A
symphonic poem in
G minor, Op. 40, composed by
Camille Saint-Saëns in 1874. It was the third of Saint-Saëns' four "
tone poems" and one of his most
popular works. The Danse Macabre, or
Dance of Death, was originally meant to be a
song for
voice and
piano, but Saint-Saëns later modified it to be performed by an
orchestra.
(and Gorgonzola points out that he parodied "Danse Macabre" just a few years later in the "Fossils" section of his "Carnival of the Animals". Most of "Fossils" was performed on xylophone, no doubt creating images of some prehistoric Lucifer conjuring up a bunch of dancing dinosaur bones.)Unlike many pieces of
classical music in which the
story is
impossible to follow without a program, the story in Danse Macabre is quite clear. After the
clock strikes
midnight, the
devil (Saint-Saëns originally meant it to be
Death itself) tunes up his
violin and
fiddles up a
waltz, conjuring up a dancing army of
ghosts,
skeletons,
demons, and
monsters. As the
horrors
frolic through the night, the waltz, with
strings,
xylophones, and
woodwinds dominating, spirals to
wilder and greater heights, until a
rooster (actually an
oboe) crows. As the
sun starts to
peep over the
horizon, the
spectral host scurry back to the graves, and the devil plays a
mournful fiddle
solo before he slinks back to
hell.
Oh, and
Stephen King wrote a
nonfiction book on the art of
horror called "Danse Macabre" back in the
1980s. It was
nifty-keen, and nearly all of the
books and
movies he mentions are definitely worth checking out.
Research from www.allclassical.com and from listening to the song a lot.