The Danse Macabre by Saint Saens
October 24, 2023
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Danse Macabre
By Saint Saens
An anthem for Halloween. This is a ghoulish story, based on the French legend that Death comes to play its fiddle at midnight on Halloween, calling to all the skeletons in the cemetery to rise out of their tombs for their annual graveyard dance
Originally conceived in 1872 by Camille Saint Saens as a song poem for voice and piano with a French text by the poet Henri Cazalis
He later expanded the piece as a tone poem in 1874, replacing the vocal part with a solo viloin and including the xylophone to evoke the rattling skeleton bones
The Danse Macabre was not well received on its premiere, however it quickly gained in popularity
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