In 1874, Camille Saint-Saens arranged a tone poem version of his composition Danse Macabre, which had debuted two years earlier as an art song for voice and piano. It is the orchestral tone poem version that is the most popular today.
Death plays this Dance of Death on his fiddle and conjures the dead from their graves to perform a grotesque waltz. Death takes delight in the fact that people from all classes and walks of life arrive ultimately at a common end.
It is hard to imagine a more downcast theme. Still, while perfectly capturing the gruesome spirit of the poem on which it is based, Danse Macabre manages to be beautiful music. It seems there are competing philosophies for translating ugliness into music. On the one hand, we convey ugliness with ugly sounds. On the other hand, we turn to Mozart, who said, "Music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music."
In the case of Danse Macabre, I would think it is precisely the music's beauty that allows it to portray the poem so accurately.
2 comments:
The story behind the music may sound gruesome but to realize the truth behind it, that’s what makes it more interesting , and even beautiful. I believe all music ever composed tells a story, and the sound that you hear is only as interesting as the story behind it.
Thanks for your comment. I think that starting with Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, though possibly earlier, classical music composers generally started placing more of an emphasis on the music's story. From then on, it became common for a large-scale work to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, all of which are strongly related to one another, thus creating the tradition of the emotional climax in Western music. In my experience, this is one aspect that divides some people into different groups, i.e. there are those who prefer Romantic composers, and there are those who prefer Baroque composers. Also, this is one reason why you can't listen to Bach the same way you listen to Rachmaninov.
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