Danse macabre

A pestilential twilight settles over baroque Spain; Saint-Saëns’ violin figures slither through cadaverous streets where Youth—gaunt yet electrically alive—clutches Love, a sylph whose ribboned limbs tremble like candle wicks. Death, a charcoal-masked matador, twirls an hourglass scythe, ushering the plague’s crimson fog. In catacombs turned ballrooms the pair dance a fugitive gavotte, their shadows stitched to the walls by moon-cold search-lights of cathedral windows. Each pirouette buys a heartbeat; each arabesque costs a breath. When the final chord fractures, Love’s body becomes the white lily on a mass grave, Youth’s scream fuses with the orchestral xylophone, and Death, now crowned with the lovers’ intertwined hair, stalks on toward the next city, his cloak embroidered with emptied names.