Camille Saint-Saëns

Of all the French composers of the 19th century, Saint-Saëns was probably the most naturally gifted. He played Beethoven’s C minor Piano Concerto and Mozart’s B flat Concerto, K. 450 (both from memory) in a single concert in the Salle Pleyel when he was 10, and he played his last concert in November 1921, one month before his death. He was also a brilliant organist; Liszt, who heard him improvise at La Madeleine in Paris, called him the finest organist in the world. He was a prodigiously prolific composer: his opus numbers run to over 150, and a hundred or more other works are unnumbered. He was an occasional music critic and an energetic traveler, who visited the United States for the first time when he was almost 70 and died in Algiers, a city he had visited often. Yet for all this activity, his reputation has always, fairly or unfairly, been that of a lightweight eclectic, and only a handful of his works survives in the standard repertoire.

Early Years: An Organist in Paris

Saint-Saëns was born in Paris and lost his father when he was only three months old, but was well brought up by his mother and a great aunt, flourished at school, and entered the Paris Conservatoire as a pianist when he was 12, studying composition with Fromental Halévy from 1851. From early on he had broad interests, with scientific and philosophical, as well as musical, enthusiasms. In music he seems to have admired everything he touched, from J.S. Bach to Mozart, and from Beethoven to Robert Schumann and early Richard Wagner. Hector Berlioz, who became a close friend despite their difference in age and temperaments, remarked paradoxically that “he knows everything but lacks inexperience.” Saint-Saëns, he presumably meant, moved too fast to pick up the detritus that enriches. For all his brilliance, Saint-Saëns failed to win the Prix de Rome, and when he left the Conservatoire in 1853, his first job was the (for a French composer) conventional one of church organist at the church of Saint-Merri in the 4th arrondissement. 

As usual, however, the organ post was merely a support structure for musical life outside. Saint-Saëns was, naturally, composing sacred music. But he was also writing symphonies—No.1 in E-flat (1853), the Symphony in F major “Urbs Roma” (1856), and No. 2 in A minor (1859)—and chamber music, including a piano quartet in E major (1851–53) and a piano quintet in A minor (1855), which eventually became Op. 14. He composed no fewer than three concertos in rapid succession: two for violin (the C major in 1858 and the A major in 1859) and his first Piano Concerto, in D major (1858). In due course there would be four more piano concertos—of which No. 2 in G minor (1868) has remained popular—a third Violin Concerto, in B minor (1880), and a pair of cello concertos—the well-known A minor (1872) and a second one in D major (1902).

Saint-Saëns: Trio No. 1 in F major for Piano, Violin, and Cello, Op. 18

Middle Period: A Composer of Popular Works

Listing Saint-Saëns’s works, however, is a thankless task. His first opera, Samson et Dalila, was staged in 1877 in Weimar under Liszt, and has held its place in the repertoire despite its biblical subject, which was controversial at the time. But his other 12 operas have vanished more or less without a trace. He composed four symphonic poems in the 1870s under the spell of Liszt’s 12 works in that form, but only the Danse macabre (1874) is well known today, though the other three hardly deserve their neglect. Of all his many other orchestral works, only the grandest of them, the so-called “Organ Symphony,” No. 3 in C minor (1886), is now programmed with any frequency, but is to some extent atypical in its architectural scale and lavish sound-world. Ironically, the nearest approach in manner to this big symphony is in Saint-Saëns’s wittiest and most anti-pompous chamber work, The Carnival of the Animals, composed rapidly in the same year as the symphony, but banned by him from performance because he was afraid it would spoil his reputation as a serious composer. The “Aquarium” and “The Cuckoo in the Deep Forest” seem like gentle parodies of the Organ Symphony at its most elevated, while “The Swan,” with its famous cello solo, smiles at the solemnity of the symphony’s slow movement theme.

Late Period: A French Mendelssohn

The truth is that Saint-Saëns was at his best in the drawing room, and his chamber music, though played only sporadically nowadays, provides the most interesting and likeable picture of his character as a creative musician. He has been variously described as the French Beethoven and the French Mozart; but perhaps the most accurate parallel would be with Felix Mendelssohn. There is the same kind of fluency and lightness of touch, the same formal balance, the same resistance to vulgarity, all this admittedly on a less impressive scale than in Mendelssohn: French sentiment and good taste versus German intellect, Romanticism without the angst. The essential charm and lucidity of Saint-Saëns’s chamber music language is already apparent in his early F major Piano Trio (1864). But his String Quartet No. 2 in G major, composed in 1918, is not essentially different in character, allowing for the added contrapuntal intensity of the medium, without the piano to diversify the sound. Listening to this attractive quartet, it’s easy to forget that Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was already five years old, and that Saint-Saëns had himself attended (and detested) one of the rowdy performances of that in any case noisy work.

The two late string quartets are the exceptions among Saint-Saëns’s chamber works, all of which otherwise include piano. It’s typical of his easy-going attitude (as it seems) that no single genre dominates. There are two of nearly everything: two piano trios, two violin sonatas, two cello sonatas, two piano quartets, and so forth. The important exception is the highly entertaining Septet, composed in 1880 for the unusual combination of piano, trumpet, string quartet, and double bass. In the final year of his life, as if to prove his undimmed vitality at the age of 85, he composed no fewer than three sonatas for woodwind instruments—oboe, clarinet, and bassoon respectively—with piano. They have much the same charm as the best of his earlier chamber music, while being noticeably shorter-winded.

Saint-Saëns: Sonata in E-flat major for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 167

Watching and Listening

The extent to which Saint-Saëns’s style remained largely unaffected by developments in music elsewhere is well shown in the CMS archive by a comparison of the Piano Trio No. 1 in F major (1864) and the Cello Sonata No. 2 in F major (1905), composed more than 40 years apart. By 1905 Richard Strauss had composed Salome, Arnold Schoenberg his first string quartet, and Claude Debussy La Mer—works which either stretched tonality to a breaking point or more or less ignored it. Saint-Saëns might as well have been on the planet Mars writing his nevertheless very fine quartet, for all the awareness it shows of such “advances.”

Videos from the Archive:

More Videos