Danse Macabre Violin Tutorial & Free Sheet Music

Danse Macabre is a symphonic poem composed by Camille Saint-Saëns in 1874. It is based on the medieval allegory of the "Dance of Death," where Death plays a fiddle at midnight, summoning the dead from their graves to dance until dawn. The piece is known for its eerie, playful tone, featuring a distinctive xylophone part that mimics the sound of rattling bones. Danse Macabre blends haunting melodies with lively rhythms, capturing the contrast between life and death in a vivid musical depiction of the grim yet whimsical dance.

I first played this piece the summer before my sophomore year of high school at a music festival in my hometown of Houston, Texas called American Festival for the Arts. The soloist is technically supposed to tune down their E string to an E flat in order to play the double stops at the beginning as open strings. I will not be doing that for the purposes of this tutorial but if you'd like to, you certainly can!

This version of the piece is not the original solo part by Saint-Saens, or even the orchestra part. This is a combination of all of the themes from the piece; you can think of it like an overture to Danse Macabre. This is an intermediate level version of the tune because it does require shifting to third position and some double stops. Danse Macabre is in the key of G Minor, meaning there are two flats, B flat and E flat. It is in 3/4 time, so there are 3 beats per measure.