Danse Macabre
Camille Saint-Saens
      {san-sahns', ca-mee'}

      Camille Saint-Saens, b.  Paris, Oct.  9, 1835, d.  Dec.  16, 
      1921, was a French composer.  He was brought up by his mother, 
      who gave him his first music lessons.  His natural musical 
      endowments showed at a very early age and were hardly less 
      remarkable than those of Mozart and Mendelssohn as children. He 
      gave his first public piano recital in 1846, and excelled in all 
      his studies at the Paris Conservatory.  A virtuoso pianist and 
      organist, at the age of 22 he became organist at the church of 
      the Madeleine but was already earning fame as a composer of 
      orchestral symphonic music.

      Most notable are four symphonic poems (including Danse macabre, 
      1875) composed under the influence of Liszt, who took great 
      interest in his career and was later (1877) responsible for the 
      first performance of his Samson et Dalila, the only one of his 
      dozen operas to achieve a lasting success.  His early symphonic 
      music was modeled on Mozart, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn, but his 
      later works show a distinctively French character--a good-natured 
      charm with a touch of deliberately assumed triviality combined 
      with a remarkable technical fluency. Outstanding among these are 
      the third of three violin concertos, the second and fourth of 
      five piano concertos, the second of two cello concertos, and the 
      third of three symphonies.  He wrote copiously in all genres, but 
      few of his chamber works or songs survived him, although he is 
      still remembered for his Variations on a Theme by Beethoven 
      (1874) for two pianos, the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso 
      (1870) for violin and orchestra, and The Carnival of the Animals 
      (1886).  Alone among French composers of his generation, he 
      enjoyed a European reputation both as composer and performer, and 
      his long career marked the reemergence in France of an interest 
      in instrumental music after a century of almost exclusive concern 
      with opera.

The Dance of Death

      The Dance of Death, also called Danse Macabre, Danse des Morts, 
      or Totentanz, emerged in medieval movement, theater, art, and 
      literature as a spontaneous reaction to the hardships of the 
      feudal system and the horrors of the BUBONIC PLAGUE, which from 
      1347 to 1350 killed a quarter of Europe's population. Sufferers 
      of the plague (and of war, famine, and poverty) danced with 
      desperate gaiety in graveyards--surrounded by skeletons, crosses, 
      dead animals, and black draperies--as if enacting the 
      superstition that the dead danced on their graves to lure the 
      living. Although death was personified in paintings, poetry, and 
      pageant as a dancer, the living dancers, originally only men, 
      represented emperors, bishops, and peasants--all equal when 
      facing death as nowhere else.  In their macabre celebrations they 
      confronted their mortality and championed death as the avenger 
      over their masters and their hardships.  Whatever physical form 
      the allegorical dance assumed, it dealt consistently with death's 
      universal inevitability, the equality of all people facing it, 
      and the vanity of wealth and rank.  Hans HOLBEIN the Younger's 
      series of woodcuts, Totentanz (1538), magnificently illustrates 
      these themes.

DMACABR2.xxx  is the original arrangement of the Danse Macabre for 4 hands by Henri Cazalis.  This is nice for people who like Grand Pianos.  My favorite, though, is DMACABR1.xxx which is an arrangement for full orchestra (MIDI) and was taken from Cazalis’ piano arrangement.

Be careful of your equipment.  This piece gets very BIG in places and you should have good solid speakers to get the right effect.

I hope you enjoy it.
Ric Dexter
Cincinnati, Ohio