Danse macabre Op.40 (1874)

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)

Danse macabre Op.40 (1874)

transcription by Franz Liszt arranged by Vladmir Horowitz

“The Danse macabre takes hold of you so powerfully,” said Liszt, “that you long to be there!” Considering that only the dead are invited – summoned from the grave to a skeletal orgy at midnight – it was a weird comment to make. Listening, however, to his piano transcription of the orchestral original, you get the impression that Liszt would have enjoyed it far more than Saint-Saëns. The French composer deserves the credit for having realized the musical potential of Henri Cazalis’s poem Danse macabre, which he first set as a song, and for creating a symphonic poem the new sounds of which – not least the first use of the xylophone in an orchestral score – stimulated such a frisson in its Parisian audience in the mid-1870s. But his work does seem a little tame in comparision with the Liszt version, which is not so much a transcription as a re-write. Using only Saint-Saëns’s material, he liberally extends its development and applies an extraordinary variety of colour and imagination to it. “I beg you,” Liszt wrote to Saint-Saëns when he sent him a copy of the transcription shortly after it was written in 1876., “to excuse my lack of skill in reducing the marvellous colouring of your score to the possibilities of the piano,” He was being far too modest!

Liszt follows the story as told by Saint-Saëns, beginning with the midnight chimes, the entry of Death as a violinist with the top string devilishly tuned down a semitone, Death tapping his heels on the tombstones in the “ziggy-ziggy-zig” rhythm described in the Cazalis poem and Death seductively bowing the chromatic waltz melody that gets the skeletons dancing on their graves. In both versions the major musical events that follow are the same – a fugal passage on a rhythmically distorted version of the waltz melody, the Dies Irae chant transformed into another dance tune, a lyrical treatment of the waltz melody now in B major rather then the prevailing G minor, a loud climax that combines the “ziggy-ziggy-zig” theme with the waltz melody, an acceleration to another loud climax and then, after an abrupt drop in the dynamic level, the cock-crow that signals dawn and sends the skeletons scurrying back where they came from. In the Liszt transcription, however, the episodes are all longer, particularly the lyrial treatment of the waltz tune which is extended enough to make a distinct middle section. At the same time most of them are texturally more elaborate, more dramatic, harmonically more intense.

The Horowitz version, which is being performed on this occasion, shortens some of Liszt’s episodes, including the lyrical treatment of the waltz melody, but makes up for that by the occasional instance of even more fanciful scoring and even more immoderate harmony. ­