For the significance of the French word _macabre_ we must turn to the
Arabic _makabir_, signifying a burial place or cemetery. The “Danse
Macabre,” therefore, is simply a “cemetery dance” or “Dance of Death.”
One of the most prevalent superstitions during the middle ages
throughout Europe, and especially France, was that of the “Danse
Macabre,”—a belief that once a year, on Hallowe’en, the dead of the
churchyards rose for one wild, hideous carnival, one bacchanalian revel,
in which old King Death acted as master of ceremonies. This gruesome
idea appears frequently in the literature of the period, and also in its
painting, particularly in church decoration, and a more or less graphic
portrayal of the “Danse Macabre” may still be seen on the walls of some
old cathedrals and monasteries.
This composition, belonging as it does to the ultra-realistic French
school of the present day, is a vivid tone picture of the same “Danse
Macabre.” At the head of the original composition, serving as motto and
undoubtedly as direct inspiration for the music, stands a curious
ancient French poem in well-nigh obsolete fourteenth century idiom. I
have made a free translation of these verses into English, as follows:
On a sounding stone,
With a blanched thigh-bone,
The bone of a saint, I fear,
Death strikes the hour
Of his wizard power,
And the specters haste to appear.
From their tombs they rise
In sepulchral guise,
Obeying the summons dread,
And gathering round
With obeisance profound,
They salute the King of the Dead.
Then he stands in the middle
And tunes up his fiddle,
And plays them a gruesome strain.
And each gibbering wight
In the moon’s pale light
Must dance to that wild refrain.
Now the fiddle tells,
As the music swells,
Of the charnel’s ghastly pleasures;
And they clatter their bones
As with hideous groans
They reel to those maddening measures.
The churchyard quakes
And the old abbey shakes
To the tread of that midnight host,
And the sod turns black
On each circling track,
Where a skeleton whirls with a ghost.
The night wind moans
In shuddering tones
Through the gloom of the cypress tree,
While the mad rout raves
Over yawning graves
And the fiddle bow leaps with glee.
So the swift hours fly
Till the reddening sky
Gives warning of daylight near.
Then the first cock crow
Sends them huddling below
To sleep for another year.
The composition opens with twelve weird strokes indicating the arrival
of midnight, struck out upon a vibrant tombstone by the impatient hand
of Death himself. There follows a light, staccato passage, suggesting
the moment when, in obedience to this awesome signal, the specters
appear from their graves and come tiptoeing forward to take their places
in the fantastic circle. Then comes a strikingly realistic passage where
Death attempts to tune up his fiddle, as he is to furnish the music for
the dance. It has been lying disused since the last annual festival, is
very much out of tune, and refuses to come up to pitch. In spite of his
best endeavors, the E string obstinately remains at E flat. The
repetition of this passage at intervals throughout the composition
suggests occasional hasty and ill-timed efforts to tune up.
Now comes the first theme of the dance itself, light, fantastic,
suggestive of purely physical excitement and ghastly pleasure, and
graphically representing the imagery of the corresponding verse of the
poem.
The second theme is slower, heavier, more gloomily impressive, with its
weird minor harmonies and its strongly marked rhythms, suggesting the
darkness and terror of that midnight scene, the gruesome gravity of old
King Death, as master of ceremonies, and the increasingly ponderous
tread of that ghostly multitude, to which the gray walls of the abbey
and the very ground itself seem to reel in unison. This is the moment
when “the sod turns black where each skeleton whirls with a ghost.”
Death again attempts to tune up his fiddle, with frenzied haste, and the
dance grows in speed and impetuous power. Later it is interrupted by a
lyric intermezzo, brief but pathetically sweet. It seems to be a
plaintive lament played in a momentary pause of the dancing, expressing
the sad memories and hopeless longings of the dancers, the real mood
which underlies the forced gaiety of this wild revel. It is
appropriately accompanied by the Æolian-like effect of the night wind
sighing among the cypress boughs. An onward rush follows, more furiously
impetuous than before, for just as in the small hours the boisterous and
frenzied merriment of the witches in “Walpurgis Night” grew apace, so
does this skeleton dance gradually reach an almost demoniac climax of
hilarity, as all unite in a grand finale, a thunderous whirl of hideous
merriment. Here the first and second dance themes are very ingeniously
woven together, appearing simultaneously in a piece of most grotesque
but effective counterpoint.
Then comes a sudden hush, in which the distant crow of the morning cock
is distinctly heard, a signal that daylight is approaching and the revel
must end. With a wild hurry and scurry the specters betake themselves to
their graves once more, a final lugubrious wail from the fiddle closing
the composition, as Death is the last to leave the field.