Camille Saint-Saens

Camille Saint-Saens was a prodigy who lived long enough to become a reactionary, and he wrote the piece most people mean when they think of the Dance of Death. He gave his first recital at ten and reportedly offered any Beethoven sonata as an encore from memory. He was organist at the Madeleine for twenty years, Liszt called him the finest in the world, and he taught Faure. His Danse Macabre of 1874 sets a poem in which Death tunes his fiddle at midnight and the skeletons dance until the cock crows, using a solo violin with the E string tuned down a semitone to make the interval medieval theorists called the devil in music, and a xylophone for the bones - the first prominent use of that instrument in an orchestra. It was hissed at its premiere. The subject descends from the danse macabre imagery that spread across Europe after the Black Death, when the idea that death takes pope and labourer alike had recently been demonstrated. He also wrote Samson and Delilah, the third symphony with organ, and the Carnival of the Animals, which he refused to let anyone publish in his lifetime because he thought its jokes would damage his standing as a serious composer. He walked out of the premiere of the Rite of Spring. He died in Algiers at eighty-six. Danse Macabre exists in several forms, and Liszt made a piano transcription of it that is harder than the original. Saint-Saens also wrote the first film score by a major composer, for L'Assassinat du duc de Guise in 1908. He travelled constantly in North Africa and Latin America, wrote on acoustics, archaeology and the occult, and published a book arguing that Wagner had ruined music.

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