Danse macabre, Op. 40
7 min
Recording
- Danse macabre, Op. 40Philadelphia Orchestra; Leopold Stokowski; Thaddeus Rich, solo violin · 29 April 1925, Camden, New Jersey7:09
In Saint-Saëns’s dance of skeletons, Danse macabre, Op. 40, a harp strikes midnight twelve times, and Death’s fiddle has its top string tuned down a semitone. Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra recorded it in Camden, New Jersey, on 29 April 1925.
Listening notes
- Opening, harp strokes of midnight
The harp plays a single note twelve times for the strokes of midnight. The note is D, the dominant of the G minor that follows.
- Solo violin, scordatura tritone
The solo violin enters with its E string lowered to E♭. Its open A and E♭ strings sound together as a tritone, the interval older musicians nicknamed the devil in music. Saint-Saëns uses this tritone as the opening motif of the dance.
- Letter to Durand, March 1876
Édouard Colonne conducted the first performance at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 24 January 1875, and the reviews were mixed. By March 1876 Saint-Saëns could tell his publisher Durand that violinists no longer wanted their top strings tuned any other way than to E♭.
- Dies irae in the woodwinds
Around the midpoint, after a short fugal passage, the woodwinds quote the Dies irae, the chant of the Requiem Mass for the day of wrath. Saint-Saëns set it in a major key. Audiences of the time found the effect unsettling.
- Xylophone in the orchestra
Saint-Saëns added a xylophone to the orchestra, an instrument only recently admitted to the symphony orchestra; it imitates the rattling of the skeletons’ bones. In 1886 he quoted this dance in “Fossils”, a movement of The Carnival of the Animals.
- Recording forces, Camden, 1925
The Discography of American Historical Recordings lists the forces at the session: seven first violins, four second violins, three violas and two cellos. A tuba, a contrabassoon and a bass saxophone are among the winds, and there is a harp.
- Coda, oboe cockcrow
In the coda a solo oboe plays the cock’s crow at dawn, and the skeletons scatter. The solo violin then plays a short elegy before the dancers return to their graves.