Leading highlights include: the Basel Cathedral treasure, the Basel and Strasbourg tapestries, the fragments of Basel’s dance of death, altars and ecclesiastical graphic works, the estate of Erasmus of Rotterdam, the coin cabinet and glass painting.
Danse Macabre, a late-medieval allegory on the universality of death
It is best known for the Church of the Holy Trinity, which contains a late-medieval Danse Macabre fresco.
The fresco of the Dance of Death (ca 1470) is a famous example of this motif, which gained wide currency following the visitations of the Black Death.
The famous Totentanzorgel (Danse Macabre organ), an instrument played by Dieterich Buxtehude and, due to requests asking for it to be examined when it needed repair, most probably Johann Sebastian Bach, was also destroyed.
Danse Macabre | Alors on danse | Danse avec les stars | Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon | Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre | Danse Macabre (Saint-Saëns) | Danse Macabre (book) | ''Danse Macabre'' | Danse macabre | danse macabre | Danse des petits cygnes | Danse avec les stars (France season 3) | Centre d'Études Supérieures de Musique et de Danse |
Material about King can also be found in his own partly autobiographical On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000), as well as scattered throughout King's Danse Macabre (1981).
Purely orchestral records by Cloëz include 'Intermezzo' by Georges Hugon (Orchestre des Concerts Symphoniques), Liszt Piano Concerto No. 2 and Hungarian Fantasy (Orchestre national de la Radiodiffusion Française, Raymond Trouard), Schobert's Concerto in G for harpsichord and orchestra (Ruggero Gerlin), Mozart's Concerto for Flute and Harp (with Gaston Crunelle, Pierre Jamet), the Hebrides Overture and Danse Macabre.
In the night of 16 May, Nishizawa, Sakai and Ōta were listening at the lounge room to a broadcast of an Australian radio program, when Nishizawa recognized the eerie Danse Macabre of the French composer, pianist and organist Camille Saint-Saëns.
Between August 1424 and Lent 1425, during the Anglo-Burgundian alliance when John Duke of Bedford ruled Paris as Regent after the deaths Henry V of England and Charles VI of France, a mural of the Danse Macabre was painted on the back wall of the arcade below the charnel house on the south side of the cemetery.
The hôtel saw several lavish and unusual festivals, such as the "danse macabre" on 23 August 1451 before Charles, Duke of Orléans.
It includes a version of "Danse macabre" played by Béla Fleck, which Fleck provided after reading on Gaiman's blog that he hoped for "Danse Macabre with banjo in it".
While directing the advertising department of the Tietz department store, in 1916–17 he produced the portfolio of lithographs, Totentanz ("Danse Macabre").
Israil Bercovici claims that the Danse Macabre originated among Sephardic Jews in fourteenth century Spain (Bercovici, 1992, p. 27).
"Ballo in Fa Diesis Minore" is based on Ingmar Bergman The Seventh Seal in which a man defies the personification of Death (lyrics are taken from an inscription of a Danse Macabre depiction at Clusone, near Bergamo); the melody is inspired by "Schiarazula Marazula", a medieval northern Italian theme which accompanied exorcism rites and which was collected by Giorgio Mainerio in his Primo libro de' balli (1578).