Danse Macabre started life in 1874 as a tone poem scored for violin and orchestra which vividly describes a poem by Henri Cazalis. As the clock strikes midnight, the cloaked figure of Death appears and calls on the skeletons to dance to the waltz he plays on his violin. The E string is tuned a semitone lower to create a diminished fifth, the dissonant interval referred to as “the devil in music” during the Middle Ages. The dance builds and builds but eventually, as the cock crows, heralding the approaching dawn, the skeletons vanish back into their graves, and death departs. This arrangement for violin and piano was made by Saint-Saëns himself in 1877.
