Camille Saint-Saëns

French composer and musician

• Born: October 9, 1835
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: December 16, 1921
• Place of death: Algiers, Algeria

A musician of infinite musicality, facility, and versatility, Saint-Saëns composed in all forms of his time. His life began only eight years after Ludwig van Beethoven died and ended only three years after Leonard Bernstein was born, spanning an era of huge transition as a kind of Romantic classicist and an open-minded traditionalist, simultaneously cosmopolitan and utterly French.

Early Life

Camille Saint-Saëns (kah-meel saynt-sahns) was a sickly child who was left fatherless at age three months, was treated in a nursing home for his first two years, and then was raised by his mother and aunt. However, his musical aptitude soon was evident and was quickly directed. At age ten he made his debut as a pianist in concertos by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. He also began studies in composition and was actively composing by his teens.

Saint-Saëns entered the Paris Conservatory at age thirteen, studying composition and orchestration with Fromental Halévy, and he trained on the organ. At the same time, he began cultivating a lifelong and voracious appetite for literature, the classics, religion, philosophy, archaeology, natural sciences, and mathematics, topics that would be the subject of many of his essays and treatises through his life.

As his music began to attract attention, Saint-Saëns joined in important editorial projects, preparing works of major composers for publication. In due course, he would make arrangements of music for many and would write cadenzas for concertos by Mozart and Beethoven. Meanwhile, he became part of the highest Parisian musical circles and became friends with composers Gioacchino Rossini, Charles Gounod, and Georges Bizet. Another composer, Hector Berlioz, who gave him particular encouragement, famously said of him that “he knows everything but lacks inexperience.” Saint-Saëns astounded Franz Liszt with his capacities for sight-reading and keyboard improvisation. He became one of the earliest French champions of Richard Wagner’s music (reporting extensively on the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876), while he also stimulated lagging French interest in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, and Mozart.

Life’s Work

Saint-Saëns once said of himself that he composed “naturally, as a tree bears fruit.” His huge output includes published music of about 180 opus numbers, plus vast unpublished works, including much juvenilia. He wrote many songs (mostly to texts by leading French poets of the day) and choral works, among them major sacred works such as a requiem and several oratorios (the earliest of them a beguiling Oratorio de Noël).

Saint-Saëns’s strong feeling for the theater generated a dozen operas, beginning with Samson et Dalila (1859) and ending with Déjanire (1911) after Sophocles, with the Tudor fantasy Henry VIII (1883) along the way. He also frequently wrote incidental scores for state works, including pioneering music for a silent film. Throughout his life he composed chamber works for varying instrumental combinations, consistently devoted to classical form: of major pieces, there are two sonatas each for violin and for cello, two trios for piano and strings, two string quartets, late works, and a sonata each for oboe, clarinet, and bassoon from his very last year. Most unusual are his septet for piano, trumpet, and strings (1880), and his whimsical Le Carnival des animaux (1886; The Carnival of the Animals ) for twelve players.

A virtuoso pianist, Saint-Saëns wrote much music for solo piano, though the bulk came from his later years. He delighted in concerto writing, producing both short pieces and full concertos for instruments that included violin (three), cello (two), and piano (five). (His Fourth Piano Concerto, said Hans von Bülow, “could cure anyone of an aversion to music!”) In orchestral writing he combined a mastery of traditional form with a willingness to experiment, generally revitalizing French creativity in this sphere. He introduced the Lisztian model of the symphonic poem with programmatic content into French practice. Of five completed symphonies, only the latter three bear numbers, culminating in the mighty Third, or Organ, Symphony. It is these works in particular that earned for the composer his friend Gounod’s accolade as the French Beethoven. Nevertheless, his openness to exotic and ethnic styles helped him maintain an eclectic quality in all his writing.

In 1875, at age forty, Saint-Saëns married a woman who was nineteen years old. The marriage was ill-founded, their two children died in childhood, and they separated in 1881. The composer’s beloved and devoted mother died in 1888, leaving him more fully isolated personally. Nevertheless, he found compensatory relationships with many students who then became his friends and even a substitute family. His personal means and professional prosperity spared Saint-Saëns formal teaching obligations beyond a minimum, but his best pupils were important ones. Chief among them was Gabriel Fauré, to whom he became a devoted mentor, both professionally and personally.

Above all, Saint-Saëns became the tireless advocate of French music both old and new. He became editor in chief for the publication of the works of the great Baroque master Jean-Philippe Rameau, and he integrated earlier French styles into his own aesthetics. At the same time, he was ready to advance new musical styles and, particularly, to encourage new French creativity. In 1871 he helped found the Société Nationale de Musique and worked with the organization for the next fifteen years, promoting performances of music by such younger talents as Emanuel Chabrier, Claude Debussy, Paul Dukas, and Maurice Ravel.

Ever increasing his activities as a critic, essayist, and freelance writer-at-large, Saint-Saëns pursued an endless career as pianist, organist, and conductor. This he combined with an addiction to travel that he contracted in his early twenties. He roved tirelessly around Europe, to Russia, to South America, and to the Middle East. Amid visits to England, he played for Queen Victoria and received numerous honors. He made tours in the United States in 1906 and 1915. After playing his last public concert in August, 1921, he retired to work in one of his favorite locales, French Algeria, where death overtook him suddenly that December at the still-vigorous age of eighty-six.

Significance

Though Saint-Saëns was, by his later decades, clearly the dean of living French composers, he had come to seem increasingly irrelevant in changing times. He was outraged by Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at its premiere in 1913, and the emerging generation of composers considered him a dodo, or outdated. Nevertheless, his musical integrity and productivity were the heart of French musical vitality through the latter half of the nineteenth century, while his Gallic devotion to lucid logic and balanced moderation served to anticipate the neoclassic revival to come.

The musical legacy of Saint-Saëns is often dismissed as superficial and facile. Nevertheless, a surprising number of his works have secured an enduring place in their repertoires. Of his operas, only Samson et Dalila survives, but it remains a guaranteed success. His witty suite The Carnival of the Animals, though meant to be an ephemeral trifle, is an endless delight, while in the concert hall his orchestral works are regularly offered.

Of Saint-Saëns’s symphonic poems, the Danse macabre is always a great hit (if not always for the right reasons), while his Organ Symphony the Third is a favorite vehicle for blockbuster occasions. Of his concertos, at least nos. 2 and 4 for piano, no. 3 for violin, and no. 1 for cello are staples. Indeed, the First Cello Concerto (1873) has a special history of influence, having been the model for Victor Herbert’s Second Cello Concerto (1894), which in turn inspired Dvorák’s own titanic Cello Concerto (1895).

Bibliography

Cooper, Martin. French Music from the Death of Berlioz to the Death of Fauré. London: Oxford University Press, 1951. A classic survey of the context for Saint-Saëns’s career.

Harding, James. Saint-Saëns and His Circle. London: Chapman and Hall, 1965. The standard biography of Saint-Saëns in English. Dated but still recommended.

Hervey, Arthur. Saint-Saëns. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1922. Written just before the composer’s death, an English admirer’s assessment. Also dated but a valuable read.

Lacombe, Hervé. The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Edward Schneider. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Provides context for Saint-Saëns’s contributions as a French composer of music appreciated internationally.

Saint-Saëns, Camille. Musical Memories. Translated by Edwin Gile Rich. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1919. A collection of essays, some autobiographical, some nostalgic, by Saint-Saëns himself. A dated but necessary read.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Outspoken Essays on Music. Translated by Fred Rothwell. New York: Dutton, 1922. An authorized translation of some of Saint-Saëns’s trenchant musical reflections, with his own introduction, published within months of his death.

Stegemann, Michael. Camille Saint-Saëns and the French Solo Concerto from 1850 to 1920. Translated by Ann C. Sherwin. Portland, Oreg.: Amadeus Press, 1991. A study of a special category of Saint-Saëns’s output, written by a leading German Saint-Saëns scholar.