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Danse Macabre (Saint-sans)Danse Macabre (written in 1874) is the name of opus 40 by French composer Camille Saint-Sans. The Composition is based upon a poem by Henri Cazalis, on old French superstition: At midnight, Death plays a dance tune on his violin.
The winter wind blows and the night is gloomy.
Mysterious moans come from the trees.
White skeletons fly through the shadows, leaping in their huge shrouds.
Each one gives a tremor and their bones rattle as they dance.
But hush!
Suddenly they stop dancing and run away.
The rooster has crowed." According to the ancient superstition, "Death" appears at midnight every year on Halloween. Death has the power to call forth the dead from their graves to dance for him while he plays his fiddle. The dead, skeletons, dance for him until the first break of dawn, when they must return to their graves until the next year. The piece makes particular use of the xylophone in a particular theme to imitate the sounds of rattling bones. Saint-Sans uses a similar motif in the Fossils part of his Carnival of the Animals. When Danse Macabre first premiered, it was recieved well. Audiences were quite unsettled by the disturbing, but innovative, sounds that Saint-Sans elicited. It has been used as background music in horror television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and was recently used as the haunting theme tune to the English series Jonathan Creek. It has also been transcribed onto piano in a popular arrangement by virtuoso pianist Vladimir Horowitz.
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