Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns () (9 October 183516 December 1921) was a French Late-Romantic composer, organist, conductor, and pianist. He is known especially for The Carnival of the Animals, Danse macabre, Samson and Delilah, Piano Concerto No. 2, Cello Concerto No. 1, Havanaise, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, and his Symphony No. 3 (Organ Symphony).
Early years
Saint-Saëns was born in Paris, France on 9 October 1835. His father, a government clerk, died three months after his birth. He was raised by his mother, Clémence, with the assistance of her aunt, Charlotte Masson, who moved in. Masson introduced Saint-Saëns to the
piano, and began giving him lessons on the instrument. At about this time, age two, Saint-Saëns was found to possess
perfect pitch. His first composition, a little piece for the piano dated 22 March 1839, is now kept in the
Bibliothèque nationale de France. Saint-Saëns's precociousness was not limited to music. He learned to read and write by age three, and had some mastery of
Latin by the age of seven.
His first public concert appearance occurred when he was five years old, when he accompanied a
Beethoven violin sonata. He went on to begin in-depth study of the full score of
Don Giovanni. In 1842, Saint-Saëns began piano lessons with
Camille-Marie Stamaty, a pupil of
Friedrich Kalkbrenner, who had his students play the piano while resting their forearms on a bar situated in front of the keyboard, so that all the pianist's power came from the hands and fingers but not the arms. At ten years of age, Saint-Saëns gave his debut public recital at the
Salle Pleyel, with a performance of
Mozart's
Piano Concerto No. 15 in B-flat major (
K. 450), and various pieces by
Handel, Kalkbrenner,
Hummel, and
Bach. As an encore, Saint-Saëns offered to play any of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas from
memory. Word of this incredible concert spread across Europe, and as far as the United States with an article in a
Boston newspaper.
He then studied composition under Fromental Halévy at the Conservatoire de Paris. Saint-Saëns won many top prizes and gained a reputation that resulted in his introduction to Franz Liszt, who would become one of his closest friends. At the age of sixteen, Saint-Saëns wrote his first symphony; his second, published as Symphony No. 1 in E-flat major, was performed in 1853 to the astonishment of many critics and fellow composers. Hector Berlioz, who also became a good friend, famously remarked, Il sait tout, mais il manque d'inexpérience ("He knows everything, but lacks inexperience").
Middle years
For income, Saint-Saëns played the
organ at various
churches in Paris, with his first appointment being at the
Saint-Merri in the
Beaubourg area. In 1857, he replaced
Lefébure-Wely at the eminent position of organist at the
Église de la Madeleine, which he kept until 1877. His weekly
improvisations stunned the Parisian public and earned Liszt's 1866 observation that Saint-Saëns was the greatest organist in the world. He also composed a famous piece called
Danse Macabre at this time.
From 1861 to 1865, Saint-Saëns held his only teaching position as professor of piano at the École Niedermeyer, where he raised eyebrows by including contemporary music—Liszt, Gounod, Schumann, Berlioz, and Wagner—along with the school's otherwise conservative curriculum of Bach and Mozart. His most successful students at the Niedermeyer were André Messager and Gabriel Fauré, who was Saint-Saëns's favourite pupil and soon his closest friend.
Saint-Saëns was a multi-faceted intellectual. From an early age, he studied geology, archaeology, botany, and lepidoptery. He was an expert at mathematics. Later, in addition to composing, performing, and writing musical criticism, he held discussions with Europe's finest scientists and wrote scholarly articles on acoustics, occult sciences, Roman theatre decoration, and ancient instruments. He wrote a philosophical work, Problèmes et mystères, which spoke of science and art replacing religion; Saint-Saëns's pessimistic and atheistic ideas foreshadowed Existentialism. Other literary achievements included Rimes familières, a volume of poetry, and La crampe des écrivains, a successful farcical play. He was also a member of the Astronomical Society of France; he gave lectures on mirages, had a telescope made to his own specifications, and even planned concerts to correspond to astronomical events such as solar eclipses.
In 1870, the Franco-Prussian War, despite being over in barely six months, left an indelible mark on the composer. He was relieved from fighting duty as one of the favourites of a relative of emperor Napoleon III, but fled nonetheless to London for several months when the Paris Commune broke out in the besieged Paris of winter 1871, his fame and societal status posing a threat to his survival. In the same year, he co-founded with Romain Bussine the Société Nationale de Musique in order to promote a new and specifically French music. After the fall of the Paris Commune, the Society premiered works by members such as Fauré, César Franck, Édouard Lalo, and Saint-Saëns himself, who served as the society's co-president. In this way, Saint-Saëns became a powerful figure in shaping the future of French music.
In 1875, nearing forty, Saint-Saëns married Marie Laure Emile Truffot, who was just 19. They had two sons, both of whom died in 1878, within six weeks of each other, one from an illness, the other upon falling out of a fourth-story window. For the latter death Saint-Saëns blamed his wife, and when they went on vacation together in 1881 he simply disappeared one day. A separation order was enacted, but they never divorced.
From 1877 to 1889, he lived at 14, rue de la Monsieur-de-Prince, and the apartment house is marked by a plaque.Photo of the plaque
Later years
In 1886 Saint-Saëns debuted two of his most renowned compositions:
The Carnival of the Animals and
Symphony No. 3, dedicated to
Franz Liszt, who died that year. That same year, however,
Vincent d'Indy and his allies had Saint-Saëns removed from the Société Nationale de Musique. Two years later, Saint-Saëns's mother died, driving the mourning composer away from France to the
Canary Islands under the alias "Sannois". Over the next several years he travelled around the world, visiting exotic locations in Europe, North Africa,
Southeast Asia, and South America. Saint-Saëns chronicled his travels in many popular books using his
nom de plume, Sannois.
In 1908, he had the distinction of being the first celebrated composer to write a musical score to a motion picture, The Assassination of the Duke of Guise (L'assassinat du duc de Guise), directed by Charles Le Bargy and André Calmettes, adapted by Henri Lavedan, featuring actors of the Comédie Française. It was 18 minutes long, a considerable run time for the day.
In 1915, Saint-Saëns traveled to San Francisco, California and guest conducted the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra during the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, one of two world's fairs celebrating the completion of the Panama Canal.
Saint-Saëns continued to write on musical, scientific and historical topics, travelling frequently before spending his last years in Algiers, Algeria. In recognition of his accomplishments, the government of France awarded him the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur. A street in Paris and in Marseilles is named in his honor.
Saint-Saëns died of pneumonia on 16 December 1921 at the Hôtel de l'Oasis in Algiers. His body was repatriated to Paris, honoured by state funeral at La Madeleine, and interred at Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.
Relationships with other composers
Saint-Saëns was either friend or enemy to some of Europe's most distinguished musicians. He stayed close to
Franz Liszt and maintained a fast friendship with his pupil
Gabriel Fauré, who replaced him as organist and choirmaster when he retired. Additionally, he was a teacher and friend to
Isidor Philipp, who headed the piano department at the Paris Conservatory for several decades and was a composer and editor of the music of many composers. But despite his strong advocacy of French music, Saint-Saëns openly despised many of his fellow-composers in France such as
Franck and
d'Indy, and while he praises the musical genius of
Jules Massenet in his 1919 book
Musical Memories, he also states pointedly in the same chapter that he had no use for Massenet personally. Saint-Saëns also hated the music of
Claude Debussy; he is reported to have told
Pierre Lalo, music critic, and son of composer
Édouard Lalo, "I have stayed in Paris to speak ill of
Pelléas et Mélisande." The personal animosity was mutual; Debussy quipped: "I have a horror of sentimentality, and I cannot forget that its name is Saint-Saëns." On other occasions, however, Debussy acknowledged an admiration for Saint-Saëns's musical talents.
Saint-Saëns had been an early champion of Richard Wagner's music in France, teaching his pieces during his tenure at the École Niedermeyer and premiering the March from Tannhäuser. He had stunned even Wagner himself when he sight-read the entire orchestral scores of Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, and Siegfried, prompting Hans von Bülow to refer to him as "the greatest musical mind" of the era. However, despite admitting appreciation for the power of Wagner's work, Saint-Saëns defiantly stated that he was not an aficionado. In 1886, Saint-Saëns was punished for some particularly harsh and anti-German comments on the Paris production of Lohengrin by losing engagements and receiving negative reviews throughout Germany. Later, after World War I, Saint-Saëns angered both French and Germans with his inflammatory articles entitled Germanophilie, which ruthlessly attacked Wagner.
Saint-Saëns edited Jean-Philippe Rameau's Pièces de clavecin, and published them in 1895 through Durand in Paris (re-printed by Dover in 1993).
According to a well known anecdote which has not been confirmed, however, Saint-Saëns stormed out of the première of Igor Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) on 29 May 1913, allegedly infuriated over what he considered the misuse of the bassoon in the ballet's opening bars.
Reputation
Saint-Saëns began his musical career as a musical pioneer, introducing to France the
symphonic poem and championing the radical works of
Liszt and
Wagner at a time when
Bach and
Mozart were the norms. By the dawn of the 20th century, Saint-Saëns was an ultra-conservative, fighting the influence of
Debussy and
Richard Strauss. This is hardly surprising—Saint-Saëns's career began while
Chopin and
Mendelssohn were in their prime, and ended at the commencement of the
Jazz Age; but his image endured for years after his death.
As a composer, Saint-Saëns was often criticized for his refusal to embrace romanticism and at the same time, rather paradoxically, for his adherence to the conventions of 19th-century musical language. He is remembered chiefly for works such as The Carnival of the Animals, which was not published in full until after his death - reportedly because Saint-Saëns feared it would affect his reputation as a serious composer; the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso for violin and orchestra, the operas Samson and Delilah and Henry VIII (of which only the first is frequently performed today), the Symphony No. 3; the second, fourth and fifth piano concertos; the third violin concerto; the first cello concerto; and the first violin sonata.
Music
Style
Saint-Saëns' concertos and many of his chamber music works are both technically difficult and transparent, requiring the skills of a virtuoso. The later chamber music pieces, such as the second violin sonata, the second cello sonata, and the second piano trio, are less accessible to a listener than earlier pieces in the same form. They were composed and performed when Saint-Saëns was already slipping out of popularity and, as a result, they are little known. They show a willingness to experiment with more progressive musical language and to abandon lyricism and charm for more profound expression.
The piano music, while not as deep or as challenging as that of some of his contemporaries, occupies the stylistic ground between Liszt and Ravel. At times brilliant, transparent and idiomatic, the music for two pianos includes the Variations on a Theme by Beethoven, the Scherzo, a palindromic piece that uses a blend of modern tonalities and conventional gestures, and the Caprice arabe, a rhythmically inventive fantasy that pays homage to the music of northern Africa. Although Saint-Saëns was considered old-fashioned in later life, he explored many new forms and reinvigorated some older ones. His compositional approach was inspired by French classicism, which makes him an important forerunner of the neoclassicism of Ravel and others.
In performance, Saint-Saëns is said to have been "unequalled on the organ", and rivaled by only a few on the piano. However, Saint-Saëns's concert style was restrained, subtle, and cool; he sat unmoving at the piano. His playing was marked by extraordinarily even scales and passagework, great speed, and aristocratic refinement. The recordings he left at the end of his life give glimpses of these traits. He was often charged with being unemotional and business-like, less memorable than other more charismatic performers. He was probably the first pianist to publicly perform a cycle of all the Mozart piano concertos. In some cases these influenced his own piano concertos; for example, the first movement of his 4th Piano Concerto in C minor strongly resembles the last movement of Mozart's 24th Concerto, which is in the same key. In turn, his own concertos appear to have influenced those of Sergei Rachmaninoff and other later Romantic composers. Throughout his life, Saint-Saëns continued to play with the technique taught to him by Stamaty, using the strength of the hand rather than the arm. Claudio Arrau never forgot the ease with which Saint-Saëns played (he cites Chopin's fourth scherzo as an example).
Musical works
Saint-Saëns's early start and his long life provided him with time to write hundreds of compositions; during his career, he wrote many dramatic works, including four symphonic poems, and thirteen operas, of which Samson et Dalila and the symphonic poem Danse macabre are among his most famous. In all, he composed over 300 works and was the first major composer to write music specifically for the cinema, for Henri Lavedan's film The Assassination of the Duke of Guise (Op. 128, 1908).
Saint-Saëns wrote five symphonies, although only three of these are numbered. He withdrew the first, written for a Mozartian-scale orchestra, and the third, a competition piece. His symphonies are a significant contribution to the genre during a period when the French symphonic tradition was otherwise in decline. Saint-Saëns also contributed voluminously to the French concertante literature; he wrote five piano concertos, three violin concertos, two cello concertos, and about twenty smaller concertante works for soloist and orchestra, including a colorfully orchestrated piano fantasy, Africa; the Havanaise and the Introduction and Rondo capriccioso for violin and orchestra; and the Morceau de concert for harp and orchestra. Of the concertos, the Second Piano concerto is one of the most popular of virtuoso piano concertos, and the Third Violin Concerto and First Cello Concerto also remain popular.
In 1886 he wrote his final symphony, the Symphony No. 3, avec orgue (with organ), one of his best-known works. The motif of the third became the inspiration for the 1978 song If I Had Words by Scott Fitzgerald and Yvonne Keeley. Aided by the monumental symphonic organs built in France by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, at that time the world's foremost organ builder, this work demonstrates the spirit of "gigantism" and the confidence of France in the Belle Époque at the end of the 19th century, a period that produced the Eiffel Tower, the Universal Exposition at Paris. The confident Maestoso fourth movement perhaps reflects the confidence of Europe in its technology, its science, its "age of reason". He was frequently named as "the most German of all the French composers", perhaps due to his use of counterpoint.
In 1886, Saint-Saëns also completed The Carnival of the Animals, which was first performed privately on 9 March. In contrast with the work's later popularity, Saint-Saëns forbade complete performances of it shortly after its première, allowing only one movement, Le cygne (The Swan) for cello and two pianos, to be published in his lifetime. Carnival was written as a musical jest, and Saint-Saëns believed it would damage his reputation as a serious composer. In fact, since its posthumous publication, this work's imagination and musical brilliance have impressed listeners and critics.
Saint-Saëns also wrote six preludes and fugues for organ, three in Op. 99 and three in Op. 109, of which Op. 99, no. 3 in E flat major is most often performed.
The opera Hélène was composed by Saint-Saëns for the great Australian soprano, Dame Nellie Melba, in 1904. Unstaged after its premiere in Monaco, it was performed in the soprano's home city (Melbourne) during January 2008.
One of Saint-Saëns's symphonic poems, Le rouet d'Omphale, Op. 31, became famous to a new generation of listeners beginning in 1937 through its use of the ominous middle section of it as the theme to the long-running radio program, The Shadow.
Controversies
Saint-Saëns was thought to have ethnically Jewish traits, especially in his youth. Adolphe Boschot said that Saint-Saëns could not be of Jewish origin because his uncle was a priest,
He was also rumoured to be homosexual.
Media
References
Further reading
Michael Stegemann: Camille Saint-Saëns and the French Solo Concerto from 1850 to 1920. Portland OR: Amadeus Press, 1991. ISBN 0-931340-35-7
External links
Piano Rolls (The Reproducing Piano Roll Foundation)
Saint-Saens playing his own Piano Concerto #2 (opening)
Saint-Saens playing Valse Nonchalente Op.110
Saint-Saens playing Rhapsodie d'Auvergne Op.73
Category:1835 births
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Category:People from Paris
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Category:Composers for violin
Category:Composers for pipe organ
Category:French classical pianists
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Category:Opera composers
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Category:Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class)
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Category:Burials at Montparnasse Cemetery
Camille Saint-Saëns
Category:Grand Croix of the Légion d'honneur
