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Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns
1835-1921 French composer, organist and conductor who wrote works including Rondo Capriccioso, Samson and Delilah and Symphony No.3 'Organ'.
Life and music
• Born in Paris in 1835, the son of an audit clerk and carpenter’s daughter, Saint-Saëns showed signs of exceptional musical ability from infancy.
• He gave his first private concert to an audience at the tender age of five, started seriously composing the following year, and aged 10 gave his professional debut with an orchestra playing a Mozart concerto and the first movement of Beethoven’s C minor Concerto.
• Saint-Saëns was one of the most gifted polymaths in musical history. Quite apart from his exceptional skills as a musician – composer, virtuoso pianist/organist, conductor, distinguished pedagogue – he was also a multi-linguist, a consulted authority on literature and the arts in general, a notable author and poet in his own right, and could hold his own with experts in a whole variety of ‘spare-time’ disciplines, notably archaeology and astronomy.
• Saint-Saëns had an uncontainable sense of humour and was the life and soul of any gathering. One night, very much the worse for drink, Saint-Saëns and his close friend Tchaikovsky crept into the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire, donned tutus and danced an impromptu pas-de-deux under the mimed ‘direction’ of Nikolay Rubinstein, the Conservatoire’s esteemed director!
• Among Saint-Saëns’ masterpieces are the Second Piano Concerto (1868) – a scintillating amalgam of Bach and Mendelssohn composed in just a few weeks – and the First Cello Concerto (1872), which ingeniously makes the soloist play with a brilliance and flexibility normally associated with the violin, while still retaining the instrument’s noble voice.
• His most notable work of all is the Danse Macabre (1874), a cornucopia of demonic delight, featuring a scordatura (unconventionally tuned) solo violin, a xylophone making bloodcurdling skeletal noises and a grotesque dance of death silenced only by the sound of the oboe announcing the dawn’s arrival.
• Tragically, Saint-Saëns’ two sons both died young: his elder son André, climbed onto a fourth-floor window ledge, lost his balance and fell to his death aged two and a half. Barely six weeks later, André’s little brother Jean-Francois died suddenly from pneumonia.
• The most distinguished French composer of his generation, Saint-Saëns selflessly promoted the music of his younger contemporaries, as well as editing works by Gluck, Rameau and Mozart.
• In many ways, Saint-Saëns stood wholly apart from his time, not being wholly swept along by the general tide of expressive Romanticism. His musical gods were Bach and Mozart as ‘these two great composers never sacrificed form to expression’.
• Perhaps the most balanced assessment of Saint-Saëns’ unique art was given by the great musicologist, M.D. Calvocoressi, who wrote that Saint-Saëns’ music, ‘though lacking strength of character, imaginative power and often seriousness, set the highest standards of form, style and workmanship’.
• Saint-Saëns died in Algiers aged 86.
Did you know?
Saint-Saëns could sightread scores of mind-boggling complexity perfectly at first sight. Wagner, who had little time for anyone for anyone but himself, was dumbfounded when Saint-Saëns played through several of his epic operatic scores at the piano as though it was child’s play.
