(Fr. danse macabre; Ger. Totentanz).
A medieval and Renaissance symbolic representation of death as a skeleton (or a procession of skeletons) leading the living to the grave; in more recent times a dance supposedly performed by skeletons, usually in a graveyard. The 14th-century epidemics of bubonic plague in Europe are generally thought to have influenced the creation of the dance of death, but its literary origins can be traced at least as far back as the Dit des trois morts et des trois vifs (before 1280) of Baudouin de Condé. The illustrations in the Danse macabre (1485), published by Guyot Marchant, and in Heinrich Knoblochzer’s so-called Heidelberger Totentanz (1490), as well as the famous woodcuts of Holbein in Les simulachres et historiées faces de la mort (1538; later known as Totentanz) depict skeletons playing musical instruments (see illustration; see also Dance, fig.6); but musical activity is by no means always present in 15th- and 16th-century pictures of the dance of death, and in most of them dancing is not shown either. A possible derivation of the French ‘macabre’ from the Hebrew and Yiddish word for a gravedigger suggests that the dance’s origins may lie in the customs of medieval gravediggers’ guilds.
A song of Spanish provenance which perhaps accompanied a 14th-century dance of death is quoted by Ursprung (p.155), but the earliest music that can definitely be linked with the dance is a Mattasin oder Toden Tantz in August Nörmiger’s Tabulaturbuch auff dem Instrumente (1598). The 19th-century tradition of the dance of death as a midnight revel by resurrected skeletons drew its impetus largely from Goethe’s poem Der Todtentanz. It was this, together with Andrea di Cione’s fresco The Triumph of Death in the Campo Santo, Pisa, that inspired Liszt’s Totentanz for piano and orchestra (1849), and Goethe’s version of the dance is echoed in Adolphe Adam’s ballet Giselle (1841). Saint-Saëns’s symphonic poem Danse macabre (1874) was originally projected as a setting of a well-known poem by Henry Cazalis, similar to Goethe’s, in which Death is represented as a gruesome fiddler of dance-tunes. Both Liszt and Saint-Saëns used the plainchant Dies irae, which in other music has assumed a macabre character of more general significance; it reappears in Mahler’s Das klagende Lied (1880–99) and in Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre (1978), both of which are loosely connected with the oldest traditions of the dance of death.
F. Douce: The Dance of Death Exhibited in Elegant Engravings on Wood etc. (London, 1833)
J.-G. Kastner: Les danses des morts (Paris, 1852)
A. Dürrwächter: ‘Die Totentanzforschung’, Festschrift Georg von Hertling (Kempten, 1913)
O. Ursprung: ‘Spanisch-katalanische Liedkunst des 14. Jahrhunderts’, ZMw, iv (1921–2), 136–60
G. Buchheit: Der Totentanz: seine Entstehung und Entwicklung (Leipzig, 1926)
H. Stegemeier: The Dance of Death in Folksong (Chicago, 1939)
J.M. Clark: The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Glasgow, 1950) [with full bibliography]
H. Rosenfeld: Der mittelalterliche Totentanz (Münster and Cologne, 1954)
W. Salmen: ‘Mittelalterliche Totentanzweisen’, Mf, ix (1956), 189–90
K. Meyer-Baer: Music of the Spheres and the Dance of Death (Princeton, NJ, 1970/R)
R. Hammerstein: Tanz und Musik des Todes: die mittelalterlichen Totentänze und ihr Nachleben (Berne and Munich, 1980)
J. Michel: ‘Tanz und Teufel: zu ausgewählten Musikdarstellungen mittelalterlicher Sakralkunst am Oberrhein’, Musik am Oberrhein (Kassel, 1993), 13–29
B. Schmid: ‘“Nam musica est etiam philosophia: meditatio mortis continua”: Totentanz und Tod in der Musik’, Musik in Bayern, no.53 (1997), 77–99
MALCOLM BOYD