Danse macabre by Saint-Saëns: a listening guide for kids

Danse macabre is a short piece for orchestra by the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns. It tells a spooky story. At midnight on Halloween, Death plays the violin in a graveyard, and skeletons climb out to dance until the rooster crows at dawn. Saint-Saëns wrote it in 1874. It lasts about seven minutes, and it is a favorite for late October.

The spookiness is the storybook kind. Most children of five and up enjoy it.

The name is said “dahnss mah-KAH-bruh.”

Quick facts

• Composer: Camille Saint-Saëns, from France
• Written: 1874
• Length: about seven minutes
• Based on: a French poem about Death playing a dance tune at midnight
• Listen for: the harp, the solo violin, and the xylophone

The story in the music

Midnight. A harp plays the same note twelve times. The clock is striking twelve.

Death tunes up. A solo violin plays two notes together that clash. It sounds wrong on purpose. Saint-Saëns asked the player to tune the top string a little low to get this sour sound.

The first dance tune. A flute starts a quick, skipping waltz. The violins take it over.

The second dance tune. The solo violin plays a slower, slinking tune that slides downward.

The bones. A xylophone plays the skipping tune with a dry clatter. These are the skeletons, knocking together as they dance.

The dance grows wild. The two tunes pile on top of each other. The whole orchestra joins, with the brass and the drums. Wind seems to howl through the strings.

Dawn. All at once, the music stops. An oboe plays a short, bright call. This is the rooster.

The ending. The solo violin plays one last, sad line. The strings scurry and fade. The skeletons slip back into the ground. Two soft plucked notes end the piece.

Three sounds to know

The mistuned violin. A violin’s strings are tuned five notes apart. For this piece, the soloist lowers the top string. The gap between the top two strings becomes an interval that people long ago called the devil’s interval, because it sounds so uneasy.

The xylophone. It has wooden bars and is played with hard mallets. In 1874, it was rare in an orchestra. Saint-Saëns used it for the sound of bones.

The oboe as a rooster. One instrument, alone, after all that noise. A small sound that ends the whole party.

The bones come back

Twelve years later, Saint-Saëns wrote The Carnival of the Animals. In the piece called “Fossils,” the xylophone plays the skeleton tune from Danse macabre again, as a joke on himself. Play the two back to back. The Carnival of the Animals guide covers the rest.

Things to do together

Count to twelve. Count the harp’s chimes on your fingers.

Skeleton dance. Dance with stiff, loose arms and legs. Freeze when the rooster crows, and sink to the floor as the music fades.

Raise a hand for the bones. Each time the xylophone plays, raise a hand.

Tell it as it plays. Call out each part of the story as it arrives: “Midnight! Tuning! Bones! Rooster!”

Draw the graveyard. Use a listening journal page. Draw the clock, the fiddler, and the rooster.

Soft to loud. The piece builds from one harp to a full orchestra. Draw a line that climbs as the sound grows.

A Halloween playlist

Pair it with “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from the Peer Gynt Suite, Night on Bald Mountain, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The piece picker has more under the spooky mood.

Print and play

Read Saint-Saëns for kids and print the Saint-Saëns fact sheet. To learn about the xylophone, read percussion instruments for kids.

More guides are listed in classical music listening guides for kids.