12/3/2023 0 Comments Franz lizt tone poems die ideakTHE COMPOSER – FRANZ LISZT (1811-1886) – In the early 1860s, the crushing disappointments of Liszt’s personal life forced him to seriously consider the solace and rigor of monastic life. THE CONNECTION – Danse macabre has been performed frequently by Utah Symphony, but it has not been programmed on the Masterworks Series since _. THE WORLD – Elsewhere in 1874, Denmark granted Iceland a constitution and limited home rule, Far from the Madding Crowd was published by English novelist Thomas Hardy and cartoonist Thomas Nast first symbolized the American Republican Party with the image of an elephant. For better or worse, his Danse is everywhere today from film to ballet stages to Olympic figure skating routines. Saint-Saens could not have known he was seeding future American youth concerts with an annual Halloween staple, but he must have seen early on that he had a career-making hit with Danse macabre. Therein lies the true legacy of this music. But the overall character sounds playful now to our modern ears, maybe even a bit comic. Grisly depictions and suggestive sonic devilry abound in Danse macabre, from the use of the Dies irae chant to the predominance of the tritone interval (known from earlier days to represent Satan himself). The latter choice was a stroke of true genius, and the composer liked the idea well enough to repeat it later in his own Carnival of the Animals. Those words included such imagery as “Death plays a dance-tune at midnight” and “Through the gloom skeletons pass” and “The bones of the dancers are heard to clatter…” In the orchestral versions, those evocative vocal lines were given to the solo violin and, among the many tricks Saint-Saëns would employ in the new guise, the rattling of the skeleton bones mentioned above was performed on the xylophone. The music began life as art song, but Saint-Saens quickly realized he needed a more robust palette to bring the words appropriately to life in sound. Saint-Saëns wrote it in 1874 after texts by the poet Henri Cazalis. Only Danse macabre survives today as a regular concert work, but “survives” is perhaps the wrong word, given its immense popularity. The effort resulted in four works – Le Rouet d’Omphale Phaéton Danse macabre and La Jeunesse d’Hercule – and, for a time, they were all admired throughout Europe. THE HISTORY – Saint-Saens was quite taken with the symphonic poems of Franz Liszt and explored the form himself during the first half of the 1870s. Saint-Saëns produced two of his most enduring scores during the courtship and short matrimony with Marie, the opera Samson et Delila and the orchestral tone poem Danse macabre. But as is so often the case in music history, great work comes from great pain. It was not a happy union and both children born to Marie Truffot died young (one fell from a window, and the other contracted pneumonia). While engaging deeply with the Parisian arts intelligentsia over the next couple of years, Saint-Saëns did something many who knew him considered unthinkable – he got married. THE COMPOSER – CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS (1835-1921) – Saint-Saëns left France briefly in March of 1871 to escape the violence of the Paris Commune but returned home just two months later to find the city full of nationalist zeal.
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