editor. He lived to scorn the work of Debussy and Stravinsky (among others) and is often regarded as a conservative—if not reactionary—composer. But in the early and middle years of his career, Saint-Saëns championed the most progressive wing of contemporary music, and his own music was often highly original in form and orchestration.

Danse macabre is a case in point. It is one of four tone poems Saint-Saëns composed in the 1870s, all inspired to some degree by Franz Liszt (whose own Totentanz, or “dance of death,” dates from 1849) and exploring both his concept of thematic transformation and novel instrumentation. Saint-Saëns set a number of poems by Henri Cazalis (1840–1909) and wrote a sung version of Danse macabre in 1872 based on the poet’s “Égalité, fraternité….” The text merges the legend of Death fiddling on Halloween as skeletons dance on their graves with the late-Medieval Dance of Death, in which all, king to peasant, are led dancing to the grave. 

Saint-Saëns expanded the song into a tone poem in 1874, giving much of the vocal part to a solo violin and using xylophone (then almost exclusively a folk instrument) to depict the rattling skeleton bones. The obbligato violin makes much use of the tritone, the diminished-fifth interval known to earlier musicians as the diabolus in musica, even tuning the instrument’s E string to E-flat to eerie effect. Saint-Saëns also introduces, about midway through, the Dies irae, a Gregorian-chant theme from the Requiem Mass much employed by composers to summon scenes of death and judgment.

The piece caused some predictable consternation at its premiere, particularly the waltzing Dies irae and the (deliberately) abrasive scordatura (mistuning). But it also quickly became a popular hit. Liszt himself arranged it for piano not long after the premiere, and it soon found other keyboard transcriptions, including piano four hands and organ. 

—John Henken