Camille Saint-Saëns

Charles Camille Saint-Saëns (IPA: ) (9 October 1835 – 16 December 1921) was a French composer and performer.

Music

Style

Saint-Saëns the composer is widely regarded as writing music that is elegant and technically flawless, but often uninspired. His works have been called logical and clean, polished, professional, and never excessive. His piano music, while not as deep or as challenging as some of his contemporaries, forms the stylistic connection between Liszt and Ravel. Though in later life Saint-Saëns was thought of as old-fashioned, he had explored many new forms as well as reinvigorated older ones. His compositions are strongly fixed in the Classical tradition, and some consider him to be a forerunner of Neoclassicism.

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In performance, Saint-Saëns is said to have been "unequalled on the organ", and rivaled only by a few on the piano—Liszt himself is reported to have thought that Saint-Saëns and himself were the two best pianists in Europe. However, Saint-Saëns' concert style was restrained, subtle, and cool; he sat unmoving at the piano. His playing was marked by extraordinarily even scales and passagework, great speed, and aristocratic refinement. The recordings he left at the end of his life give glimpses of these traits. He was often charged of being unemotional and business-like, and so he was less memorable than other more charismatic performers. He was probably the first pianist to publicly perform a cycle of all the Mozart piano concertos. In some cases these influenced his own piano concertos; for example, the first movement of his fourth piano concerto, in C Minor, strongly resembles the last movement of Mozart's 24th Concerto, which is in the same key. Throughout his life, Saint-Saëns continued to play with the technique taught to him by Stamaty, which kept the performing strength in the hand and not the arm, and so the recordings he made in the 1910s are remarkable in that one can hear the pianistic technique of Kalkbrenner, which predates Chopin.

Related Topics:
Mozart - 24th Concerto - 1910s - Chopin

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Musical Works

See: List of compositions by Camille Saint-Saëns

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Saint-Saëns' 86 years provided him with time to write hundreds of compositions; during his long career, he wrote many dramatic works, including four symphonic poems, and thirteen operas, of which Samson et Dalila and the symphonic poem Danse Macabre are among his most famous. In all, he composed over three hundred works and was the first major composer to write music specifically for the cinema, for Henri Lavedan's film L'Assassinat du Duc de Guise.

Related Topics:
Dramatic - Symphonic poem - Opera - Danse Macabre - Duc de Guise

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In 1886 he wrote his Symphony No. 3, "avec orgue" ("with organ"), perhaps the most famous of all his works. Aided by monumental symphonic organs built in France by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, at that time the world's foremost organ builder, this work in particular is immersed in the spirit of "gigantism" of the dying 19th century, along with the Eiffel Tower, the Universal Exposition at Paris and the beginning of the "belle époque". The Maestoso of the fourth movement is clearly an expression of the confidence of the European man in himself, in his technology, his science, his "age of reason" (somewhat ironically, the melody was later used as the basis for the theme music of the immensely popular film Babe). He was frequently named as "the most German composer of all the French composers", perhaps due to his fantastic skills exhibited in the construction of melodic passages.

Related Topics:
1886 - Symphony No. 3 - Aristide Cavaillé-Coll - 19th century - Eiffel Tower - Universal Exposition at Paris - Belle époque - Babe - German

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Also in 1886, Saint-Saëns completed Le Carnaval des Animaux, which was first performed on 9 March. Despite the work's great popularity today, Saint-Saëns forbade complete performances of it shortly after its première, allowing only one movement, "Le Cygne" ("The Swan"), a piece for cello and piano, to be published in his lifetime. The piece was written as a sort of musical jest, and Saint-Saëns believed it would damage his "serious" reputation.

Related Topics:
1886 - 9 March - Cello

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Saint-Saëns also wrote six preludes and fugues for organ, three in op. 99 and three in op. 109, the most performed of which is the Prelude and Fugue in E flat major, op. 99, no. 3.

Related Topics:
Prelude - Fugue

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