Tour de danse (5/5): Saint-Saëns, dance between symphonic poem and film score
Back to classical music for this final episode of Tour de danse. In the spotlight this time is Camille Saint-Saëns, on the 100th anniversary of his death.
Music can accompany a dance – classical, jazz or rock – as we’ve seen in previous episodes. But it can also describe and translate musically texts or images that represent a dance scene.
This is what Camille Saint-Saëns did when he successfully set to music the lines of a poem by Henri Cazalis, Égalité-Fraternité, from Les Heures sombres. The main theme: in a cemetery, at nightfall, the skeletons of the dead, roused from their torpor by the sound of an out-of-tune violin played by Death, dance until dawn.
This inspiration gave birth to La Danse macabre by Saint-Saëns. Originally composed for voice and piano (1872), it was orchestrated by the composer as a symphonic poem (1874). In this version, the instruments used play a clearly defined role. They become the real actors. The harp sounds the stroke of midnight. The cellos, which, along with the pizzicati, represent Death’s heel strikes, awakening the dead. The xylophone, never before used in a symphony orchestra, represents the sound of dancing skeletons. The violins recall the winter wind.
The theme of the Dance of Death had already inspired another illustrious musician: Franz Liszt. His Totentanz, subtitled Variations sur le “Dies Irae” (1849) for piano and orchestra, was inspired this time either by woodcuts or frescoes. Unlike Liszt, however, Saint-Saëns’s composition is lively, highly danceable, ironic and captivating. Throughout Danse macabre, Saint-Saëns uses the waltz tempo to great effect. He thus lends his symphonic poem a certain undeniable luminosity.
The choice of using a dance tempo, this time the minuet, is also very successful in another lesser-known composition by the French composer. In 1908, directors André Calmettes and Charles Le Bargy called on Camille Saint-Saëns, a specialist in ballet and stage music, to write the original score for the silent film The Assassination of the Duke of Guise. The result was what is arguably the first film score in history.
The film recalls a famous historical episode: the day of December 23, 1588. On that day, Henri I de Lorraine, Duc de Guise, was assassinated by his rival, King Henri III. On screen, in the first scene, we see the Marquise de Noirmoutier, the lover of the Duc de Guise, in her salons. How to emphasize the high status of the woman and her insouciance of her lover’s macabre fate? Saint-Saëns decided to associate her with a gallant and noble dance: he composed a sort of minuet, Louis XIV’s favorite dance. The music plays a part in the story, supporting the narrative and the character’s feelings and thoughts. It lends the scene an emotional power that reaches the spectator. The expressive, dramatic, lyrical or symbolic function of music is now inseparable from the image.
Camille Saint-Saëns, composer, teacher, pianist, organist, conductor, critic, columnist, poet, playwright and, at the age of 73, film composer.
Want to find out more about this versatile musician? Discover our selection of documents.
