A fine
reserve of poetic temper saved him from hysterical excess. He never lost
the music in the story, disdaining the mere rude graphic stroke; in his
dramatic symbols a musical charm is ever commingled. And a like poise
helped him to a right plot and point in his descriptions. So his
symphonic poems must ever be enjoyed mainly for the music, with perhaps
a revery upon the poetic story. With a less brilliant vein of melody,
though they are not so Promethean in reach as those of Liszt, they are
more complete in the musical and in the narrative effect.
_DANSE MACABRE_
Challenged for a choice among the works of the versatile composer, we
should hit upon the _Danse Macabre_ as the most original, profound and
essentially beautiful of all. It is free from certain lacks that one
feels in other works, with all their charm,--a shallowness and almost
frivolity; a facility of theme approaching the commonplace.
There is here an eccentric quality of humor, a daemonic conceit that
reach the height of other classic expression of the supernatural.
The music is founded upon certain lines of a poem of _Henri Calais_
(under a like title), that may be given as follows:
Zig-a-zig, zig-a-zig-a-zig,
Death knocks on the tomb with rhythmic heel.
Zig-a-zig, zig-a-zig-zig,
Death fiddles at midnight a ghostly reel.
The winter wind whistles, dark is the night;
Dull groans behind the lindens grow loud;
Back and forth fly the skeletons white,
Running and leaping each under his shroud.
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