Danse Macabre, Op. 40

Camille Saint-Saëns was a child prodigy on a level that makes Mozart look like a late bloomer. He gave his first public piano recital at age ten, offering to play any Beethoven sonata from memory as an encore. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at thirteen. He could play organ, piano, and practically every other instrument. He was also a published scientist, a playwright, a philosopher, and an amateur astronomer who traveled to Algeria to observe a solar eclipse. He did all of this while maintaining the personality of a particularly irritable postal clerk.

Danse Macabre is based on a French poem by Henri Cazalis about Death playing the fiddle at midnight on Halloween, summoning skeletons to dance in a graveyard until the rooster crows at dawn. Saint-Saëns sets it with obvious relish — the solo violin is tuned with the E string lowered to E-flat, creating the tritone interval that medieval musicians called 'diabolus in musica,' the devil in music. The xylophone represents rattling bones. The oboe crows like a rooster. The whole thing is gloriously literal and about as subtle as a coffin through a window.

The premiere in 1875 was booed. Parisian audiences found the skeleton effects vulgar and the tritone tuning offensive. Saint-Saëns, who had spent decades being the most respected and most ignored serious composer in France, responded with characteristic acid: he didn't care. He had been right about things before the public caught up, and he would be right about this. Within a decade, Danse Macabre was one of the most performed orchestral works in Europe.

Saint-Saëns lived to eighty-six, composing until the very end, outliving most of his contemporaries and all of his patience. He watched Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky revolutionize French music and hated every minute of it. He called The Rite of Spring an abomination. He thought Debussy was a fraud. History sided with the younger composers, but Saint-Saëns had the last laugh in one respect: Danse Macabre is still played every October in concert halls worldwide, and it still makes people grin. Not many symphonic poems can claim that.