Saint-Saëns wrote the melody first as a setting of a poem of Henri Cazalis for voice and piano, expanding it into a symphonic poem a year or two later. A "danse macabre" or "dance of death" is a very old genre of music or art with its origins in the Middle Ages, the main point of which is that no matter what your station was in life, in death we all dance together; the last line of Cazalis' poem is "Et vive la mort et l'égalité!" or "Long live death and equality!" Edwin Lemare's transcription is one of his most famous, and his work is usually conceived for a large English organ, so I have played this on an emulation of the Willis organ of Hereford Cathedral. The acoustic is quite reverberant, so in order for the eight and sixteenth notes to not become mush I have taken a slightly more deliberate tempo than I would in a dryer room. My starting place is usually bar = 60 since the beginning is supposed to be the chimes of a clock; this is closer to bar = 55 but I think that the clarity makes up for the speed.

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