Danse Macabre - Camille Saint Saëns

The Danse macabre, Opus 40, is a tone poem for orchestra, written in 1874 by the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921). It started out in 1872 as an art song for voice and piano with a French text by the poet Henri Cazalis, which is based on an old French superstition. In 1874, the composer expanded and reworked the piece into a tone poem, replacing the vocal line with a solo violin part. Danse macabre, as a theme, was meant to represent how death was the great social equalizer — no one escapes the dance with death — and there were a number of paintings and pieces of art inspired by this philosophy. When Saint-Saëns initially wrote his Danse macabre, it was actually an art song. Henri Cazalis wrote lines like, “The bones of the dancers are heard to crack,” but two years later Saint-Saëns replaced the voice with the violin and the dissonance amped up its tension.