Camille Saint-Saëns - Danse macabre Op.40

A little bit tame for a danse macabre! :-)



"The piece makes particular use of the xylophone to imitate the sounds of rattling bones. ... According to legend, Death appears at midnight every year on Halloween. Death calls forth the dead from their graves to dance for him while he plays his fiddle (here represented by a solo violin). His skeletons dance for him until the rooster crows at dawn, when they must return to their graves until the next year.



The piece opens with a harp playing a single note, D, twelve times (the twelve strokes of midnight) which is accompanied by soft chords from the string section. The solo violin enters playing the tritone, which was known as the diabolus in musica ("the Devil in music") during the Medieval and Baroque eras, consisting of an A and an E♭—in an example of scordatura tuning, the violinist's E string has actually been tuned down to an E♭ to create the dissonant tritone." (Source)



Camille Saint-Saëns - Danse macabre Op.40