Dance of Death large national orchestra. Camille Saint-Saens

A medieval allegorical drama, the plot of which unequivocally alludes to the mortality of every person - the Dance of Death. Its roots go back centuries and have long been lost among the works of antiquity, many of which, if they have survived to this day, are certainly not on public display. He began to gain nationwide popularity at the turn of the 10th and 11th centuries, when the end of the world was expected in Europe. But the end of the world did not come, but Macabre continued to exist in the form of musical works, poetry and, of course, painting.

Death will overtake everyone. The proximity of death in the past pushed people into the arms of God's representatives on Earth, and even today it fills the ranks of followers of certain religious cults. That is why the Vatican officially approved Macabre, whose images began to appear in the design of Catholic churches and on the canvases of prominent artists of that era.

The term itself - Macabre - owes its appearance to the scenes of the Dances of Death with the participation of the seven Maccabee brothers, their mother Solomonia and the elder Eleazar, whose martyrdom is described in the biblical Second Book of Maccabees and whose images were actively used in this ritual performance. The Dance of Death itself was originally a dramatic performance in which the personified Death in verse addressed a certain number of people, usually 24, in turn.

Dances of death were performed throughout Europe, but gained the greatest popularity in Germany. Painters of the Middle Ages and contemporary artists People: Konrad Witz, Bernt Notke, Lovis Corinth, Ernst Barlach, Frans Masereel and many others. The literary tradition of the Dances of Death was originally a work folk thought- poems and prose on this topic were composed by unknown craftsmen and scattered to all corners of the Old World. Later, such classics as Baudelaire and Goege, as well as our contemporaries - A. Blok, Bryusov, Bernhard Kellerman, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King addressed this topic.

In the musical tradition, the Dances of Death inspired Mussorgsky and Shostakovich. In the 20th century, Macabre got into the cinema and on theater stage. And the popularity of this story is not surprising. Since we are all mortal and Macabre once again reminds us of this, motivating us to live here and now, not chasing the illusory probable future. And of course, to think about the soul, which still lives and lives, in contrast to the mortal body, which it inhabits only for a short period of time.

“Yes, man is mortal, but that would be half the trouble. The bad thing is that he sometimes suddenly dies, that's the trick! Woland

Truth appears as a fact ©

Dance of Death (modified post)

The dance of death (German Totentanz, English Dance of Death, French Danse macabre, Italian Danza macabra, Spanish Danza de la muerte) is an allegorical plot of painting and literature of the Middle Ages, representing one of the variants of the European iconography of death and the frailty of human existence: personified Death leads a chain of figures to the grave, including a king and a monk, a young man, a girl and others.

The first Dances of Death, which appeared in the 1370s, were a series of rhyming mottos that served as captions for drawings and paintings. They were created up to the 16th century, but their archetypes date back to the ancient Latin tradition.

art
* Konrad Witz (1440)
* Bernt Notke (1477)
* Guyot Marchand (1486)
* Michael Wohlgemuth (1493)
* Holbein the Younger (1538)
* Alfred Rethel (1848)
* Max Slevogt (1896)
* Otto Dix (1917)
* Alfred Kubin (1918)
* Lovis Corinth (1921)
* Frans Masereel (1941)
Literature
The ballad Dance of Death (1815) is by Goethe. Baudelaire (1857), Rilke (poem Dance of Death, 1907), Gustav Meyrink (1908), August Strindberg, Eden von Horvat (1932), B. Brecht (1948) also addressed the plot.
Stephen King used the name "Dance of Death" for his review of works (books and films) of the horror genre.
Music
* Franz Liszt (1849, inspired by a fresco by Orcagni in Santa Croce, Florence)
* Camille Saint-Saens (1874)
* Modest Mussorgsky, Songs and Dances of Death (1875-1877)
* Arnold Schoenberg (1914)
* Benjamin Britten, op. 14 (1939)
* Frank Martin, Dance of Death in Basel (1943)
* Dmitri Shostakovich, op.67 (1944)
* Viktor Ullmann (1944)
* George Krum, Black Angels, Part 1 (1971)

Death-friend brings liberation. The old bell ringer has died, and Death, having climbed the bell tower, rings the bell, doing its work.

Even more serious and terrifying is the image of death in the suite “Another “Dance of Death””, dedicated to the events of the armed struggle of 1848. Here death solemnly appears before the people in a long cloak, on a horse. Her appearance brings joy and hope. She weighs the pipe and the crown on the scales, passes the sword of justice to the rebels, then holds the banner of the uprising, fearlessly towering on the barricades. Finally, satisfied, she leaves on the apocalyptic horse, among the fallen, wounded, crying. The omnipotence, the sizzling power of Death, its deceit and cunning are not limited by anything, all earthly, finite life is infinitely subject to it alone. And there is no more saving laughter, it was lost in the depths of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Life and Death are not a single whole, in the world of Retel they oppose each other, death is only death, only death and destruction, it does not give rise to anything new that would cause joy and laughter. She leaves, leaving behind only corpses, horror and fear.

Kuznetsova V.V.

Kyosai
Jigoku Dayu (The Hell Courtesan)
Series Kyosai Rakuga - Kyosai's Amusing Pictures
Date 1874

In the church of Niguliste in the chapel of St. Anthony is the preserved part of the imposing painting "Dance of Death". It belongs to the brush of the famous Lübeck artist Bernt Notke.

The painting depicts a chain of people from different classes of society, from the pope to the baby, and figures of Death dancing next to them, calling people to dance. The artist initially created two identical paintings, one of them was destroyed in Lübeck during the Second World War, only a fragment of this masterpiece was preserved in Tallinn. This very impressive 15th-century painting is valued at $100 million (1.8 billion EEK).

Niguliste Church - here are three of the four most significant preserved in Estonia works of art middle ages. This church, built in the 13th century, was once the center of the religious life of the Lower City. Today it is a museum and a concert hall at the same time.

Niguliste Church, named after the patron saint of all sailors - St. Nicholas, was built by German merchants who moved to Tallinn from the island of Gotland. The church acquired its original appearance in the 13th century and in those ancient times looked more like a fortification.

In subsequent centuries, the church building was rebuilt and completed more than once. special attention deserves the late Gothic chapel of Anthony at the south side of the church and the northern aisle in the Renaissance style. The Niguliste Church is the only sacral building in the Lower City that did not undergo the devastation that accompanied the Lutheran Reformation of 1523: the cunning parish warden ordered all church locks to be filled with lead - and the angry mob simply did not get inside. In the 20th century, the Niguliste church was badly damaged: first from the bombing in the spring of 1944, and then after a big fire in 1982, immediately after the restoration work was completed.

The main altar to Niguliste was made in 1482 by the famous Lübeck master Hermen Rode, and the altar of the Virgin Mary of the end of the 15th century, which belonged to the Brotherhood of the Blackheads, was made by an unknown author from the Dutch city of Bruges. However, according to some reports, the altar was made in the workshop of the artist Hans Memling.

In addition, a unique collection of silver items belonging to the church, guilds, workshops and the Brotherhood of Blackheads is stored in Nigulista.

Currently, organ music concerts are held in the hall of the Niguliste church, famous for its excellent acoustics.

Negro skeleton?

Dances of death: iconography, text, reflection

Etymology of the phrase "danse macabre"

I. Ioffe (Russian historian, art critic) believes that the word "la danse" is used here not so much in its derivative and later meaning of "peaceful march", "round dance", "whirling", "pastoral", but in its original meaning " wrestling, fights, fights. Indeed, in the dictionary of modern French, in addition to the commonly used meanings of the word "la danse" - "dance", "dance", - you can find another meaning inherent in it in a colloquial context, the meaning of "fight", "battle", "fight", the meaning , which completely coincide with the one attributed to him by I. Ioffe. A new etymological interpretation allows the Russian researcher to explain differently hidden meaning, concluded in the phrase "danse macabre" he analyzes, is the union and mutual conditioning of fun and sorrow. The phrase "dance of death" indicates the connection of death with feast: feast, wrestling, syncretic sports, the connection "the idea of death with the idea of regeneration and rebirth", the connection that death is associated with plentiful food and drink during the commemoration.
Unlike I. Ioffe, F. Aries (French historian) analyzes the last component of the phrase "danse macabre". Aries offers the following etymology for the term of interest to him: "From my point of view, it had the same meaning as the word macchabee in modern French in native language which retains many ancient sayings. There is nothing surprising in the fact that by the beginning of the XIV century. The “dead body” (the word “corpse” was not used at all then) began to be called by the name of St. Maccabees: they have long been revered as patrons of the dead, because it was believed ... that it was they who invented intercession prayers for the dead. The memory of the connection of the Maccabees with the cult of the dead lived for a long time in popular piety.

P.a. S.i is associated with the medieval iconography of the theme of death, where death appears in the form of a mummified corpse, a reaper, a bird-catcher, a hunter with an arquebus. Such images of death are combined into an independent myth-poetic series, separate from the dogma of Christianity and partly duplicating the functions of its characters (for example, Death-judge on the portals of Paris, Amiens and Reims cathedrals instead of judge-Christ). In other cases, most of them, images of death are based on the biblical narrative (Death defeated - I Cor. 15, 55; rider Death - Rev. 6, 8; 14, 14-20). The theme of P. and S. and developed in penitential literature under the influence of the preaching of Franciscan and Dominican monasticism. In the "Legend of the Three Living and Three Dead", XII century, the poem "I will die" of the XIII century. and other monuments, the main thematic and stylistic features of the future P. and S. and. The “Legend” is a poetic commentary on a book miniature: in the midst of a hunt, the princes meet half-decomposed dead on a forest path, they turn to them with a sermon about the frailty of life, the vanity of the world, the insignificance of power and glory, and call him to repentance. The dead was what the living is now, and the living will become what the dead is.
Actually, the P. and S. genre originated in Central Germany. The original text created by a Würzburg Dominican c. 1350, was soon translated into Middle High German: each Latin distich of the original began to correspond to a pair of quatrains put into the mouth of the skeleton and the newly deceased. There are 24 characters in total: pope, emperor, empress, king, cardinal, patriarch, archbishop, duke, bishop, count, abbot, knight, lawyer, choirmaster, doctor, nobleman, lady, merchant, nun, cripple, cook, peasant, child and his mother.

From penitential literature, Wurzburg P. and S. borrowed the principle of correlating textual and illustrative series, as well as composition - a sequence of recitatives of various characters. But unlike "I will die", recitatives are now pronounced not by living people, but by the dead, forcibly involved in a nightly dance in a cemetery. Their partners are the messengers of Death - skeletons. Death Himself accompanies them on a wind instrument (fistula tartarea). In later editions, in particular the Paris edition of 1485, it is replaced by an orchestra of the dead, consisting of a piper, drummer, lute player and harmonist. The afterlife ordeal of the souls of sinners begins with an infernal dance, which, therefore, is depicted not as “going through the torment”, but in the form of a festive pantomime, which points to one of the sources of P. and S. and to the areal pantomime (German: Reigen, lat. .chorea).

The sad distichs of the newly deceased go back to the same ditty basis as the fervent parts of fools-sloths-liers; it is no coincidence that the accessories of the carnival fool-Harlequin include signs of death.

Having a complex, partly ritual, partly literary origin, the Wurzburg P.a.S.i arose as a reaction to the plague epidemic of 1348. Dozens of sinners suddenly torn out of life participate in P.e.S.i; they are drawn into a round dance by the music of Death: Fistula tartarea vos jungit in una chorea. Over the following centuries, the connection between P. and S. and plague epidemics was indispensable, although every time spontaneous. Being a response to a nationwide disaster, the Wurzburg P. and S. is connected with the preaching of repentance, but death kills everyone, regardless of the way of life.

Under the pressure of the elements, every seemingly unconditional and objective causality, the very semantic system of culture, collapses. “Why pray?” asks a Latin P.i.S. nun. “Have my chants helped?” the nun of the German translation echoes her.
In the third quarter of the XIV century. Dominican miniatures appear in France and reach Paris. On their basis, in 1375, a new version of P. and S. and. Its author is a member of the Paris Parliament Jean Le Fevre, a poet and translator who miraculously escaped death during the epidemic of 1374. Le Fevre translated an unpreserved edition of the Latin dialogic P. and S. and. Like any medieval translation, P.a. S. and Le Fevre is a fairly radical revision of the original. Of the former characters, 14 were left and 16 new ones were introduced, including the constable, the judge, the master, the usurer, the Carthusian monk, the juggler and the dandy. In P.e S.i, written not by a church, but by a secular author, Paris of the 14th century is reflected. - a metropolitan, commercial, university city, a place of congestion of churches and monasteries, a center of fun and all kinds of entertainment. Unlike P. and S. and from Würzburg, this contains a sharp criticism of the mores of the clergy. If the German translator was interested in the afterlife, then the French one is focused on the life of the sinner in this world. The measure of life is death. Before her face, the undead, but dying man of the Parisian P. and S. and is aware of the vanity and futility of his attempts and aspirations. The work of Jean LeFevre has not been preserved in its original form as a handwritten miniature. However, his text series was captured on the frescoes of the cemetery of the Parisian Franciscan monastery of the Innocent Infants (1424/1425), which are known to us from engraving copies of the 15th century.

In Italy, images were not of dance, but of the triumph of Death. One of these images are the frescoes of the Pisan cemetery of Campo Santo, written under the influence of the plague of 1348. However, the triumph of Death was sometimes combined with her dance. An example of this is the two-tier composition in Cluson, near Bergamo (1486).

A different picture has developed in Spain, where "P.a S.i" appears long before the acquaintance with the text of Le Fevre and in the form of a plot that is by no means iconographic: accompanied by the Latin song "We will die", "P.u S.i" is danced in Catalonia ser. 14th century in the cemetery near the church. In the second half of the XV century. already under the influence of the text of Jean Le Fevre, P.a. S.i. proper appears in Spain. It develops the usual medieval culture the opposition of the folklore quasi-genre and its refined canon, worked out in the circles of the burgher cultural elite. The canon is foreign-oriented and rooted in local tradition at the same time. The Spanish P. and S. includes 33 characters, among them - alms and tax collectors, a subdeacon, a deacon, an archdeacon, a gatekeeper, a cashier, a Jewish rabbi and a Mauritanian high priest. In contrast to the German and French translations, in the Spanish P.e.S.i there reigns not the spirit of despair and humility, but the spirit of disagreement and opposition.

In the history of German P. and S. and a special place is occupied by frescoes painted ca. 1484 at the Marienkirche in Berlin. The pathos of the Berlin work is the overcoming of death. The Berlin frescoes demonstrate the gradual ingrowth of the medieval mythology of death into the mythological system of Christianity. If earlier epidemics and mass deaths of people were described in terms of a different, albeit rudimentary, mytho-poetic series, now they are comprehended in terms of Christian doctrine. The messengers of Death - skeletons - become a rudiment, Death as a character is abolished, it is replaced by Christ.

The two-century history of P. and S. and ends with a cycle of engravings by Hans Holbein the Younger (1523-1526). Holbein created that summing up image of P. and S. and which, obscuring the history of the genre itself, entered the European and world culture like its classic incarnation. The cycle of Holbein the Younger, consisting of 40 images, is based on the Greater and Lesser Basel P.ah S.i.
Holbein the Younger created his masterpiece, based on principles that negate the ideological basis of the medieval P. and S. and. Being reduced to pure negation, the image of Death loses its traditional mythological semantics and goes beyond the scope of the set of meanings within which it once existed and which is depicted in medieval iconography. The skeleton turns not only into the ultimate personification of death, but also into its abstract allegory. Usually, death figured in church and cemetery frescoes as a social event, and not only as a mass phenomenon during epidemics, but also as an object of collective attention and reflection. In Holbein's private viewing cycle, death becomes a private matter. Such a shift is based on some moments of painting technique, namely the manner of illustrators of the 16th century. to break the round dance of the dead into separate pairs. This, however, was superimposed on the Renaissance individualization of a person and on his heightened experience of his personal fate. Holbein's engravings are characterized by the aestheticization of the theme. The approach of death turns into a reason to extract the maximum artistic effect from it - for example, by comparing the dryish plasticity of the skeleton with the plasticity draped in fabric human body. In contrast to a long tradition, the illustrative row completely obscures the text.

Traditions of the image of death

The emergence of a personified image with a disgusting and frightening appearance marked not only a new stage in the attitude towards death, but also a new phase in the development of late medieval consciousness. J. Huizinga and I. Ioffe understand the meaning of this phase in different ways. According to Huizinga, the appearance of the skeletal appearance of death is associated with the formation of a new manneristic aesthetics, main principle which, admiring the ugly, obtaining sensual pleasure from the contemplation of the disgusting and terrible, was the expression psychological state European at the turn of the XV-XVI centuries. Up to the XV century. on engravings and frescoes, death is almost impossible to distinguish from other characters in the image without reading the captions. The image of death in the form of a pale horseman becomes the most popular over time, however, it is worth comparing the images of death on the miniature of Saint-Sever (XI century) with the engraving of 1488 by A. Dürer to understand how the iconography of death is changing.

Causes

In the works of J. Huizinga, I. Ioffe and F. Aries, the comprehension of the iconography of death is closely connected with the interpretation of the plot action "danse macabre". In the very fact of the appearance of the engraving series "Dance of Death" J. Huizinga sees a symptom of the crisis attitude of a medieval person, fear of life, fear of beauty, because, in his mind, pain and suffering are associated with it. The popularity of "Macabric" symbols in the era of the "autumn of the Middle Ages" by J. Huizinga explains the cruelty of the Hundred Years' War and plague epidemics, the worst of which, the "Black Death" of 1347-53, claimed the lives of more than 24 million people.
F. Aries, on the contrary, sees in the demonstration of images of skeletons and rotting corpses a kind of counterbalance to the thirst for life, which found expression in the increased role of the will, which, among other things, provides for a magnificent funeral and numerous funeral masses. Sweeping aside any socio-political and ideological motivation in the "dance of death", F. Aries summarizes his conclusions in the following way: "The art of" macabre "was not ... an expression of a particularly strong experience of death in an era of great epidemics and a great economic crisis. It was also not just a means for preachers to inspire fear of hellish torments and call for contempt for all worldly and deep faith. Images death and decay express neither the fear of death nor the fear of the other world, even if they were used to achieve this effect. We tend to see in these images a sign of passionate love for the world here, on earth, and the painful consciousness of death, to which every person is doomed" .

Dance of death

Dictionary of medieval culture. M., 2003, p. 360-364

DANCE OF DEATH (German Totentanz, French dance macabre, Spanish danza de la muerte, Dutch dooden dans, Italian ballo della morte, English dance of death), a synthetic genre that existed in European culture from the middle. XIV to the first half of the XVI century. and representing an iconographic plot accompanied by a poetic commentary, the dance of skeletons by the newly deceased.

The dance of death is associated with the medieval iconography of the theme of death, where death appears in the form of a mummified corpse, a reaper, a bird-catcher, a hunter with an arquebus. Such images of death are combined into an independent myth-poetic series, separate from the dogma of Christianity and partly duplicating the functions of its characters (for example, Death-judge on the portals of Paris, Amiens and Reims cathedrals instead of judge-Christ). In other cases, most of them, the medieval emblematics of death is based on the biblical narrative (Death defeated - I Cor. 15, 55; rider Death - Rev. 6, 8; 14, 14-20). The theme of the Dance of Death developed in penitential literature under the influence of the preaching of Franciscan and Dominican monasticism. In the "Legend of the Three Living and Three Dead", XII century, the poem "I will die" of the XIII century. and other monuments, the main thematic and stylistic features of the future Dance of Death were formulated. "Legend" is a poetic commentary on a book miniature: in the midst of a riot, the princes meet half-decayed dead on a forest path, they turn to them with a sermon about the frailty of life, the vanity of the world, the insignificance of power and glory
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and call to repentance; once the dead was what the living is now, the living will be what the dead has become. As for the other mentioned text, it is not connected with the pictorial series, nevertheless its narrative structure is extremely close to the narrative and pictorial structure of the Dance of Death. Each of the Latin distichs - a king, a pope, a bishop, a knight, a tournament herald, a doctor, a logician, an old man, a young man, a rich judge, a lucky man, a young nobleman, etc. - is framed by the formula "I'm going to death": "I'm going to death, King. What honors? What is the glory of the world? // Death's royal path. Now I'm going to death... / I'm going to death, beautiful face. Beauty and decoration // Death will erase without mercy. I'm on my way to death now...

Actually the genre of the Dance of Death originated in Central Germany. The original text created by a Würzburg Dominican c. 1350, was soon translated into Middle High German: each Latin distich of the original began to correspond to a pair of quatrains put into the mouth of the skeleton and the newly deceased. There are 24 characters in total: pope, emperor, empress, king, cardinal, patriarch, archbishop, duke, bishop, count, abbot, knight, lawyer, choirmaster, doctor, nobleman, lady, merchant, nun, cripple, cook, peasant, child and his mother. From penitential literature, the Wurzburg Dance of Death borrowed the principle of correlating textual and illustrative series, as well as composition - a sequence of recitatives of various characters. But unlike "I will die", recitatives are now pronounced not by living people, but by the dead, forcibly involved in a nightly dance in a cemetery. Their partners are the messengers of Death - skeletons. Death herself accompanies them on a wind instrument (fistula tartarea). In later editions, in particular the Paris edition of 1485, it is replaced by an orchestra of the dead, consisting of a piper, drummer, lute player and harmonist. The afterlife ordeal of the souls of sinners begins with an infernal dance, which, therefore, is depicted not in the spirit of visionary literature, as “going through torment”, but in the form of a festive pantomime, which indicates as one of the sources of the Dance of Death to the areal pantomime (German: Reigen, lat chorea). The sad distichs of the newly deceased go back to the same ditty basis as the fervent parts of fools-sloths-liers; it is no coincidence that the accessories of the carnival fool-Harlequin include signs of death.

Having a complex, partly ritual, partly literary origin, the Würzburg Dance of Death arose as a reaction to the plague of 1348. Dozens of sinners suddenly pulled out of life participate in the Dance of Death; they are drawn into a round dance by the music of Death: Fistula tartarea vos jungit in una chorea. Over the following centuries, the connection between the Dance of Death and plague epidemics was indispensable, although spontaneous every time. As a response to a nationwide disaster, the Würzburg Dance of Death is connected with the preaching of repentance, but death kills everyone, regardless of the way of life: the judge’s hook and the “beloved of the church” cardinal, the merchant who makes capital and the “father monks” abbot; she spares neither the secular lady, nor the nun of the monastery, who has served God all her life. Under the pressure of the elements, every seemingly unconditional and objective causality, the very semantic system of culture, collapses. “Why pray?” asks the nun of the Latin Dance of Death. “Have my chants helped?” the nun of the German translation echoes her.

The Würzburg Dance of Death spreads in the second half of the XIV - early. 15th century throughout Germany, originally - in the form of parchment strips-scrolls measuring 50 by 150 cm ( Spruchband) or parchment sheets containing two or three dozen brands of parchment sheets in folio ( Bilderbogen), and is used in the manner of Latin exempl a - as an aid in preaching. Publishers and collectors of the 16th-16th centuries give dances of death the new kind- illustrated folk book (Blochbuch). At the same time, the round dance of the dead is divided in pairs, and each pair is given a separate page.

In the third quarter of the XIV century. Dominican miniatures appear in France and reach Paris. Based on them, in 1375 a new version of the Dance of Death was created. Its author is a member of the Paris Parliament Jean Le Fevre, a poet and translator who miraculously escaped death during the epidemic of 1374. Le Fevre translated an unpreserved edition of the Latin dialogue Dance of Death. Like any medieval translation, Le Fevre's Dance of Death presents
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A fairly radical reworking of the original. Of the former characters, 14 were left and 16 new ones were introduced, including the constable, the judge, the master, the usurer, the Carthusian monk, the juggler and the dandy. In the Dance of Death, written not by a church, but by a secular author, Paris of the 14th century is reflected. - a metropolitan, commercial, university city, a place of congestion of churches and monasteries, a center of fun and all kinds of entertainment. In contrast to the Dance of Death from Wurzburg, it contains a sharp criticism of the mores of the spiritual class: Le Fevre confronts the hierarchical status of his characters with their human weakness and depravity. The cardinal regrets the loss of rich clothes, the patriarch gives up his dream of becoming a pope, the abbot says goodbye to a profitable abbey, the Dominican admits that he has sinned a lot and repented little, a monk will no longer become a prior, a priest will not receive payment for the funeral, etc. If the German translator was interested in the afterlife, then the French one is focused on the life of the sinner in this world. The measure of life is death. Before her face, the undead, but dying man of Parisian P. and S. and is aware of the vanity and futility of his attempts and aspirations. The work of Jean LeFevre has not been preserved in its original form as a handwritten miniature. However, his text series was captured on the frescoes of the cemetery of the Parisian Franciscan monastery of the Innocently Murdered Infants (1424/1425), which are known to us from engraving copies of the 15th century.

The French Dance of Death stands at the origins of this genre in England and Italy. During the English occupation of Paris, the frescoes of the Cemetery of the Innocent Infants were repainted by the monk John Lydgate. A few years later, ca. 1440, The dance of death appears in London, on the cemetery wall of the monastery of St. Paul, and later in one of the parish churches of Stratford. In the Tower there was a tapestry with woven silhouettes of the newly deceased and skeletons. In Italy, images were not of dance, but of the triumph of Death. One of these images are the frescoes of the Pisan cemetery of Campo Santo, written under the influence of the plague of 1348. However, the triumph of Death was sometimes combined with her dance. An example of this is the two-tier composition in Cluson, near Bergamo (1486).

A different picture has developed in Spain, where the “Dance of Death” appears long before the acquaintance with the text of Le Fevre and in the form of a plot that is by no means iconographic: accompanied by the Latin song “We will die”, the “Dance of Death” is danced in Catalonia ser. 14th century in the cemetery near the church. In the second half of the XV century. already under the influence of the text of Jean Le Fevre, the Dance of Death itself appears in Spain. The opposition between the folklore quasi-genre and its refined canon developed in the circles of the burgher cultural elite, which is usual for medieval culture, is emerging. The canon is foreign-oriented and rooted in local tradition at the same time. The Spanish Dance of Death includes 33 characters, among them - alms and tax collectors, a subdeacon, a deacon, an archdeacon, a gatekeeper, a cashier, a Jewish rabbi and a Moorish high priest. Unlike the German and French translations, in the Spanish Dance of Death there is not a spirit of despair and humility, but a spirit of disagreement and opposition. The pope prays for the intercession of Christ and the Virgin Mary, the king gathers a squad, the constable orders to saddle the horse, the dandy calls on the lady of the heart to help. The cry of the victorious Death is heard over the troubled world. She draws into the round dance "all living people of any class."

The dance of death was most widespread in Germany. In the XV century. three varieties of it arose here - Upper, Lower and Middle German. High German is represented primarily by the Dance of Death from Metnitz (1490, crypt wall) and Ulm (1440, gallery of the monastery courtyard); both works are closely related to the Würzburg dialogic text. The Basel Dances of Death were exceptionally popular in medieval Europe - the Big (façade of the Dominican monastery, c. 1440) and the Small (covered gallery in the convent of Klingenthal, 1450). Many artists of the 15th-16th centuries were inspired by them; in particular, the penitential orientation of the Great Dance of Death is developed in the Bernese frescoes by Niklaus Manuel (1516-1519). Being a decorative element of architectural structures, Basel frescoes played an important role in the construction of the monastic and urban space.
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In the second half of the XV century. in the coastal cities of Germany, another, Low German version of the Dance of Death arose. The Lübeck P.a.S. was completed in August 1463, during the days of the most severe plague epidemic that affected the entire north of Germany. The artist Bernt Nottke depicted the Dance of Death on canvas stretched along the inner walls of the Marienkirche. The dance of death has become one of those mystical Andachtsbilder, whose naturalism evokes horror mixed with empathy in the pleading. Of the 30 characters Le Fevre Nottke left only 22, which he added with two new ones, the duke and the duchess.

In the history of the German Dance of Death, a special place is occupied by frescoes painted ca. 1484 at the Marienkirche in Berlin. Located on adjacent walls, they fall into two rows: a row of clergy - from the clerk to the pope, and a row of laity - from the emperor to the jester. The highest representatives of the church and secular hierarchies are near the crucifix placed in the corner; The round dance of the newly deceased does not move as usual, from left to right, but is directed towards its center, towards Christ. The dance of death is opened by a preacher, "a brother of the order of St. Francis." Instead of a musical death, a devil with a bagpipe perched under his pulpit.

Emphasizing his sympathy for the poor and the small of this world, the anonymous author of the Berlin Dance of Death contrasts them with those in power and the rich. If in the Lübeck work diverse human life activity is integrated into the image of a divinely ordered world, then the Berlin work considers it in a narrowly ascetic plane. The author is not interested in the actual nature of the activity, its principles, goals, social significance; he is only interested in its ethical properties: how it looks in the eyes of the Creator, and whether it is good deed by which faith is alive. In the Dance of Death in the Marienkirche in Berlin, one can feel not dryly rational Dominican religiosity, but Franciscan religiosity, spontaneously emotional. From Christian activity, from merits before God, the emphasis is shifted to God's mercy. “Help, Jesus, let me not be lost!”, “Jesus and all the saints are with me!”, “May the power of God and Jesus Christ help me!”, “O Christ, do not let me fall away from you!”, the newly deceased exclaim in response to the call of the Crucified: "Enter with me into the round dance of the dead!". The pathos of the Berlin work is the overcoming of death. The Berlin frescoes demonstrate the gradual ingrowth of the medieval mythology of death into the mythological system of Christianity. If earlier epidemics and mass deaths of people were described in terms of a different, albeit rudimentary, mytho-poetic series, now they are comprehended in terms of Christian doctrine. Messengers of Death - skeletons -

become a vestige, Death as a character is abolished, it is replaced by Christ.

Unlike other regional varieties of the Dance of Death, the Middle German existed only in handwritten and printed form. Imprinted on expensive parchment, decorated with rich gilding, it is executed in the style of Burgundian-Flemish book illumination. According to the outfits of the newly deceased participating in it, the Dance of Death dates back to approximately 1460. All editions of the Middle German Dance of Death - Heidelberg (1485), Mainz (1492) and Munich (c. 1510) - date back to one hypothetical source. It was, apparently, a printed or handwritten sheet, consisting of five rows of stamps. The contrasting of the clergy with the lay classes, criticism of the white clergy, the Dominican and Benedictine orders, as well as an appeal to God's mercy instead of the usual call for the awareness of sin and the fight against it - all this allows us to attribute the Middle German version to the Franciscan spiritual tradition.

The two-century history of the Dance of Death ends with a cycle of engravings by Hans Holbein the Younger (1523-1526). Holbein created that summing up image of the Dance of Death, which, having obscured the history of the genre itself, entered European and world culture as its classical incarnation. The cycle of Holbein the Younger, consisting of 40 images, is based on the Greater and Lesser Basel Paragraphs of S.i; it was published in 1538 in the form of a small "commemorative book". The engravings were supplied with French couplets-
363

mi, written by Gilles Corroze, and Latin quotations from the Bible, specially selected by Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Holbein the Younger created his masterpiece, based on principles that deny the ideological basis of the medieval Dance of Death. He introduces Death into the halls of the Renaissance world, thereby exposing its illusory well-being and false harmony. Being reduced to pure negation, the image of Death loses its traditional mythological semantics and goes beyond the scope of the set of meanings within which it once existed and which is depicted in medieval iconography. The skeleton turns not only into the ultimate personification of death, but also into its abstract allegory. Usually, death figured in church and cemetery frescoes as a social event, and not only as a mass phenomenon during epidemics, but also as an object of collective attention and reflection. In Holbein's private viewing cycle, death becomes a private matter. Such a shift is based on some moments of painting technique, namely the manner of illustrators of the 16th century. to break the round dance of the dead into separate pairs. This, however, was superimposed on the Renaissance individualization of a person and on his heightened experience of his personal fate. Holbein's engravings are characterized by the aestheticization of the theme. The approach of death turns into a reason to extract the maximum artistic effect from it - for example, by comparing the dry plasticity of the skeleton with the plasticity of the human body draped in tissue. In contrast to a long tradition, the illustrative row completely obscures the text. The comment recedes into the background and is perceived as an auxiliary or completely optional means. The old balance is crumbling. From a religious-magical work, the Dance of Death becomes a work of art. These metamorphoses reflected the profound changes that took place in the public consciousness.

Literature

Nesselstrauss Ts.G. "Dance of death" in Western European art of the XV century. as a theme of the turn of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance // Culture of the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. M., 1993; Sinyukov V.D. The theme of the Triumph of Death. On the question of the relationship between symbol and allegory in the art of the late European Middle Ages and the Italian Trecento // Art and Culture of Italy of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. M., 1997

C. G Nesselstrauss

"Dance of death" in Western European art of the XV century.

as a theme of the turn of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Culture of the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. M., 1993, p.141-14 8

(abbreviated)

The theme of death as a leitmotif pervades Western European culture second half of the XIV-XV centuries. It sounds in the literature of different genres and directions - from Petrarch's "Triumphs" and "Bohemian farmer" Johann von Saatz to Savonarola's sermons and Sebastian Brant's "Ship of Fools", from Eustache Deschamps' poems to Pierre Chatelain's "Mirror of Death" and Francois Villon's poetry. In the visual tradition, not a single century in the history of European artistic culture did not give rise to such an abundance of motives related to the theme of death, as the 15th century. In frescoes, altar painting, sculpture, book miniatures, woodcuts, engravings on copper, we constantly meet the plots of "Three dead and three living", "The triumph of death", "Dance of death", "The art of dying". The theme of death also widely penetrates into the illustrations of early printed publications - various kinds of leaflets, religious and didactic writings, as well as into works of secular literature: an example is the engraving "Imago mortis" with dancing skeletons in the "World Chronicle" by Hartmann Schedel. Death appears here as an old woman with a scythe, flying above the ground on membranous wings. bat, then in the form of the dead with the remnants of flesh on the bones, then in the form of skeletons. Triumphant dances of skeletons, the pursuit of people by the dead, endless round dances, where the dead involve the living, the grimacing skulls of the cemetery ossuaries, chilling pictures of decay - such is the incomplete repertoire of makarbic images in the art of the second half of the 14th-15th centuries.

In the extensive literature devoted to the "Dances of Death" the question of the reasons for such a wide distribution of these plots has been raised more than once. Undoubtedly, the immediate cause was the many disasters that befell Europe - plague epidemics, which periodically devastated cities from 1348, the Hundred Years War, famine, the invasion of the Turks< ...>And yet, for all the catastrophic nature of the disasters, they were more of an excuse than the reason for such a widespread theme of death in the visual arts of the 15th century. It seems to me that the modern French historian Jean Delumeau is right when he considers the success of this topic one of the manifestations of the great fear that seized Europe at a turning point in its history. Then the seemingly unshakable foundations of medieval society were shaken - the papacy, whose authority was undermined by the Avignon captivity and the great schism that followed it, and the empire, whose subordination to the laws of time was demonstrated by the collapse of the thousand-year-old Byzantium and the deep crisis of the German Empire. These events were accompanied by social upheavals, the spread of heresies and reform movements, and finally, a new and most powerful outbreak of eschatological expectations, timed to coincide with 1550.

In the literature devoted to the "Dance of Death", the question of the origins of this theme was considered in detail.<...>Contrary to an extremely popular belief, the theme of death, as it appears in the literature and fine arts of the 15th century, was not inherited from the Middle Ages. In the poetry of the Middle Ages, power, might, glory are declared illusory from the standpoint of "contempt for the world", while in Villon's poems there is bitter regret about the transience of time and the transience of earthly joys.

There are even more differences in the interpretation of the theme of death in the fine arts of the Middle Ages and the 15th century. Actually, in medieval art, death, in the apt expression of Jacques Le Goff, is "the great absent" ("Among the many fears that made them [the people of the Middle Ages] tremble, the fear of death was the weakest; death is the great absent of medieval iconography"). Her images have nothing to do with the dead and skeletons of the 15th century. In the art of the Middle Ages, death appears in an ordinary human form, while the meaning of the depicted is revealed with the help of inscriptions or attributes. In most cases, this is an apocalyptic rider on a "pale horse", galloping in a row of three others. Let us refer, for example, to the miniature of the "Apocalypse" from Saint-Sever, early. XI century, where the rider on the "pale horse" is no different from his brothers. Above the rider's head is the inscription "mors" (death). Meanwhile, in Dürer's famous cycle on the same subject (1488), the rider on the "pale horse" already appears in the form of a dead man with an open belly and with a scythe in his hands, which corresponds to the characteristic of the 15th century. iconography.

<...>Death in the interpretation of the Middle Ages is an evil defeated by Christ, which is in striking contrast with the characteristic of the XIV-XV centuries. "Triumphs of death" or its depiction in the form of a queen commanding people<...>There are no frightening pictures of decay in medieval art. On the contrary, the dead, even at an advanced age, were usually depicted on tombstones young and beautiful, as they should awaken at the hour of the Last Judgment. In general, the Middle Ages preached disgust rather for living flesh than for dead<...>

The theme of decay and decay penetrates into art only at the end of the Middle Ages, in the second half of the XIV century. Apparently, at this time there was a legend about "Three dead and three alive", which tells about the meeting of three kings with their dead predecessors, who pursue them with the words: "We were like you, and you will be like us"<...>

Of all the variants of makarbic plots, the most common were in the 15th century. "Dances of Death". They are especially popular in Germany. Their literary edition appeared, apparently, at the end of the 14th century, and the pictorial version - in the first quarter of the 15th century. It is believed that one of the first paintings on this topic was the famous fresco on the wall of the gallery of the cemetery at the monastery in honor of the innocently murdered babies in Paris (the cemetery was dedicated to the babies of Bethlehem, innocently killed by King Herod, whose relics were donated to the monastery by King Louis IX)<...>It was considered an honor to bury here, and since there was always not enough space, old graves were dug up, and the bones were poured into open ossuaries, exposed to the public, who willingly visited the cemetery. This served as a clear example of universal equality before death, which was reflected in the words of Villon, who mockingly bequeathed his glasses to the blind from the Three Hundred Hospital in order to help them distinguish the bones of an honest man from the bones of a scoundrel in the cemetery of the Innocents. The idea of universal equality before death is also imbued with the idea of the mural, which consisted of a long line of dancing couples. Representatives of all classes were involved here in a round dance by their dead partners, presented in the form of skeletons with the remains of flesh and an open womb.<...>

In "Dances of Death" live echoes of pre-Christian folk beliefs about the cemetery dances of the dead<..>. These beliefs run counter to the church teaching about the separation of the soul from the body at the moment of death of a person, and for a long time were condemned as pagan. In the text of the penitential (book of repentance) of the XI century. the penitent is asked if he participated in the funeral dances invented by the pagans, who were taught this by the devil<...> .

L. Sychenkova

Iconography of the "dance of death".

One historical parallel

(abbreviated; full text see:

In this article, we will try to compare the various interpretations of the "dance of death" proposed in the works of J. Huizinga, F. Aries and the Russian culturologist I. Ioffe. Setting scientific tasks for themselves, these scientists approached the topic of interest to us from different methodological positions. No less important is the fact that they offered independent interpretations of "danse macabre" at different historical times: the Dutch culturologist J. Huizinga - in 1919, the Russian art historian I. Ioffe - in 1934-37, the French historian F. Aries - mid 1970s. .

The statements and arguments of J. Huizinga, I. Ioffe and F. Aries about the "dance of death" in essence do not go beyond the general thematic and problematic field. Historians have discussed next questions: 1) the etymology of the phrase "danse macabre"; 2) the emergence of the theme of death in medieval art; 3) "dance of death" as a funeral rite and theatrical mystery; 4) the history of the creation of a personified image of death; 5) the plot of the "dance of death" and its meaning; 6) the style of iconographic works.

The term "danse macabre" does not have a literal translation; its etymology cannot be considered definitively established. "Death" in French is "la mort", not "macabre". The history of the penetration of the word "macabre" into the French language, as well as the emergence of the strange phrase "dance of death" is still the subject of lively discussions between historians and philologists of various trends and schools.

Unlike other researchers I. Ioffe focuses not on the last word, "macabre", but on the first word of this lexeme, "la danse". The action, within the framework of which two phenomena incompatible with each other - dance and death - brought to life the centauric, oxymoronic combination of words necessary for its designation. I. Ioffe believes that the word "la danse" is used here not so much in its derivative and later meaning of "peaceful march", "round dance", "whirling", "pastoral", but in the original meaning of "struggle", "fight" , "fights". Indeed, in the dictionary of modern French, in addition to the commonly used meanings of the word "la danse" - "dance", "dance", - you can find another meaning inherent in it in a colloquial context, the meaning of "fight", "battle", "fight", the meaning , which completely coincide with the one attributed to him by I. Ioffe. The new etymological interpretation allows the Russian researcher to explain differently the hidden meaning contained in the phrase "danse macabre" he analyzes - the union and mutual conditioning of fun and sorrow. The phrase "dance of death" indicates the connection of death with feast: feast, wrestling, syncretic sports, the connection "the idea of death with the idea of regeneration and rebirth", the connection that death is associated with plentiful food and drink during the commemoration.

Unlike I. Ioffe, F. Aries analyzes the last component of the phrase "danse macabre". Aries offers the following etymology of the term of interest to him: "From my point of view, it had the same meaning as the word macchabee in modern French folk language, which retains many old sayings. There is nothing surprising in the fact that by the beginning of the XIV century. "dead body" (the word "corpse" was not used then at all) began to be called by the name of St. Maccabees: they have long been revered as the patrons of the dead, because it was believed ... that it was they who invented intercession prayers for the dead. The memory of the connection of the Maccabees with the cult of the dead lived for a long time in popular piety ".

J. Huizinga also gives his own interpretation of the word "macabre". In the 2nd half of the XIV century. the strange term "macabre or" Macabre ", as it originally sounded. "Je fis de Macabre la danse" / "I wrote the Macabre dance" /, says the Parisian poet Jean Le Febvre in 1376. From an etymological point of view, this name own, which should be borne in mind in relation to this word, which caused so much controversy in modern science.It was only much later that an adjective stood out from the phrase "la danse macabre", which acquired in the eyes of modern researchers a semantic connotation of such sharpness and such originality that it gave they have the opportunity to correlate with the word "macabre" all late medieval visions of death. The cultural and linguistic analysis of the term "danse macabre" carried out by J. Huizinga and F. Aries is based on a comparison of data from historical linguistics, ritualistics and ethnography; rituals of the late medieval traditions.

As a certain fact of art, the "dance of death" developed in the general semiotic, folklore-mythological and ritual space of medieval European culture. It grew (and here the independent conclusions of J. Huizinga and I. Ioffe completely coincide with each other) from mass theatrical performances, mysteries. "Dances of death", - wrote the Russian historian of culture, - which we now know from separate disparate arts, in the form of frescoes or engravings depicting dances, in the form of poems, in the form of songs, were a single spiritual action ". "Moralite "dances of death" played out, apparently, on the days of commemoration of the dead; these were either processions, where death, playing the flute, led people of all classes, starting from the pope ... or round dances, also of all ranks, where every living person had death as his couple ... or dances in pairs, where the death of each individual invites you to dance with her" .

Developing the same version, J. Huizinga reinforces it with the theory popular at the beginning of the 20th century by the French art critic E. Mal. Mall's theory boiled down to in general terms to the fact that it was theatrical performances that inspired the artists, suggesting to them the plot, grouping, postures, gestures and costume of the depicted persons. Plots and their "realistic interpretation", all this, - according to Mal, - comes from the theater, from staging on the square. Despite the fact that the theory of E. Mahl was once subjected to crushing criticism from the Belgian art critic L. van Peyfelde and the Berlin cultural historian M. Hermann, J. Huizinga believes that it should still be recognized as correct in a narrow area, regarding the origin "danse macabre": performances were played before they were captured on engravings.

How, however, did the image of death in the form of a skeleton appear in European iconography? J. Huizinga and I. Ioffe note that despite the popularity of the theme of death in medieval art, its image had a very vague outline for a long time. At first, she acted in the guise of an apocalyptic horseman, sweeping over a pile of fallen bodies, then in the form of Erinyes falling from a height with bat wings, then in the form of a demon, which only in the 15th century. is replaced by the image of the devil, and later the skeleton. The emergence of a personified image with a disgusting and frightening appearance marked not only a new stage in the attitude towards death, but also a new phase in the development of late medieval consciousness. J. Huizinga and I. Ioffe understand the meaning of this phase in different ways. According to Huizinga, the appearance of the skeletal image of death is associated with the formation of a new mannerist aesthetics, the main principle of which, admiring the ugly, obtaining sensual pleasure from contemplating the disgusting and terrible, was an expression of the psychological state of a European at the turn of the 15th-16th centuries.

According to I. Ioffe, a certain parodic tendency is captured in the late medieval iconography of death. Instead of her abstract, low-plastic representation in the image of "an angel carrying away the soul, a winged genius with an extinct torch, or a woman in mourning, in a word, in the form of an ideal messenger of heaven," her concrete-bodily perception "in the ugly form of a messenger of hell" develops. Such a symbolic transformation is associated with the reincarnation of death from a tragic being into a comic and infernal being. From now on, "she is deprived of gloomy strength and grandeur, she dances, plays, sings parodic verses ... Her antics, bows, gentle hugs, insinuating smiles and mocking calls - everything speaks of her diabolical, buffoonish essence. In the early frescoes of Basel, Lubeck, Bern, she is given as a thin bodily figure, dressed in corpse-colored tights, with clearly painted ribs and a mask of an eyeless skull.

F. Aries, on the contrary, sees in the demonstration of images of skeletons and rotting corpses a kind of counterbalance to the thirst for life, which found expression in the increased role of the will, which, among other things, provides for a magnificent funeral and numerous funeral masses. Sweeping away any socio-political and ideological motivation in the "dance of death", F. Aries summarizes his conclusions as follows: "The art of" macabre "was not ... an expression of a particularly strong experience of death in an era of great epidemics and a great economic crisis. It it was also not merely a means for preachers to instill fear of hellish torments and call for contempt for all worldly and deep faith.Images of death and decay do not express either the fear of death or the fear of the other world, even if they were used to achieve this effect. We tend to see in these images a sign of passionate love for the world here, on earth, and a painful awareness of the death to which every person is doomed.

The conclusions of F. Ariès, in particular those related to the iconography of "macabre", were criticized by the Russian medieval historian A. Gurevich, as well as by the French historian M. Vovel, who deals with the history of the perception of death. The first believes that, when reconstructing the picture of the world of the distant past, it is unacceptable to rely only on iconographic sources: "It is necessary to compare different categories of sources, understood, of course, in their specificity" . As for M. Vovel, he sets out his remarks in the article "Does the collective unconscious exist?" Vovel reproaches F. Ariès for extrapolating, in his opinion, the mental attitudes of the elite to the entire thickness of society, for ignoring popular religiosity and the peculiarities of the perception of death by the uneducated.

According to Joffe, in the frescoes of the German artist and poet N. Manuel Deutsch on the theme of the "dance of death" in Bern, we have portraits of the emperors Francis I and Charles V, Pope Clement VII, portraits of famous cardinals and monks selling indulgences. The quatrains under the frescoes are full of openly reformatory ideas, attacks against Catholicism, the pope and his spiritual vassals.

After a break, in the middle of the 17th century, the theme of "danse macabre", the theme of death - the judge and the avenger - appears in German art with renewed vigor. The persistent popularity of this plot is explained not so much by political as by historical and cultural reasons. In the "dance of death" the idea of a conscious synthesis of individual arts found a real embodiment, recreating the archaic syncretism of folk comedies with their own means at a new historical turn. In these latter, one can discern the undifferentiated unity of recitation, singing, dance, acrobatic stunts and ritual brawls-agons. The idea of synthesis is already stated in the dedication to the collection "The Mirror of Death" by E. Meyer, where it is said: "I bring you, venerable and highly respected, a work of art of three sisters - painting, poetry and music. The work has the name of a dance, but" Dances of death ... ".

Notes and bibliography

1. Ioffe Ieremia Isaevich (1888-1947) - art critic, culturologist, from 1933 to 1947. Professor of Leningrad University, Head of the Department of Art History, author of the theory of synthetic study of art. The main works are "Culture and Style" (1927), "Synthetic Study of the Arts" (1932), "Synthetic History of Art and Sound Film" (1937). Joffe outlined his interpretation of the "dance of death" in the book "Mystery and Opera (German Art of the 16th-18th Centuries)", which, by his own admission, grew out of the preparation of a concert-exhibition German music XVI-XVIII centuries at the Hermitage Theater in the spring of 1934. During these years, in the late 20s and early 30s, I. Ioffe worked as a head. section of Western European art in the Hermitage, where he got access to work with the original engraving series "danse macabre". This gave him the opportunity to collect rich illustrative material for his book, which reproduced the original works of G. Holbein Jr., A. Dürer, E. Meyer, Daniel Chodovetsky and others.
2. Huizinga J. Autumn of the Middle Ages. A study of the forms of life and forms of thought in the 14th and 15th centuries in France and the Netherlands. - M., 1988.
3. The French historian Philippe Aries began developing this topic in 1975 (see: Aries Ph. Essais sur l "histoire de la mort en Occident de Moyen Age a nos jours. H., 1975;) Russian translation: Aries F. Man in the face of death. - M., 1992)
4. In the comments to the Russian translation of "Autumn of the Middle Ages" by J. Huizinga, a new etymology of the term "macabre" is proposed. The author of the commentary, E.D. Kharitonovich, writes: “Now the most reliable is the etymology that derives this word from the Arabic “makbara” (“tomb”) or from the Syrian “maqabrey” (“gravedigger”). These expressions could get into the French language during Crusades". (See: Kharitonovich E.D. Comments / Huizinga J. Autumn of the Middle Ages. Study of the forms of life and forms of thinking in the XIV and XV centuries in France and the Netherlands. - P. 486.) "Eastern" interpretation of the term "macabre", according to apparently owes its origin to J. Delumeau, who believes that the "dance of death" arose under the influence of the dances of Muslim dervishes "(See: Delumeau J-Le peche: la culpabilisation en Occident (XIII-e-XVIII-e siecles). -P., 1983. - P.90 See also: Kaplan A.B. The emergence of elements of Protestant ethics in Western Europe in the late Middle Ages // Man: image and essence (humanitarian aspects). M .: INION. - 1993. - P.103.
5. Aries F. Man in the face of death. - P.129.
6. Huizinga J. Autumn of the Middle Ages. - P.156-157.
7. Ioffe I.I. Mystery and opera. - P.70.
8. Ibid.
9. See: Gvozdev A.A. Theater of the era of feudalism // History of the European
theater. - M., L., 1931. - S.521-526; here the theory of E.Mall is considered in detail.
10. Huizinga J. Autumn of the Middle Ages. - P.156; Ioffe I.I. Mystery and opera. - P.68.
11. Ioffe I.I. Mystery and opera. - P.68.
12. Ibid.
13. Aries F. Man in the face of death. - P.138-139.
14. Gurevich A.Ya. Preface. Philip Aries: death as a problem of historical anthropology// Aries F. Man in the face of death. - P.19.
15. In the same article, A.Ya. Gurevich refers to the work of M. Vovel "Does the collective unconscious exist?"
16. Ioffe I.I. Mystery and opera. - P.65.
17. Ibid. - P.68-69.
18. Dinzelbacher P. History of mentality in Europe. Essay on the main topics // History of mentalities, historical anthropology. Foreign research in images and abstracts. - M., 1996. - S.188
19. Ioffe I.I. Mystery and opera. - P.76.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid. - P.126.

Symphonic poem

Orchestra composition: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, xylophone, timpani, cymbals, triangle, bass drum, harp, solo violin, strings.

History of creation

Saint-Saëns turned to the genre of the symphonic poem a decade and a half after Liszt. The French composer became interested in Liszt's poems even in his youth: "They showed me the path, following which I was destined to later acquire the Dance of Death, Omphala's Spinning Wheel and other compositions." The four symphonic poems of Saint-Saens (1871-1876) differ significantly from Liszt's, continuing the tradition of French program symphonism founded by Berlioz: "It was Berlioz who shaped my generation and, I dare say, it was well formed," said Saint-Saens.

The differences between Saint-Saens and Liszt are especially clearly revealed when referring to the common program prototype - the "dance of death" common in the Middle Ages. Liszt finds philosophical depth and tragedy in them, inspired by an old Italian fresco in a concert paraphrase on the theme of Dies irae (Last Judgment) for piano and orchestra. Saint-Saens in a symphonic poem with a solo violin embodies the same plot, not without a sarcastic grin, following the French poetry of his day.

In 1873, the composer's attention was drawn to a poem by the poet and physician Henri Casalis (1840-1909), who wrote under the pseudonym Jean Lagor. It bore the ironic title "Equality, Brotherhood" and described the dance of skeletons at midnight in winter to the sound of the violin of Death. On this text, the composer composed a romance, and a year later used his music for a symphonic poem called "Dance of Death".

The lines of Casalis's poem are prefaced to the score as a program:

Zipper, hedgehog, hedgehog, Death with a heel
Beats the beat on the gravestone,
At midnight, Death sings a dance,
Whack, whack, whack, plays the violin.

The winter wind blows, the night is dark,
Lindens creak and plaintively moan,
Skeletons, whitening, emerge from the shadows,
They rush and jump in long shrouds.

Zipper, hedgehog, hedgehog, everyone is fussing,
The sound of the bones of the dancers is heard.
...................
...................
But ts-s! suddenly everyone leaves the round dance,
They run, pushing, - the rooster crowed.
..................
..................

The poem is dedicated to Caroline Montigny-Remory, whom Saint-Saens called "his dear sister in art." She was a gifted pianist and often played music together with the composer. Letters from Saint-Saëns to Caroline have survived, spanning some four decades, beginning in 1875.

The premiere of "Dance of Death" took place on January 24, 1875 in Paris, at the Column Concerts, and was a great success - the poem was repeated at the request of the public. However, 20 months later, in the same Paris, she was booed. The opinions of members of the Mighty Handful turned out to be just as different after Saint-Saens's tour in November-December 1875 in Russia, where he himself conducted the Dance of Death. Mussorgsky and Stasov strongly preferred Liszt's work of the same name, and Saint-Saens's poem was characterized as follows: "A chamber miniature in which the composer reveals tiny thoughts inspired by a tiny versifier" (Mussorgsky); “an orchestral piece, although decorated with elegant and piquant instrumentation in a modern style, is sweet, small, most likely “salon”, one might say - helicopterous, frivolous” (Stasov). Rimsky-Korsakov and Cui argued with them. The first sincerely admired the poem, the second called it "charming, elegant, musical, highly talented." Comparing the two Dances of Death, Cui wrote: “Liszt treated his theme with extreme seriousness, depth, mysticism, and the unshakable blind faith of the Middle Ages. M. Saint-Saëns, like a Frenchman, looked at the same task lightly, playfully, semi-comically, with skepticism and denial of the nineteenth century. And Liszt himself highly appreciated Saint-Saens' Dance of Death, especially the "wonderful brilliance" of the score, and made a piano transcription of it, which he sent to Saint-Saens in 1876.

In those years, the Dance of Death orchestra struck with its unusualness. The composer introduced a xylophone into it, designed to convey the sound of the bones of dancing skeletons (four and a half decades earlier, Berlioz, in the finale of the Fantastic Symphony, first used the technique of playing violins and violas with a bow shaft to create a similar effect). In the French edition of the score, an explanation is given that “a xylophone is an instrument made of wood and straw, similar to a glass harmonica,” and you can find it at the publishers’, on the same Place Madeleine in Paris. The solo violin is also a member of the orchestra, on which Death plays his devilish dance, at the tempo of a waltz (possibly inspired by Liszt's Mephisto-Waltz), according to the author's instructions. The violin is tuned in an unusual way: the two upper strings form an interval not of a pure fifth, but of a tritone, which was not accidentally called “diabolus in musica” (the devil in music) in the Middle Ages.

Music

The poem is framed by an introduction and conclusion with inventive sound effects. The harp against the background of the sustained sound of the horn and the chord of the violins with 12 beats, imitating the bells, heralds midnight. Cellos and pizzicato double basses quietly beat out the rhythm. There are sharp sounds like a tuned solo violin. The waltz begins. The sonority gradually grows, new instruments enter, there is a dialogue between the solo violin and the xylophone, doubled by woodwinds. Then the round dance of the dead is drawn in scherzo fugato, as Liszt liked to do when incarnating the Mephistopheles images. The theme sounds passionately, enticingly in the central major episode, where the violin again comes to the fore to the accompaniment of the harp. In the subsequent development, one can hear an ominous knock - perhaps Death, beating his heel on the gravestone (solo timpani), and the howling of the wind (chromatic passages of wooden ones), but the rhythm of the waltz is obsessively, stubbornly preserved. The revelry of diabolical forces ends at a noisy climax. The oboe in complete silence imitates the cry of a rooster. For the last time, the diabolical violin enters, and the echoes of the dance dissipate and fade into a barely audible sound of the strings against the background of the buzzing of a flute in a low register. “It is difficult to get rid of the painfully uncomfortable feeling when listening to this music, in which there are so few emotions so calculated and so frighteningly bared mockingly bleak visions of non-existence ...”, sums up the Soviet researcher of Saint-Saens' creativity Yu. Kremlev.

A. Koenigsberg

The brilliance and harmony of construction are inherent in the symphonic poems of Saint-Saens. Based on the Lisztian method of generalized interpretation of the program underlying the work, it is, however, more "classical" in its principles. musical development, in which the influence of Mendelssohn is noticeable. These works were written in the 70s; some of them are performed to this day (Omphala's Spinning Wheel, 1871, Phaeton, 1873), but most often - the "Dance of Death" (with a solo violin, 1874), inspired by Liszt's "Mephistopheles" musical images.

This is a fantastic night scene played out in a cemetery (based on a poem by Henri Casalis). The bell rings at midnight. Death plays the violin. Under an unusual waltz (the violin accompanies its melody with enchanting figurations), the dead rise from the coffins; “then the bones clang against the bones” - in the sound of pizzicato string instruments and xylophone. Suddenly, the rooster heralds the dawn (oboe motif). The ghosts disappear. Dawn drives out death.

The score of the poem is rich in various shades, timbre finds, but its music still lacks demonic spontaneity, sensual seductiveness, malicious mockery, as is the case, for example, in The Sabbat of Witches from Berlioz's Fantastic Symphony, in Night on Bald Mountain » Mussorgsky or Liszt's Mephisto-Waltz. Saint-Saens, however, is more successful in the elegance of expression, the subtlety of color, the clear finishing of details.

"Danse macabre" (Dance of Death) is a symphonic poem by Charles Camille Saint-Saens (French composer, organist, conductor, music critic and writer), written in 1874. About its creation and the second version from much more famous composer- below.

In 1873, Saint-Saens' attention was drawn to a poem by the poet and physician Henri Casalis, who wrote under the pseudonym Jean Lagorde. It bore the ironic title "Equality, Brotherhood" and described the dance of skeletons at midnight in winter to the sound of the violin of Death. The composer first composed a romance to this text, and a year later he used his music to create a symphonic poem.

Here are the lines of the original poem by Casalis, which are prefaced to the score as a program:

"Whack, Whack, Whack, Death with a heel
Beats the beat on the gravestone,
At midnight, Death sings a dance,
Whack, whack, whack, plays the violin.
The winter wind blows, the night is dark,
Lindens creak and plaintively moan,
Skeletons, whitening, emerge from the shadows,
They rush and jump in long shrouds.
Zipper, hedgehog, hedgehog, everyone is fussing,
The sound of the bones of the dancers is heard.
But ts-s! suddenly everyone leaves the round dance,
They run, pushing, - the cock crowed.

Dance of Death premiered in Paris January 24, 1875 and passed with great success -at the request of the public, the work was played again. However, 20 months later, in the same Paris, it was booed. The opinions of members of the Mighty Handful after the tour of Saint-Saens turned out to be just as different. in Russia (n November - December 1875), where he himself conducted the Dance of Death. Mussorgsky and Stasov strongly preferred Liszt's work of the same name, released earlier, and Saint-Saens's poem was characterized as follows: "A chamber miniature in which the composer reveals tiny thoughts inspired by a tiny versifier" (Mussorgsky).

Comparing the two Dances of Death, the music critic Cui wrote: “Liszt treated his theme with extreme seriousness, depth, mysticism, and the unshakable blind faith of the Middle Ages. M. Saint-Saëns, like a Frenchman, looked at the same task lightly, playfully, semi-comically, with skepticism and denial of the nineteenth century.

Remarkably, Liszt himself highly appreciated Saint-Saens' Dance of Death, especially the score's "wonderful brilliance", and made a piano transcription of it, which he sent to Saint-Saens in 1876.

In those years, the orchestra "Dance of Death" struck with its unusualness. The composer introduced a xylophone into it, designed to convey the sound of the bones of dancing skeletons. The solo violin is also a member of the orchestra, on which Death plays his devilish dance, according to the author's instructions - at the tempo of a waltz.

The violin is tuned in an unusual way: the two upper strings form an interval not of a pure fifth, but of a tritone, which was not accidentally called “diabolus in musica” (the devil in music) in the Middle Ages. In the subsequent development, one can hear an ominous knock - perhaps Death, beating his heel on the gravestone (solo timpani), and the howling of the wind (chromatic passages of wooden ones), but the rhythm of the waltz is obsessively, stubbornly preserved. The revelry of diabolical forces ends at a noisy climax. The oboe in complete silence imitates the cry of a rooster.

And here you can compare the works of both composers:

Dance of Death - Charles Camille Saint-Saens

Powered by Cincopa Video Hosting for Business solution. Dance of Death - Charles Camille Saint-SaensSymphonic poem"Danse macabre" by Charles Camille Sens-Saens"Danse macabre"

Dance of Death - Franz Liszt

Women's Portal Flero

Dance of death

Symphonic poem

History of creation

Music

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