Danse macabre by Saint-Saëns | Boo!

Description
Well, it’s nearly Halloween 🎃 and there are many works of music that depict the spookiness, darkness and morbidity of this annual tradition. 😱 But one jumps out at me, Danse macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns. Take a minute to get the scoop!

Fun Fact
Like all great music, this work was imitated by many over the years. The re-tuning of the violin for the tri-tone interval was used by many composers, with my personal favorites being Béla Bartók’s Contrasts for violin, clarinet, and piano, and James Newton Howard’s chilling score to the 2002 film, Signs. But notable occurrences include Symphonie fantastique by Hector Berlioz, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini by Sergei Rachmaninoff, “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” from Sweeney Todd by Stephen Sondheim, and “Into the Unknown” by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez from Frozen II. Rachmaninoff actually quoted the “Dies Irae” theme in a dozen of his works.
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About Steven, Host
Steven is a Canadian composer & actor living in Toronto. Through his music, he creates a range of works, with an emphasis on the short-form genre—his muse being to offer the listener both the darker and more satiric shades of human existence. If you're interested, please check out his music website for more. Member of the Canadian League Of Composers.
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Transcript

Well, it’s nearly Halloween and there are many works of music that depict the spookiness, darkness and morbidity of this annual tradition. But one jumps out at me, La Danse macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns.

Originally conceived as an art song for voice and piano, it eventually evolved into a tone poem for violin and large orchestra. It was composed in 1874 and would go on to become Saint-Saëns’s most famous tone poem. 

Every year on Halloween, according to legend, “Death” appears at midnight, calling forth the skeletons from their graves to dance to his tunes while he accompanies them with his fiddle (here represented by a solo violin) until the rooster crows at dawn and they return to their graves. 

The piece opens with a single note in the harp, counting the twelve strokes of midnight. The solo violin, plays the dissonant tri-tone chord. During the Medieval and Baroque eras, this chord was known as the Diabolus in musica (“the Devil’s chord in music”). 

This work perfectly blends programmatic elements and powerful instrumentation—an amazing work of art.