Camille Saint-Saëns (1835 – 1921): Piano Concerto no 2 in G Minor
Camille Saint-Saëns was a musical genius who may just have been born in the wrong century. As the hoped for saviour of French Romantic music in the 1860s and 70s, he was hopelessly miscast. While contemporary composers were increasingly expected to fill their music with passionate, intimate expression, Saint-Saëns stubbornly veered on the side of classical balance and restraint. A somewhat dry, matter of fact man, he had no time whatsoever for the emotional pyrotechnics of his age.
It is on these very same grounds that Saint-Saëns’ output has often been misjudged and misunderstood. Even today there are many who think that he never quite fulfilled his potential. Others believe he was simply too gifted, and hence never forced to dig deep and evolve as an artist. It was a charge made against him even when he was still a young man. “He knows everything”, his friend Hector Berlioz once said of him, “but lacks inexperience”.
No one thought to wonder whether Saint-Saëns might just have been better suited to another age. It’s certainly possible to imagine his well-ordered, Augustan mind flourishing during the early 1700s, and making his own worthy contributions to the French High Baroque of Jean-Philippe Rameau and François “Le Grand” Couperin. Failing that, he would almost certainly have felt at home in 1920s Paris, whose music was then in the grip of a heady and decidedly unromantic neo-classicism. One could picture Saint-Saëns’ most famous work, Le Carnaval des Animaux, with its catchy melodies, surrealist wit and light, inventive orchestration, rubbing shoulders with some of the best-loved compositions from that era, and not least the music of Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc.
But even if Saint-Saëns was fated to live in such expressionistic times, he was always firmly in the camp of regarding music as a self-sufficient language. “Music is something besides a source of sensuous pleasure and keen emotion”, he once said, “and this resource, precious as it is, is only a chance corner in the wide realm of musical art. He who does not get absolute pleasure from a simple series of well-constructed chords, beautiful only in their arrangement, is not really fond of music.” As for artistic expression: “Art is intended to create beauty and character. Feeling only comes afterwards and art can very well do without it. In fact, it is very much better off when it does.” In these and other similar comments, Saint-Saëns would prove himself to be well ahead of his time.
The fact that music was far from his only passion may have helped Saint-Saëns gain some extra perspective. Academically bright as a child, he carried a wide range of interests into adulthood, including literature, philosophy, zoology, fossil-hunting and astronomy, while in addition he was an accomplished classicist, fluent in both Latin and Greek. He was also unusually well travelled, making well over 150 foreign trips during his lifetime and visiting every continent bar Australia and Antarctica. Above all, he was durable, with both his performing (he was a virtuoso on both piano and organ) and composing careers covering an astonishing eight decades between the 1840s and 1920s. The only thing Saint-Saëns’ never quite mastered were his human relationships. He had few friends and was a notorious grouch in his later years. His brief attempt at marriage in his forties was little short of catastrophic.
The long and remarkable life of Camille Saint-Saëns would first see light in the Sixth Arrondissement of Paris, at a time when the French capital was recovering from yet another revolution (this one to forcibly replace the unpopular Bourbon king, Charles X, with his soon to be equally unpopular cousin, Louis Philippe). Having lost his father (an official at the French Ministry of the Interior) when he was two months old, Saint-Saëns was largely raised by his mother Françoise-Clémence and a music-loving great aunt. Young Camille would form a particularly close bond with his unstintingly supportive mother, even as his over-dependence on her would eventually hold him back in later life.
His innate musical talent was evident almost from the time he could take his first steps. Many have even compared Saint-Saëns’ childhood achievements with Mozart’s. By the time he was two years old he had developed perfect pitch. He started writing his own compositions at the age of three and by five was good enough on the piano to play the (far from easy) accompaniments to Beethoven’s violin sonatas.
The super-talented prodigy wasn’t always easy to please however. He was particularly unimpressed to be presented with a piano piece for the left hand only and refused to learn it. “The bass doesn’t sing”, he complained. And when first taken to see a symphony orchestra concert, his budding musical sensibilities were almost overwhelmed by the brass section. “Until then”, he recalled in his memoirs,
… I had only heard single violins and their tone had not pleased me. But the impression of the orchestra was entirely different and I listened with delight to a passage played by a quartet, when, suddenly, came a blast from the brass instruments – the trumpets, trombones and cymbals. I broke into loud cries, “Make them stop! They prevent me from hearing the music!” They had to take me out.
But Françoise-Clémence also installed plenty of discipline into her son, making sure that, for all his unusual gifts, he never got too far ahead himself. This was partly reflected in the choice of Camille’s first piano teacher, who made the boy practice with a wooden bar placed beneath his forearms so as to concentrate all the movements in his hands. Camille’s mother also made sure her son never pursued fame for its sake, often telling him: “If you work merely to be applauded, you will never do anything worthwhile.”
At the age of ten Camille made his debut public recital at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, an event talked about for decades afterwards. He performed both the Mozart Piano Concerto in B Flat Major (K450) and Beethoven’s Third Concerto in C Minor. As an encore he breezily offered to play any of the 32 Beethoven sonatas from memory.
Five years at the Paris Conservatoire followed, where he studied composition, piano and organ. He duly won a major organ prize but was irked not to carry off the much coveted Prix de Rome for composition, even if several colleagues felt that Saint-Saëns had been hard done by. He had better luck with a competition organized by the Société Sainte-Cécile, Paris, winning first place with his mini cantata, Ode à Sainte-Cécile (1852). From that time onwards he began to create a reputation for himself as a composer.
At the age of 17, Saint-Saëns began a lifelong habit of ascribing opus numbers to all his major compositions. In the event, his output would be prolific, stretching onwards for the next 70 years (until he reached opus number 167) and with his compositional arc full of surprising twists and turns. Like any good classicist, Saint-Saëns embraced all forms, from operas and masses to piano etudes and songs, to symphonies, symphonic poems and an impressive body of chamber music. He would even write some of the earliest known film music (for the French film “L’Assassinat du duc de Guise” (The Assassination of the Duke of Guise) in 1908). But the most glittering masterworks would always rub shoulders with more prosaic-seeming efforts. His opus one itself was far from barnstorming – a set of three pieces for harmonium.
After leaving the conservatoire in 1853, Saint-Saëns’ main source of income for the next 25 years was as an organist – firstly at the old Parisian church of Saint-Merri (near the Hôtel de Ville), and then from 1857 at L’Église de la Madeleine (in the Fourth Arrondissement) then the official church of the Empire. Saint-Saëns quickly developed a reputation for breathtaking improvisations during services. When Franz Liszt heard him play, he declared him the finest organist in the world.
But Saint-Saëns’ virtuosity could sometimes fall foul of La Madeleine’s more banal musical tastes. Having been told by a parish vicar that his playing style was too “severe” and that most of the congregation were “wealthy people who attended the Opéra-Comique frequently” and should have their musical tastes “respected”, Saint-Saëns replied testily, “when I hear from the pulpit the language of opéra-comique I will play music appropriate to it, and not before!”
When not playing for church services, the young composer would prove to be highly productive with his creative work. From the 1850s alone would come his first two symphonies (in E Flat Major and A Minor), three concerti composed in rapid succession during 1858 (two for violin, one for piano), and chamber music, including a piano quartet and piano quintet.
From 1861 Saint-Saëns also had a spell as a teacher at the École Niedermeyer de Paris, a kind of elite school for prospective church musicians, although Saint-Saëns himself was put in charge of piano classes. Here the still youthful composer belied his later close-mindedness by introducing his pupils to some of Europe’s most avant-garde music (including the likes of Liszt and Wagner) while also making a genuinely warm impression on his students. Several of them, including the budding composers André Messager and Gabriel Fauré would feel a lasting gratitude towards their teacher, with Fauré himself recalling years later:
After allowing the lessons to run over, [Saint-Saëns] would go to the piano and reveal to us those works of the masters from which the rigorous classical nature of our programme of study kept us at a distance and who, moreover, in those far-off years, were scarcely known…. At the time I was 15 or 16, and from this time dates the almost filial attachment … the immense admiration, the unceasing gratitude I [have] had for him, throughout my life.
Saint-Saëns was particularly fascinated by Wagner’s operas, and championed them against the prevailing tastes in France. He studied them closely, and once astonished Wagner himself by playing a piano reduction of his entire opera Tristan from memory. But nor was Saint-Saëns ever a slavish devotee of the great operatic genius, once writing “I admire deeply the works of Richard Wagner in spite of their bizarre character. They are superior and powerful, and that is sufficient for me. But I am not, I have never been, and I shall never be of the Wagnerian religion.” Over time, Saint-Saëns attitude to contemporary music would alter markedly and by the start of the twentieth century he had become one of France’s most notorious reactionaries.
Sensing that his teaching was taking him too much away from composition, Saint-Saëns resigned his post at the Niedermeyer in 1865 and redoubled his creative efforts. By now he was already established as one of France’s most promising young musicians, and his career possibilities looked boundless. In 1867 he won a major composition prize (organized by the Grande Fête Internationale in Paris with a glittering array of judges including Berlioz, Gounod, Rossini and Verdi) with his grand cantata Les Noces de Prométhée. At around the same time, he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. He was still just thirty two years old.
Then came one of his first genuinely popular works, his Piano Concerto no 2 in G Minor, written a year later. It serves as an attractive showcase of Saint-Saëns’ talent in all its eclectic inventiveness. The early twentieth century Polish pianist, Zygmunt Stojowski, once joked that it was probably the only concerto ever written to begin like Bach and end with Offenbach.
Although Saint-Saëns was a huge fan of Beethoven and had grown up playing the great man’s piano concerti, there is little trace of that influence on this work. In place of a weighty first movement comes a tentative Andante Sostenuto, and something much closer to a free-form meditation between the piano and orchestra.
The solo piano opening (in a melancholy G Minor) does indeed sound like a lost Bach fantasia, but this opening was written not by Saint-Saëns but rather lifted (with permission) from an abandoned motet by his old pupil Gabriel Fauré. Much of this first movement then proceeds in this quasi-improvisatory way, with a delicious main theme carrying more than a hint of Chopin. But not all is tranquil – the piano grows more agitated and there are moments when the full orchestra asserts itself, appearing to call the music to order. The movement ends in the same Bachian melancholy that had opened proceedings, all perfectly (and atmospherically) stage-managed by its composer.
The second and third movements are, by contrast, much quicker and scherzo-like, and far more tightly constructed. The second (Allegro Scherzando) brings the lightest music of the whole work, and here the high-spirited influence of Jacques Offenbach (whose operettas were then all the rage in Paris) is most apparent. The final movement, a breathless saltarello, continues something of the Offenbach-ish vibe, even as its mood is a little more serious. It also incorporates a beautiful central motif, made up of fleeting piano trills and unfashionably modal harmonies that seem to evoke another era. As his long career progressed, Saint-Saëns would show himself to be a musical sponge (much like Maurice Ravel a few decades later), taking inspiration from a wide and heterogeneous range of sources, from 16th century motets to folksong and native, non-European music. “I am an eclectic spirit”, he once admitted. “It may be a great defect, but I cannot change it; one cannot make over one’s personality.”
The fact that the Second Concerto was written in just three weeks also suggests Saint-Saëns’ impressive fluency – and not least that the music proceeds with such confidence, as if a single note could not have been written otherwise. The work was premiered in Paris in May 1868, with the composer himself at the piano. Giving himself so little time to learn the solo part beforehand may have contributed to the work’s initial modest reception. But quite quickly it would establish itself as one of composer’s best known works in France, while Saint-Saëns himself was able to take part in subsequent performances all across Europe. .
So the talented young genius was on his way, with still over half a century of music-making ahead of him, including the creation of many of his finest works. But after a relatively trouble-free ride, tougher times were just around the corner. Just two years later would bring the Franco-Prussian war, with Paris firstly overrun by German soldiers and then (even more brutally) by French political rebels. After one of Saint-Saëns’ colleagues at the La Madeleine had been murdered by rebels, the composer would flee to England for several months.
Not long after this would come Saint-Saëns’ disastrous marriage, followed by some of the darkest days of his life. Sensing that his initial popularity in France was beginning to wane, and the tide of musical history moving against him, Saint-Saëns would eventually succumb to a near mental breakdown and contemplate suicide.
But he would find a way through all of this, to endure and survive. Even as his contemporaries began to fade from view, and the modern world increasingly disgusted him, Camille Saint-Saëns, the great unromantic, would carry on, doggedly performing and composing right to the end of his long life.