Saint-Saëns, Musical Eclectic

Flora Willson

Unexpected things can happen to a composer’s reputation in the years immediately after their death. When Camille Saint-Saëns died in 1921 at the age of 86, he was a pillar of the French musical establishment. He’d been elected to the prestigious Institut de France decades earlier and had since been showered with awards, from honorary doctorates from both Oxford and Cambridge to the distinguished Grand Croix of the Legion of Honour – the highest of all French civil honours. And that wasn’t all: according to composer and virtuoso pianist Franz Liszt, Saint-Saëns was the best organist in the world. As a composer, Saint-Saëns’ compatriot Charles Gounod branded him “the French Beethoven”; one of the official orations at his state funeral called him “the Mozart of his time”. His protégé and close friend Gabriel Fauré described him as “the most complete musician we have ever possessed”.

ABOVE Portrait of Saint-Saëns in 1846. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale De France (Library) © NPL – DeA Picture Library / Bridgeman Images

And yet. Just a few years after those glittering obituaries, French composer Reynaldo Hahn reported that “today it takes courage to admire Saint-Saëns”. Worse still, the grumbling had already started during Saint-Saëns’ lifetime. Amid wild enthusiasm for some of his compositions and the vocal support of various celebrated musical contemporaries, Saint-Saëns also came under attack from other composers: figures such as Hector Berlioz – who quipped that he “knows everything, but lacks inexperience” – and Claude Debussy, who dismissed the older composer outright, as “the musician of tradition”.

Neither Berlioz’s joke nor Debussy’s sideswipe is entirely unfair. Saint-Saëns had a remarkable facility with all things musical, and a voracious, polymathic interest in much else besides. Born in Paris in 1835, Saint-Saëns wrote his first composition at three years old, made his public debut as a pianist aged ten and entered the Paris Conservatoire at 13. From his early twenties Saint-Saëns spent two decades in the most exalted (and best paid) organist’s job in Paris – at the Madeleine church –while simultaneously establishing himself as a composer. It’s hardly surprising that such a trajectory irritated Berlioz, who’d grown up largely without formal musical education, entered the Conservatoire aged 22 and never learned the piano.

Debussy had his own axe to grind. He was a generation younger than SaintSaëns, who came to represent much that he wanted to rebel against. And Debussy was right: Saint-Saëns was a composer deeply committed to tradition – to long-standing musical forms such as the symphony and the concerto – as well as to the music of the past. But that attitude was itself forward-looking during Saint-Saëns’ lifetime, when most of what we now know as “early music” had yet to be rediscovered. (In fact, we have Saint-Saëns to thank whenever we hear performances of one of the giants of eighteenth-century French music: in 1894 he was appointed the editor of the complete works of Rameau, whose music had been largely forgotten during the nineteenth century.)

The problem with Saint-Saëns, so far as some of his contemporaries and many twentieth-century musicians and commentators were concerned, was that he didn’t fit neatly into the binary categories that shaped French musical culture around the turn of the century. Was he avant-garde or reactionary? a revolutionary or a traditionalist? a patriot or a cosmopolitan? His compositional career stretched from childhood into his late 80s – and from the era of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Meyerbeer’s spectacular grand operas to the musical upheavals spearheaded by Stravinsky, Schoenberg and L es Six. No wonder Saint-Saëns’ relationship to the status quo shifted in that time; the status quo itself had changed almost beyond recognition.

Of course, there were all sorts of smaller transformations in French musical life between Paris’ love affair with Donizetti in the 1830s and 1840s and the riotous premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913. The four works on tonight’s programme emerged from two distinct moments in the late-nineteenth-century portion of Saint-Saëns’ long career. What’s more, those historical moments bookend a crucial period in his changing place in the French musical landscape. Saint-Saëns’ two symphonic poems Phaéton and Danse macabre and his Cello Concerto No. 1 all date from the early 1870s. Then approaching his 40th birthday, the composer was still in post as the organist at the Madeleine and was, like his most ambitious contemporaries, trying – and largely failing – to make a name for himself as an opera composer. His frustrations about the lack of interest in his operatic ambitions shown by the gatekeepers of Paris’ opera houses were only exacerbated by the collective soulsearching that seized France in aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War (1870 – 71) and Paris Commune (1871). Saint-Saëns and his colleagues found themselves in a musical era kick-started by Ludwig van Beethoven and subsequently propelled by Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt and, most recently, Richard Wagner. Even on France’s venerable operatic stages, the most popular works were by composers who were foreign, deceased or both. What, asked many, had happened to French music? Should French composers resign themselves to lingering on the sidelines of music history, just as Napoleon III’s army had been defeated by Bismarck’s Prussian forces at Sedan?

ABOVE Title page of score for Danse macabre. Praga, Prazska Konzervator. © A. Dagli Orti / © NPL – DeA Picture Library / Bridgeman Images

Saint-Saëns thought not. With his good friend Romain Bussine (a poet and singing teacher at the Paris Conservatoire) and other composers including Fauré, Henri Duparc and César Franck, Saint-Saëns established the Société Nationale de Musique in 1871 and acted as its vicepresident for the next fifteen years. The Society’s aim was officially “to further the production and popularization of all serious musical works”. Its Latin motto made its principal mission clearer: “Ars gallica” –“French art”. As Saint-Saëns insisted in

1872, a new school of French composition was emerging – but it was “young, subject to lose its way, and is in need of direction”. The new Society was set up to function as a sort of “brotherhood”, providing encouragement and support for its members.

In this context it might seem odd that both Phaéton and Danse macabre, which Saint-Saëns composed in 1873 and 1874 respectively, are symphonic poems: a musical genre considered risqué in France. Stranger still, at that time the symphonic poem was a form most closely associated with Franz Liszt, one of the prominent non-French composers then embracing brave new musical worlds – precisely, you might think, the kind of figure whose influence Saint-Saëns and his fellow Société Nationale members were trying to shake off. But Saint-Saëns rarely fitted neatly into a single musical category. Thus at the same time that he was energetically fomenting new directions in French composition, Saint-Saëns also promoted Liszt’s music in France, transcribing several of his works and conducting a concert of his symphonic poems in Paris in 1878. Liszt, in turn, played a crucial role in organising the long-awaited world premiere of Saint-Saëns’ opera Samson et Dalila in 1877.

No wonder Liszt’s influence is audible in both of the symphonic poems on tonight’s programme. Phaéton is based on the story from Greek mythology of Phaeton, child of the sun god Helios, who begs to drive his father’s chariot across the sky but loses control. As Saint-Saëns explained on the original published score: “The whole world is about to go up in a blaze, when Jupiter strikes the arrogant Phaeton with a lightning bolt”. Phaeton’s all-too-tenuous hold on the sun chariot is immediately palpable in the nervous energy of the piece’s first main theme, where the orchestral texture feels like it, too, could pull apart at any moment. The adventurous harmonic palette and bold use of brass both point to Saint-Saëns’ admiration for Liszt, as well as hinting at the French composer’s early admiration for Wagner. (Saint-Saëns reported his initial pleasure in studying Wagner’s works and attending performances; but then, as he wrote, “I got to know some Wagnerians and I realized that I was not one of them and never would be”.)

Danse macabre is an orchestral reworking of a song Saint-Saëns had penned in 1872, setting a poem by Henri Cazalis that retells a French legend about Death playing his violin to rouse the dead at midnight on Halloween. Saint-Saëns returned to the song in autumn 1874, handing the vocal line back to a solo violin (its E string tuned down a semitone for additional spookiness in the piece’s prominent tritone – an interval once known as the “Devil in music”) and relishing the spectacular range of colours that a late-nineteenth-century orchestra could provide. Such was the piece’s popularity that it was widely transcribed. Saint-Saëns and Fauré premiered the former’s own arrangement for two pianos at a meeting of the Société Nationale de Musique in April 1875. A year later, Liszt himself produced a blisteringly virtuosic transcription for solo piano, which he sent to Saint-Saëns, along with an apology for his “lack of skill in reducing for the piano the wonderful colouring of the score. No one can really play the orchestra on the piano…”

Liszt may have been right, but that didn’t stop Saint-Saëns trying either. Only a month after the world premiere of his Cello Concerto No. 1, performed by the cellist August Tolbecque and the renowned orchestra of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire de Paris in January 1873, Saint-Saëns played his own piano arrangement of the orchestral score alongside Tolbecque at another meeting of the Société Nationale. The concerto itself was, by the 1870s, a venerable –perhaps even old-fashioned – musical form. Yet Saint-Saëns was determined to develop it in his own way. Once again he drew on the example of Liszt in the work’s unusual formal structure, where the three movements run continuously on and thematic material is shared between them. It’s an unequivocally serious, ambitious work, dedicated to one of the finest cellists of his day: Tolbecque was a cello professor at the Marseille Conservatoire, a regular fixture at Paris’ Société des Concerts du Conservatoire de Paris and an enthusiastic collector of historic instruments. Compared to his symphonic poems, in other words, Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No. 1 was a heftier contribution to the “Ars gallica” cause.

No other orchestral composition by SaintSaëns, however, would match the gigantic scale of his Symphony No. 3 – the so-called “Organ” symphony – which he composed in 1885 – 6, a little over a decade after the other works in tonight’s concert. By then, Saint-Saëns was an internationally renowned composer, acclaimed in Britain and the USA almost more than in France. On home turf, Saint-Saëns was finally on the verge of a decisive break with the Société Nationale de Musique. At stake was the question of whether music by foreign composers should be promoted by the Société Nationale. Saint-Saëns was adamant that it should not, warning of the damage that Wagnerian influence was wreaking on opera in particular: “Gradually the music has become shapeless and reduced to an indiscernible and liquefied porridge”. He eventually resigned as vicepresident in protest.

But while Saint-Saëns’ role in the Société Nationale increasingly positioned him as a reactionary, many outside France continued to view him as the leading light of French music. It seems fitting, then, that it was from London that the prompt arrived for Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3, now one of his most popular works; and also that the symphony was dedicated to the memory of Liszt, who died shortly after its premiere in 1886. His distinctly un-Gallic influence can be felt in the work’s formal boldness (the conventional four symphonic movements subsumed into two large-scale sections) and in the subtle reworking of thematic material across the piece as a whole.

Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 was commissioned by the Philharmonic Society, the same august organisation that had commissioned Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony decades earlier. Saint-Saëns was initially invited to perform a piano concerto with the orchestra: any concerto of his choice, although “one of your own compositions” was their preference. Saint-Saëns accepted, explaining that he’d instead be writing a new symphony. A few months later he wrote again with a warning. He was now in mid-flow with composition, but the symphony was becoming “formidable”. Above all, he was concerned about its huge orchestra – including not only the organ that enters to unforgettable effect in its finale, but also two pianos, a piccolo, a bass clarinet, a contrabassoon, a mixture of valved and natural horns and trumpets, a battery of percussion, three trombones and a tuba. “Luckily there are no harps”, he added.

The composer himself conducted the premiere at St James’s Hall, reporting afterwards that it had been “a colossal success”. Critics nevertheless seemed unsure what to make of such irresistibly, unapologetically enjoyable music. As one British writer put it, pondering how to make sense of such a monumental composition by a French composer, “We should sooner think of a serious dissertation on the Brighton Pavilion.” Had he seen that review, Saint-Saëns would probably have been faintly amused. As he described himself: “I am an eclectic spirit. It may be a great defect, but I cannot change it: one cannot make over one’s personality”.