{"id":5506,"date":"2012-08-14T10:06:39","date_gmt":"2012-08-14T15:06:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/?p=5506"},"modified":"2012-08-14T10:06:39","modified_gmt":"2012-08-14T15:06:39","slug":"two-cd-releases-show-off-the-art-of-composer-camille-saint-saens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2012\/08\/14\/two-cd-releases-show-off-the-art-of-composer-camille-saint-saens\/","title":{"rendered":"Two CD releases show off the art of composer Camille Saint-Sa\u00ebns"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Camille Saint-Sa\u00ebns in his element — on a steamship.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Repeat something enough times with conviction, and people start to believe it, whether it has to do with politics, economics or art.<\/p>\n

French composer Camille Saint-Sa\u00ebns, who bridged the Romantic and Modern eras thanks to an 86-year lifespan, was treated as a relic of a bygone age by his obituarists and university lecturers.<\/p>\n

It’s a status that does not square with a legacy of rich craft he left behind, and which deserves a fresh look and listen now that we can have some perspective on the aesthetic steamroller of Modernism.<\/p>\n

Two recent albums — one new, one a valuable reissue — can only help rehabilitate this great creative mind. Saint-Sa\u00ebns is best known for Carnival of the Animals<\/em>, written in 1888, his opera Samson et Dalila<\/em> (1877), his two concertos each for the violin and cello, and his “Organ” Symphony<\/em> (1886). These are but little windows into a wider musical universe.<\/p>\n

But first, a bit of biographical background.<\/p>\n

Saint-Sa\u00ebns was born in Paris, in 1835, and gave his first concert at age 11. The concert featured Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3<\/em> and the Piano Concerto No. 15<\/em> (K450) by Mozart, embellished with Saint-Sa\u00ebns’ own cadenzas. (Let’s remember he was playing on something like Chopin’s Pleyel piano; the modern concert grand wouldn’t be perfected for another four decades.)<\/p>\n

He was accepted into the Conservatoire in Paris in 1848, graduating with the Organ Prize in 1851, at age 16. His teachers included opera composer Jacques Fromental Hal\u00e9vy. He immediately started entering composer competitions (he twice lost a Prix de Rome, but did well elsewhere), and took his first full-time organist’s job in 1853, at Saint-Merri, in central Paris.<\/p>\n

That year, at age 18, he also wrote his first published symphony, which caught the attention of Franz Liszt, who came to Paris to hear Saint-Sa\u00ebns play the organ at his next parish, the vast neo-classical Madeleine Church, in 1857, and grandly declared the 22-year-old Frenchman to be the world’s best organist.<\/p>\n

Saint-Sa\u00e9ns could, essentially, do no wrong until after the turn of the century. He became an avid traveller, spreading the gospel of his carefully constructed music as far as the United States. Queen Victoria thought he was marvellous, as did Czar Alexander III in Russia.<\/p>\n

When a production of Racine’s Andromaque<\/em> was built around Sarah Bernhardt, she demanded incidental music from the French composer. He wrote a cantata for the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, The Celestial Fire<\/em>, meant as a metaphor for the arrival of domestic electricity.<\/p>\n

A stodgy, starchy composer wouldn’t have given the time of day to electricity.<\/p>\n

But Saint-Sa\u00ebns had an inquiring mind. He spent the money from his first big commission on a telescope, and wrote articles on a wide range of topics.<\/p>\n

(His personal life was far more colourful than we can imagine. Saint-Sa\u00ebns married a woman half his age in 1875, their two sons died in early childhood and the composer ran away from home into the arms of young men, many of them in North Africa. He would frequently cross the Mediterranean under assumed names, and died in Algiers, in 1921.)<\/p>\n

Saint-Sa\u00ebns was the first French composer to include Arabic themes in his music, and the first to write tone poems. He was the first to write for harmonium.<\/p>\n

He even produced a set of pieces for piano-harmonium duo. A Pr\u00e9lude from this set of pieces is played nicely here by the great Xaver Varnus and pianist Anik\u00f3 Nov\u00e1k at the Palace of the Arts in Budapest, in 2007:<\/p>\n