The New York Times Essential Library by Allan Kozinn

Author:Allan Kozinn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2011-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

For those of us who came of age at a time when rationalism was a highly prized quality in music—meaning, in practical terms, that early music and contemporary music were valued more highly than the purely emotional outbursts of late romanticism—the music of Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) has always been something of a guilty pleasure. Obviously, that attitude demands reconsideration now. Most of us, after all, long ago came to terms with Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler, the most intensely emotional composers of the age; yet Saint-Saëns has retained the image of being decorative but not really serious, a purveyor of frothy, caloric music beneath a thin veneer of neoclassical elegance.

His Symphony no. 3—popularly known as the Organ Symphony because of the organ part that dominates its finale—deserves better standing. For that matter, so does Saint-Saëns himself. A true polymath, he was born in Paris, began his piano studies at age three, and made his formal debut playing Beethoven and Mozart concertos—from memory, and with his own cadenza in the Mozart—when he was ten. His composition studies were under way well before he entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1848. But he was equally passionate about his studies in the natural sciences, literature, religion, languages, and the visual arts. He published articles on several of these topics, as well as music criticism and scholarly studies of Renaissance music.

Early in his career, Saint-Saëns’s talents won the attention and support of Hector Berlioz, Gioacchino Rossini, Charles Gounod, and Franz Liszt. He was passionate about the music of other composers, most notably Wagner, and defended them against more conservative opinion to the contrary. Yet, at the start of World War I, he argued for a ban on German music, Wagner’s especially.

Saint-Saëns composed prolifically: in addition to his most famous opera, Samson et Dalila, he wrote a dozen others, as well as incidental music, chamber works, dozens of choral settings, both sacred and secular, a rich catalog of songs, and a long list of orchestral works that includes the popular Danse macabre, five piano concertos, two cello concertos, and two violin concertos. He maintained an active performing life as both a pianist and a conductor. His last piano recital, in 1921, commemorated the seventy-fifth anniversary of his youthful debut; he died in Algiers a few months later.

It was for a guest conducting appearance in 1886 with the Royal Philharmonic Society of London that Saint-Saëns was commissioned to write the Organ Symphony. Saint-Saëns’s themes here have a Schubertian lilt, but they are developed as a series of thematic transformations, a mode of musical development that was widely associated with Liszt, who had died that year, and to whose memory the work is dedicated. Saint-Saëns scored the work for a huge orchestra, augmented not only by the organ but by piano four-hands. He cast it in two large movements, mainly to keep the focus on the thematic development, rather than on changes of tempo and texture. Still, each movement is easily divisible in half, and most CD versions

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