Saint-Saëns - Danse Macabre, Op. 40 (Analysis)

Death plays the violin in a moonlit cemetery while skeletons dance a waltz.
In Danse macabre, Saint-Saëns transforms the dead’s midnight waltz into orchestral theatre, balancing supernatural menace with unmistakable irony.

Danse macabre is the third of the four symphonic poems Camille Saint-Saëns wrote during the 1870s. Le Rouet d’Omphale, Op. 31, and Phaéton, Op. 39, had come before it; La Jeunesse d’Hercule, Op. 50, would follow. Through these works, Saint-Saëns helped shape a renewed French instrumental tradition: one indebted to Liszt’s symphonic poem, yet marked by the clarity, economy and precise orchestral thinking that were distinctly his own.

The work also belongs to the broader revival of French music after the Franco-Prussian War. The Société nationale de musique, which Saint-Saëns co-founded in 1871 with other French musicians, created a platform for symphonic and chamber music at a time when Parisian musical life remained largely dominated by opera. Saint-Saëns was among the first French composers to cultivate the Lisztian symphonic poem consistently and to establish the genre in France.

The earliest version of Danse macabre was not orchestral. In 1872 Saint-Saëns composed a mélodie for voice and piano to Henri Cazalis’s poem Égalité, Fraternité, later included in the collection L’Illusion. At midnight, Death takes up his violin and summons the dead from their graves. Figures of every social rank join the same dance until the cock’s crow announces dawn and sends them underground again.

The song was published in 1873. A year later Saint-Saëns returned to its material and recast it as a symphonic poem for large orchestra and solo violin. The autograph score preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France is dated October 1874 at its close and places extracts from Cazalis’s poem at the beginning. It also served as the engraver’s copy for the first printed edition.

This was far more than a mechanical transfer from voice and piano to orchestra. Saint-Saëns enlarged the thematic material, introduced new episodes and contrapuntal development, and designed a complete dramatic arc. The solo violin assumes much of the role once carried by the voice, while woodwinds, strings, harp and percussion share the rest of the narrative. The orchestra becomes narrator, stage and dancing multitude at once.

What distinguishes the score is the balance between its macabre subject and its ironic presentation. Saint-Saëns does not sustain an atmosphere of unbroken terror. Waltz rhythm, short repeated phrases, finely judged timbres and readily identifiable musical signs create a strange nocturnal spectacle. Death is both fiddler and master of ceremonies; the dead temporarily recover movement, voice and freedom from social rank.

Movements / Structure

Danse macabre unfolds as one continuous movement in 3/4, marked Mouvement modéré de Valse. It follows neither sonata form nor rondo form in any strict Classical sense. Its coherence comes from the recurrence and transformation of two principal themes, the gradual thickening of the orchestral texture, and a clear trajectory from midnight stillness to climax and final dissolution.

The dramatic course can be heard in six broad phases:

Midnight and expectation

The harp repeats D twelve times while low chords and pizzicato strings establish the nocturnal setting. Sparse material and restrained dynamics prepare the entrance of the central figure.

Death appears and tunes the violin

The solo violin enters with a tritone produced by its two highest open strings. Its altered sonority becomes Death’s musical signature and the summons that awakens the dead.

The two principal themes

The first theme, initially heard in the woodwinds, is brief, repetitive and sharply rhythmic. The second, more lyrical and descending, is introduced by the solo violin and retains a clearer connection with the work’s vocal origin.

The dance spreads

Both themes pass from one instrument to another, move through different tonal regions and acquire increasingly dense accompaniments. Exchanges between solo and orchestral passages suggest that more and more figures are joining the dance.

Fugato, Dies irae and climax

The texture becomes contrapuntal as thematic entries follow one another with growing urgency. A transformed Dies irae enters the mounting activity; the principal themes converge and the whole orchestra is drawn towards the central climax.

Dawn and coda

The oboe imitates the cock’s crow and abruptly interrupts the nocturnal revel. The orchestra withdraws, the solo violin is heard one last time, and the music returns to the silence from which it emerged.

Musical Analysis

Twelve strokes at midnight

The introduction is built from an exceptionally simple and effective idea. The harp repeats the note D twelve times, marking the twelve strokes of midnight. D is the dominant of the work’s home key, G minor, and therefore creates a natural pull towards the tonic.

Saint-Saëns delays that confirmation. Sustained, subdued chords surround the harp strokes while cellos and double basses add short pizzicato notes. Harmony remains deliberately uncertain, and the slow exchange of timbres seems to suspend time itself.

The opening thus fulfils three purposes simultaneously: it establishes the hour, creates the dark setting, and prepares the solo violin’s entrance harmonically. With so little movement around it, Death’s first sound is impossible to miss.

Scordatura and Death’s tritone

Saint-Saëns requires an unusual tuning for the solo violin. The highest string is lowered from E to E-flat, while the other three remain at normal pitch. This deliberate alteration of standard tuning is known as scordatura.

When the player sounds the open A and E-flat strings together, they produce a tritone. Unlike the perfect fourth or fifth, this interval offers no immediate sense of stability. Here it sounds persistent, rough and faintly wrong, as though the violin had remained deliberately out of tune.

Later theoretical tradition associated the tritone with the phrase diabolus in musica. The familiar claim that medieval church authorities simply prohibited it is an oversimplification. Saint-Saëns nevertheless draws knowingly on its cultural symbolism and turns it into Death’s identifying motif.

Scordatura also alters the instrument’s colour. The slackened E-flat string carries less tension and sounds less brilliant than a normally tuned E string. The strangeness comes not only from the interval but from the physical response of the violin itself.

The soloist’s first entrance can be heard as an act of tuning. Death tests the strings; once the characteristic interval is established, the music that animates the entire crowd begins.

The first theme: the dance in motion

After the introduction, the first principal theme appears in the flute. Its narrow range, repeated notes and emphatic rhythm make it instantly recognisable, even when it changes instrument or is absorbed into a denser texture.

This theme supplies the dance with its motor. Short note values and repetition allow it to continue without extensive melodic development. Saint-Saëns can use it as a rhythmic foundation, an independent melody or material for counterpoint.

As it moves from woodwinds to strings and then into larger orchestral groups, its character changes. At first it sounds restrained, almost hesitant. Additional instruments make it livelier, sharper and more insistent, giving audible form to the dead rising one by one and joining the dance.

The second theme: a memory of song

The solo violin introduces the second principal theme. Broader in phrase, descending in contour and more songful in character, it recalls that Danse macabre began as a composition for voice and piano.

The two themes serve complementary functions. The first provides rhythmic energy and repetition; the second offers melodic continuity. Their alternation allows Saint-Saëns to shift between the collective motion of the dance and the individual presence of Death’s violin.

The second theme does not remain the soloist’s private property. Later statements migrate to other instruments, and fragments enter sequences, imitations and combinations with the first theme. What begins as Death’s personal “voice” gradually becomes part of the crowd’s common motion.

Free form, firm internal design

Calling the work “free in form” can suggest a loose succession of pictures. The score, however, displays remarkable thematic economy. Almost everything grows from the tritone, the two principal themes, the waltz rhythm and the later entrance of the Dies irae.

Themes return at different dynamic levels, in new keys and with altered orchestration. Sometimes they are stated whole; elsewhere they are broken into smaller motifs. Certain reappearances resemble refrains, while others extend the development without recreating an earlier section exactly.

The result might be described as episodic development with elements of rondo and thematic synthesis. Familiar material provides orientation, but the direction remains continuous: each return occurs at a higher level of energy and moves the drama closer to its climax.

This thematic unity serves the narrative. The dead do not arrive as a succession of unrelated musical characters; they enter the same dance. Saint-Saëns therefore needs few themes. He transforms the existing material as a stage director might change the lighting, distance and scale of a scene.

The waltz rhythm

The score is in 3/4 metre and marked Mouvement modéré de Valse. Its triple pulse remains recognisable through much of the work, although it seldom acquires the smooth elegance of a conventional ballroom waltz.

The accompaniment frequently presses on the first beat while clipped woodwind and violin motifs move above it. Elsewhere, accents shift within the bar or phrases resist the regular periodicity expected of the dance.

The result remains dance-like yet acquires a mechanical, unnatural quality. This is a waltz without the breath or physical weight of living dancers. The skeletons move precisely, but their motion is angular, repetitive and faintly rigid.

The choice is also satirical. Saint-Saëns transfers one of the nineteenth century’s most fashionable social entertainments to a graveyard. The cultivated ballroom gives way to a midnight gathering where rank and public decorum have lost all authority.

Tonality and harmonic instability

The home key of G minor supplies the work’s dark frame. Saint-Saëns preserves recognisable tonal centres, keeping the music immediately intelligible, yet disturbs them through chromatic motion, diminished harmonies and frequent thematic transposition.

Instability is present from the introduction. The repeated D promises resolution; the A–E-flat tritone introduces an interval that sits uneasily within the tonal picture. G minor is established, but within an environment that always remains slightly unsettled.

During the dance, material travels through related regions, notably the relative B-flat major and dominant areas. Major colouring does not dispel the macabre atmosphere. It often intensifies the irony, illuminating the music without changing the themes’ uncanny identity.

Chromatic scales approaching the climax temporarily weaken the sense of a stable centre. Together with rising dynamics and denser orchestration, they make the dance appear to have exceeded the limits of its original order.

From imitation to fugato

A crucial stage in the development comes when simple thematic repetition gives way to contrapuntal treatment. Phrases begin to enter successively in different voices, suggesting the exposition of a fugue.

The passage is more accurately described as a fugato than as a complete fugue. Saint-Saëns uses successive entries, imitation and overlapping lines without organising the entire episode according to a strict fugal scheme.

The technique intensifies the drama. Every new entry seems to add another dancer, and as the intervals between entries contract, the texture thickens and momentum grows.

Despite the polyphonic density, individual lines remain clear. Careful distribution between woodwinds and strings enables the listener to follow each entrance and its spread through the ensemble. Counterpoint becomes a means of theatrical representation.

The transformed Dies irae

From bar 173, the woodwinds and harp introduce the medieval Dies irae, the sequence historically associated with the Mass for the Dead and the Last Judgement. A critic at the first performance had already recognised its presence.

The melody no longer has the austere, monophonic character of chant. Its rhythm is adjusted to the waltz, while its instrumentation lends it a lighter, more secular colour. The listener recognises an emblem of death, already swept into the dance.

This transformation creates one of the work’s most ingenious layers of irony. The Dies irae retains the memory of death and judgement while losing its ceremonial gravity. In this nocturnal revel, even the official music of the dead must dance.

The quotation is not merely an external symbol. It relates to the existing thematic material and enters the form smoothly, adding a new dramatic episode without breaking the score’s continuity.

The orchestra as a stage

The orchestration assigns readily understood dramatic roles. The solo violin personifies Death, the harp marks midnight, the xylophone evokes clattering bones, and the oboe announces dawn.

These associations do not exhaust the instruments’ musical functions. The violin continues beyond Death’s entrance to present and develop thematic material; the harp supports the harmonic and colouristic fabric after its twelve opening strokes.

The xylophone is particularly striking. Still highly unusual in the symphony orchestra of the period, its short, dry sound projects through the texture and creates an immediate aural image of bones knocking together.

The strings extend the same effect through col legno, striking the strings with the wood of the bow. The kinship between xylophone and col legno spreads the rattling sonority beyond one instrument into the entire string body.

Woodwinds bring lightness, detail and incisive articulation. Brass is used more sparingly at first, then gains importance as the music approaches its climax. The orchestra therefore expands gradually rather than revealing its full weight from the outset.

Textural clarity is essential to the narrative. Even when themes overlap, the principal colours remain identifiable. Death, the dance, the bones and the cock’s crow can be distinguished without prior knowledge of every detail in Cazalis’s poem.

Accumulation and the great climax

The work’s intensity does not arise from one abrupt change. Saint-Saëns builds it through gradual accumulation: more instruments participate, thematic entries come more frequently, dynamics rise and chromatic movement spreads across the orchestra.

The two principal themes, first heard separately, begin to coexist. Their simultaneous presence increases the contrapuntal density and makes every earlier episode seem to merge into a single communal dance.

Rapid scales in strings and winds widen the musical space while brass and percussion add weight. The waltz’s initial elegance remains underneath, though it now supports orchestral motion nearing the edge of disorder.

The climax brings no conventional triumphant resolution. At the height of the revel, an event from outside the musical dance interrupts it: dawn arrives.

The cock’s crow and the return to silence

The oboe gives the cock’s crow. Its dramatic effectiveness lies in contrast: after the force of the full orchestra, a thin and solitary voice suddenly appears. Sheer volume does not end the dance; the recognition of an ordinary morning signal does.

Fast motion and strong dynamics fall away. The orchestra empties, and the figures of the night lose their borrowed vitality. The dispersal is rapid because the poem commands the dead to abandon their dance immediately.

The solo violin returns with a brief, more lyrical phrase. For a moment, Death is no longer the energetic fiddler of the revel but an almost solitary presence. The coda restores calm without offering complete emotional resolution.

The ending completes the work’s symmetrical arc. Music rose from stillness, gathered motion, filled the orchestra and finally withdrew into sparse sound. The circle of the night is closed, while the programme itself implies that it may begin again.

Selected performance: Kent Nagano — Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, with Andrew Wan as solo violinist

From song to symphonic narrative

The relationship between the 1872 song and the 1874 symphonic poem reveals how Saint-Saëns approached programme music. The orchestral score did not grow from a vague meditation on death: it developed from an existing poem and musical material already tied to particular words.

In the vocal version, the singer narrates the scene directly. Cazalis names Death, the violin, the bones, dancers divided by social rank and the cock’s crow. Music supports the story, but the text identifies its images.

In the symphonic version, words disappear. Saint-Saëns must therefore translate verbal images into events that can be recognised by ear. Twelve harp strokes replace the reference to midnight; the solo violin assumes the role of Death; xylophone and col legno strings suggest bones; the oboe gives voice to the cock.

The change of medium also enlarged the form. A song could follow the stanzas of a poem, whereas a symphonic poem required greater musical autonomy. Themes are consequently developed, recombined and driven towards a climax whose logic no longer depends on the order of the verses alone.

The transformation demonstrates Saint-Saëns’s ability to keep a programme intelligible without sacrificing musical coherence. The score can be followed as a narrative, yet it also stands independently as a tightly designed orchestral composition.

The medieval danse macabre and the equality of the dead

The danse macabre was a characteristic image in the visual art and literature of late-medieval Europe. In murals, woodcuts and poems, the dead—or Death personified—lead people of every age and social class into a common dance.

The order of the figures mattered. Popes, emperors, kings, nobles, merchants, peasants and children were shown following the same path. The image served as a memento mori, a reminder that power, wealth and status offer no protection from death.

Cazalis preserves this idea while sharpening its social satire. People separated in life by rigid conventions join the same dance and symbolically exchange places. Night temporarily abolishes hierarchy.

The title Égalité, Fraternité makes the implication explicit. This equality is not a political achievement; it is enforced by the destiny shared by every human being. Death becomes the only power that applies equality without exception.

Saint-Saëns translates the collective image into music by allowing themes to spread continually. Material passes from soloist to orchestra and from one instrumental group to another. No timbre remains isolated: as the work advances, every voice is absorbed into the same rhythmic motion.

Parodying the rituals of death

Danse macabre employs familiar emblems of mortality in a setting that is dance-like and frequently comic. Its irony comes above all from bringing together two apparently incompatible worlds: funeral ritual and the social waltz.

The Dies irae offers the clearest example. Closely associated with judgement, fear and the religious memory of death, the melody becomes waltz material in Saint-Saëns’s hands and joins the revel of the dead.

The violin undergoes a similar reversal. Folklore and literature often portray the Devil or Death as a virtuoso fiddler. Saint-Saëns draws on that image, yet his soloist does not begin with a grand or terrifying melody. He persistently tunes an uncanny interval and directs a dance whose articulation remains fine and almost buoyant.

The xylophone adds another layer of parody. Clattering bones might have become a gruesome detail; the instrument’s dryness and rhythmic precision make the image vivid and playful at once.

This balance prevents the score from becoming simple horror music. Saint-Saëns treats the macabre as a field of musical irony. Death retains his power, yet for one night he is a theatrical character who exposes the solemn pretensions of the living.

Danse macabre and the French symphonic poem

The symphonic poem was associated above all with Franz Liszt and German Romanticism. Saint-Saëns adopted its essential premise—a single-movement orchestral work inspired by an extra-musical subject—and adapted it to his own aesthetic.

Compared with the large scale and philosophical ambition of many Lisztian scores, Danse macabre is exceptionally concise. Its programme is conveyed through instantly recognisable sonic emblems, and its form grows from a small group of themes transformed without lengthy digression.

The orchestration displays French clarity and precision. Saint-Saëns avoids continuous full-orchestra writing and preserves long stretches of lighter texture. The climax is all the more effective because it follows a carefully controlled expansion of instrumental forces.

The work became an important landmark in French programme music. Its union of narrative, thematic economy and orchestral detail anticipates qualities later heard in works such as Paul Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

🪶 A Chapter in the Life of the Work

By January 1875 Paris knew Camille Saint-Saëns as an exceptional pianist, organist and composer, and as a forceful advocate of instrumental music. Danse macabre presented a rather different face of this serious and formidably trained musician. In its pages, Death played the violin, skeletons waltzed, and a xylophone turned their bones into rhythm.

The premiere took place on 24 January 1875 at the Théâtre du Châtelet, in a Concerts Colonne programme conducted by the organisation’s founder, Édouard Colonne. C. Lelong played the solo violin part. Music by Haydn, Handel, Beethoven and Victorin de Joncières was heard in the same concert. Against that background, Saint-Saëns’s new piece must have seemed particularly unusual: short, programmatic, crowded with precise aural images, and founded on the unlikely marriage of death and dance.

Later tradition often described the premiere as a complete fiasco. In this version of events, the audience booed, the tritone and xylophone caused offence, and the composer’s mother supposedly fainted in the hall. It is a memorable story, but it does not agree with the most reliable evidence.

One week later, the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris reported that the work had been repeated at its premiere, which points to a warm public response. Its critic praised the inventive orchestration and detected the disguised Dies irae, although he found the oboe’s imitation of the cock clumsy. Colonne performed the work again on 7 February, and it continued to attract attention.

Reception was certainly not unanimous. Some critics distrusted the representational effects, the xylophone and the ironic recasting of the Dies irae. Adolphe Jullien treated the work as something close to an eccentric diversion or musical deception, and later performances provoked sharper reactions than the opening night. Responses therefore ranged from enthusiasm to outright rejection, as often happened when unfamiliar orchestral devices challenged accepted taste.

The famous account of Saint-Saëns’s mother fainting is not confirmed by the contemporary testimony consulted for this revision. It probably belongs to the stories later gathered around the work, after its original eccentricity had become part of its legend. It cannot responsibly be presented as historical fact.

Saint-Saëns himself seems to have understood quickly that he had created a work of unusual appeal. The symphonic poem was published in 1875 by Durand, Schoenewerk et Cie and dedicated to the pianist Caroline Montigny-Rémaury, who was associated with the Société nationale de musique and performed his music in its concerts.

Arrangements soon followed. Saint-Saëns prepared versions for two pianos and, later, for violin and piano; Ernest Guiraud arranged it for piano four hands. The most important transcription was Franz Liszt’s formidable solo-piano version, S. 555.

Liszt admired the score but recognised that the piano could not reproduce the full contrast among harp, woodwinds, xylophone, percussion and solo violin. In a letter of 2 October 1876, he asked Saint-Saëns to forgive his inability to transfer the orchestra’s “marvellous colouring” to the keyboard. His remark identifies an essential truth: the work resides not only in its themes, but in the precise instruments entrusted with them.

By the end of the 1870s, Danse macabre had secured its place in the concert repertory. In March 1876 Saint-Saëns joked to his publisher Auguste Durand that violinists now refused to tune their highest string to anything but E-flat—a sign that the score’s distinctive scordatura had already become widely recognised.

In 1886 he quoted the theme again in “Fossils” from The Carnival of the Animals. There, the xylophone plays fragments of old or excessively familiar tunes as though they were musical fossils. Among them is Saint-Saëns’s own theme. The self-quotation is characteristic of his wit: a piece written only twelve years earlier is already treated as a relic of musical history.

The life of Danse macabre is therefore more complex than the simple legend of a failed premiere vindicated by posterity. The audience responded early to its theatrical force, while critics struggled more with its irony and unfamiliar orchestral means. The work endured because immediate narrative appeal was joined to exceptionally careful musical construction.

🎧 Listening Guide

The work’s course becomes easier to follow when attention turns to the returning themes and changes of orchestration. These ten moments provide useful landmarks.

The twelve repeated Ds

The harp repeats one note; it does not play twelve different pitches. Each repetition serves as a stroke of the clock while the low chords hold the harmony in suspense.

The solo violin’s tritone

The open A and E-flat strings create the abrasive sound of Death’s entrance. The altered tuning is also audible in the duller colour of the lowered string.

The first theme in the flute

The brief theme with repeated notes is the dance’s principal rhythmic cell. Its later appearances in other instruments reveal how the initially restricted motion spreads through the orchestra.

The violin’s second theme

This descending, more song-like melody contrasts with the rhythmic first theme. As other voices adopt it, it loses its exclusively solo identity and joins the collective dance.

Xylophone and col legno

The xylophone produces the score’s most readily recognised effect. Strings struck with the wooden side of the bow extend the same sonority, making the clatter of bones sound from several points in the orchestra.

Contrapuntal thickening

Successive entries make the melodies seem to chase one another. Their increasing overlap is Saint-Saëns’s principal means of turning an individual dance into a communal whirl.

The Dies irae

The chant appears altered and drawn into triple metre. Woodwind and harp colouring removes it from liturgical austerity and strengthens its ironic purpose.

The themes in combination

Before the final climax, ideas first heard separately appear together or in rapid succession. Recognising both within the dense texture reveals how carefully the seemingly uncontrolled culmination is organised.

The cock’s crow

The solitary oboe interrupts rather than competes with the orchestra. The texture immediately thins and the energy collapses, as if the force animating the dead had suddenly been withdrawn.

The violin’s final phrase

The solo violin’s last appearance is calmer and lonelier. It closes the action and returns Death from his role as choreographer to silence.

🎶 Further Listening

Danse macabre allows substantial differences of interpretation. Some performances emphasise darkness, others dancing irony, and others the lucidity of Saint-Saëns’s orchestral design.

  • François-Xavier Roth — Les Siècles: Period instruments and a lighter orchestral balance sharpen the distinctions among instrumental groups. Xylophone, woodwinds and col legno strings emerge vividly while the pulse retains genuine dance energy.
  • Charles Dutoit — Philharmonia Orchestra: A transparent reading of characteristic French elegance. Orchestral detail remains clear, and the climax arises through a gradual, tightly controlled increase of intensity.
  • Kent Nagano — Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, Andrew Wan: A modern account with clean articulation, strong dynamic contrasts and a prominent solo violin. It makes the thematic continuity among the score’s episodes especially easy to hear.

📚 Further Reading

A fuller understanding of the work emerges from reading the score alongside Saint-Saëns’s thematic catalogue and studies of nineteenth-century French musical life.

  • Sabina Teller Ratner — Camille Saint-Saëns, 1835–1921: A Thematic Catalogue of His Complete Works, Vol. I: The Instrumental Works. The essential source for chronology, first editions, dedications, arrangements and the work’s exact place in the composer’s catalogue.
  • Jean Gallois — Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns. A substantial French biography that sets the work within Saint-Saëns’s career and the cultural life of Paris.
  • Brian Rees — Camille Saint-Saëns: A Life. An accessible full biography, useful for understanding the composer’s relationships with Liszt, the Société nationale de musique and the principal Parisian concert institutions.
  • Wolfgang Birtel — Preface to the Eulenburg edition of Danse macabre. A concise study of the score’s origins, orchestration, first reception and major arrangements.

🔗 Related Works

  • Hector Berlioz — Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14: In the fifth movement, the Dies irae enters a supernatural nocturnal scene and is transformed by the orchestra. Its union of narrative, recurring ideas and instrumental symbols anticipates several features of Danse macabre.
  • Franz Liszt — Totentanz, S. 126: Large-scale variations on the Dies irae, giving death a violent and monumental presence. It offers a darker, more dramatic treatment of the same symbolic world.
  • Modest Mussorgsky — Night on Bald Mountain: Another supernatural nocturnal gathering that rises towards a great orchestral climax and dissolves with the arrival of dawn.
  • Paul Dukas — The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: A French symphonic poem in which limited thematic material develops through strict logic, precise orchestration and subtle humour.
  • Camille Saint-Saëns — “Fossils” from The Carnival of the Animals: The xylophone and a quotation from Danse macabre return the sound of bones in a more comic and self-mocking context.

🎼 Closing Reflection

For a few minutes, Death lends the dead the rhythm they lost with life. When the oboe announces dawn, the dance stops and old distinctions return with the light. Music has already shown how temporary they always were.

📖 References & Sources

This analysis compares the autograph orchestral score with the first printed edition, the 1872 song and Henri Cazalis’s poetic programme. Details of the premiere and reception were cross-checked against contemporary reports, Saint-Saëns’s thematic catalogue and modern institutional and musicological studies. Particular care was taken to distinguish documented responses from 1875 from later stories that cannot be confirmed in the earliest sources.

Scores

  • Saint-Saëns, Camille. Danse macabre: poème symphonique d’après une poésie de Henri Cazalis, Op. 40. Autograph orchestral score, October 1874. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de la Musique, MS-500.
  • Saint-Saëns, Camille. Danse macabre: poème symphonique, Op. 40. First orchestral edition. Paris: Durand, Schoenewerk et Cie, 1875, plate D. S. & Cie 2140.
  • Saint-Saëns, Camille. Danse macabre. Mélodie for voice and piano to a poem by Henri Cazalis. Paris: Enoch, 1873.
  • Saint-Saëns, Camille. Danse macabre, Op. 40. London and Mainz: Edition Eulenburg No. 1379, 2018.

Primary Sources

  • Cazalis, Henri. “Égalité, Fraternité,” in L’Illusion. Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1875.
  • Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, Vol. 42, No. 5, 31 January 1875.
  • Liszt, Franz. Letter to Camille Saint-Saëns, 2 October 1876, as cited in Sabina Teller Ratner’s thematic catalogue.
  • Correspondence between Camille Saint-Saëns and Auguste Durand, March 1876.

Secondary Sources

  • Birtel, Wolfgang. Preface to Camille Saint-Saëns, Danse Macabre, Op. 40. London and Mainz: Edition Eulenburg, 2018.
  • Gallois, Jean. Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns. Sprimont: Mardaga, 2004.
  • Ratner, Sabina Teller. Camille Saint-Saëns, 1835–1921: A Thematic Catalogue of His Complete Works. Vol. I: The Instrumental Works. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
  • Rees, Brian. Camille Saint-Saëns: A Life. London: Chatto & Windus, 1999.

Discography

  • Saint-Saëns: Symphonic Poems. Les Siècles, François-Xavier Roth. Bru Zane, 2023.
  • Saint-Saëns: Danse macabre; Phaéton; Le Rouet d’Omphale; Havanaise; Marche héroïque. Philharmonia Orchestra and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Charles Dutoit. Decca.
  • Danse Macabre. Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, Kent Nagano, Andrew Wan. Decca, recorded 2015.

Digital and Institutional Resources

  • Bibliothèque nationale de France — autograph score and bibliographic record for Danse macabre.
  • Palazzetto Bru Zane Mediabase — history, premiere, reception and arrangements of the work.
  • Société Camille Saint-Saëns — chronology for 1875–1881 and bibliographic catalogue.
  • Philharmonie de Paris — historical and musicological introduction to the work.
  • International Music Score Library Project — autograph, first edition, orchestral parts and historical arrangements.

Note on Editions

The analysis follows the 1874 orchestral version preserved in the autograph score at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and reflected in the first Durand, Schoenewerk et Cie edition. Arrangements for solo piano, two pianos, piano four hands and violin with piano are used only to document the work’s dissemination and later life.