Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns (UK: /ˈsæ̃sɒ̃ (s)/, US: /sæ̃ˈsɒ̃ (s)/, French: [ʃaʁl kamij sɛ̃sɑ̃(s)]) was a French composer, organist, conductor, and pianist from the Romantic era. His most famous works include Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (1863), the Second Piano Concerto (1868), the First Cello Concerto (1872), Danse macabre (1874), the opera Samson and Delilah (1877), the Third Violin Concerto (1880), the Third ("Organ") Symphony (1886), and The Carnival of the Animals (1886).
Saint-Saëns began performing publicly at age ten. After studying at the Paris Conservatoire, he worked as a church organist at Saint-Merri in Paris and later at La Madeleine, the official church of the French Empire, from 1858 until 1878. After leaving this position, he became a well-known pianist and composer, performing across Europe and the Americas.
As a young man, Saint-Saëns was interested in the latest musical styles of his time, including those of composers like Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner. However, his own music followed traditional classical forms. He studied musical history and respected the structures used by earlier French composers. This caused disagreements with later composers who worked in the impressionist and expressionist styles. Though his music had elements that resembled neoclassical styles, which later composers like Stravinsky and Les Six also used, he was often seen as resistant to change during his later years.
Saint-Saëns taught briefly at the École Niedermeyer in Paris for less than five years. Despite the short time, this role was important for French music. His students included Gabriel Fauré, who later taught Maurice Ravel. Both Fauré and Ravel were greatly influenced by Saint-Saëns, who they admired as a talented musician.
Life
Camille Saint-Saëns was born in Paris. He was the only child of Jacques-Joseph-Victor Saint-Saëns, who worked for the French Ministry of the Interior, and Françoise-Clémence, who was born into the Collin family. Victor Saint-Saëns, Camille’s father, had ancestors from Normandy, and his wife came from the Haute-Marne region. Camille was born in the Rue du Jardinet in the 6th district of Paris and was baptized at the nearby church of Saint-Sulpice. He always considered himself a true Parisian. Less than two months after his baptism, Victor Saint-Saëns died of tuberculosis on the first anniversary of his marriage. To help Camille’s health, he was taken to the countryside and lived with a nurse in Corbeil, a town 29 kilometers (18 miles) south of Paris for two years.
When Camille returned to Paris, he lived with his mother and her aunt, Charlotte Masson. Before he was three years old, he had perfect pitch and enjoyed playing tunes on the piano. His great-aunt taught him the basics of piano playing, and at age seven, he became a student of Camille-Marie Stamaty, a former pupil of Friedrich Kalkbrenner. Stamaty required his students to rest their forearms on a bar in front of the keyboard so that their power came only from their hands and fingers. This method, Saint-Saëns later wrote, was good training. Clémence Saint-Saëns, Camille’s mother, knew her son had an early talent but did not want him to become famous too soon. In 1969, music critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote that Saint-Saëns was the most remarkable child prodigy in history, including Mozart. Camille gave occasional performances for small audiences starting at age five, but he made his official public debut at age ten at the Salle Pleyel. His program included Mozart’s Piano Concerto in B♭ (K 450) and Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto. Through Stamaty’s influence, Saint-Saëns met composition professor Pierre Maleden and organ teacher Alexandre Pierre François Boëly. From Boëly, he developed a lifelong love for the music of Bach, which was not widely known in France at the time.
As a schoolboy, Saint-Saëns excelled in many subjects. In addition to music, he studied French literature, Latin, Greek, divinity, and mathematics. He also had interests in philosophy, archaeology, and astronomy, which he remained an amateur in later life.
In 1848, at age thirteen, Saint-Saëns entered the Paris Conservatoire, France’s leading music school. The director, Daniel Auber, had taken over from Luigi Cherubini in 1842 and introduced a more relaxed schedule, though the curriculum remained traditional. Students, even talented pianists like Saint-Saëns, were encouraged to study the organ because church organist careers were seen as more stable than those of solo pianists. Saint-Saëns’s organ teacher was François Benoist, whom he considered a poor organist but an excellent teacher. Benoist’s other students included Adolphe Adam, César Franck, Charles Alkan, Louis Lefébure-Wély, and Georges Bizet. In 1849, Saint-Saëns won the Conservatoire’s second prize for organists, and in 1851, he won the top prize. That same year, he began formal composition studies with Fromental Halévy, a protégé of Cherubini, whose other students included Charles Gounod and Bizet.
Saint-Saëns’s early compositions included a symphony in A major (1850) and a choral piece, Les Djinns (1850), based on a poem by Victor Hugo. He competed for France’s top musical award, the Prix de Rome, in 1852 but did not win. The Conservatoire’s director, Auber, believed Saint-Saëns had more promise than the winner, Léonce Cohen, who later had little success. In the same year, Saint-Saëns won first prize from the Société Sainte-Cécile, Paris, for his Ode à Sainte-Cécile. The first piece Saint-Saëns officially recognized as a mature work and gave an opus number was Trois Morceaux for harmonium (1852).
After leaving the Conservatoire in 1853, Saint-Saëns became the organist at the ancient church of Saint-Merri near the Hôtel de Ville. The parish had 26,000 members, and the organist earned a comfortable income from fees for weddings, funerals, and a modest salary. The church’s organ, built by François-Henri Clicquot, had been damaged during the French Revolution and only partially restored. It was suitable for church services but not for the large recitals held in other famous Parisian churches. Saint-Saëns used his free time to compose, including his Symphony in E♭ (1853), which included military fanfares and expanded brass and percussion sections. This work reflected the mood of the time, following Napoleon III’s rise to power and the restoration of the French Empire. It earned Saint-Saëns another first prize from the Société Sainte-Cécile.
Musicians like Rossini, Berlioz, Liszt, and singer Pauline Viardot quickly recognized Saint-Saëns’s talent and supported his career. In early 1858, Saint-Saëns moved to the prestigious position of organist at La Madeleine, the official church of the Empire. Liszt, who heard Saint-Saëns play there, called him the greatest organist in the world.
Although Saint-Saëns later had a reputation for musical conservatism, in
Music
In the early 1900s, an anonymous writer in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians wrote:
Although Saint-Saëns was interested in modern musical ideas when he was young, he always respected the great composers from earlier times. A critic named D C Parker, who wrote about Saint-Saëns on his 80th birthday, said, "Saint-Saëns knows the works of Rameau, Bach, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart. His deep appreciation for these composers forms the base of his music."
Saint-Saëns was less interested than some of his French peers in the continuous style of music made famous by Wagner. Instead, he often used self-contained melodies. These melodies, as Ratner described, are "supple and pliable," but they are usually made of three- or four-bar sections, and the pattern "AABB" is common. Sometimes, Saint-Saëns used neoclassicism, which came from his study of French baroque music. This style contrasts with his more colorful orchestral music. Grove noted that Saint-Saëns created effects through unique harmonies and rhythms rather than through elaborate orchestration. He usually preferred familiar techniques. Rhythmically, he often used standard double, triple, or compound meters, though Grove mentioned a 4/4 passage in the Piano Trio and another in the Polonaise for two pianos. From his time at the Conservatoire, Saint-Saëns was skilled in counterpoint, and this technique appears naturally in many of his works.
In 1955, authors Edward Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor wrote in The Record Guide that Saint-Saëns's musical skill helped French musicians recognize that music exists beyond opera. In the 2001 edition of Grove's Dictionary, Ratner and Daniel Fallon analyzed Saint-Saëns's orchestral music and called the unnumbered Symphony in A (about 1850) the most ambitious of his early works. His First Symphony (1853) is a serious and large-scale piece influenced by Schumann. The "Urbs Roma" Symphony (1856, unnumbered) is less refined, with a heavy and thick sound. Ratner and Fallon praised the Second Symphony (1859) for its clear structure and use of fugues. The most famous of his symphonies is the Third (1886), which includes prominent parts for piano and organ. It begins in C minor and ends in C major with a stately chorale tune. The four movements are divided into two pairs, a structure Saint-Saëns used in other works, such as the Fourth Piano Concerto (1875) and the First Violin Sonata (1885). The Third Symphony is dedicated to Liszt and uses a recurring theme in a style similar to Liszt's thematic transformation.
Saint-Saëns wrote four symphonic poems inspired by Liszt's model, though Sackville-West and Shawe-Taylor noted they lack the "vulgar blatancy" found in Liszt's works. The most popular is Danse macabre (1874), which depicts skeletons dancing at midnight. Saint-Saëns often used clever harmonies rather than unusual instruments to create orchestral effects, but in this piece, he used the xylophone to represent the rattling bones of the dancers. Le Rouet d'Omphale (1871) was written after the Commune but has a light and delicate sound. Rees called Phaéton (1873) the best of the symphonic poems, showing Saint-Saëns's ability to create striking melodies. A critic at the premiere of Phaéton thought the piece sounded like a noisy horse rather than the fiery horses from Greek legend. The last symphonic poem, La jeunesse d'Hercule (1877), was the most ambitious but also the least successful, according to Harding. Roger Nichols praised these orchestral works for their memorable melodies, strong structure, and orchestration, calling them "new standards for French music" and an inspiration to composers like Ravel.
Saint-Saëns composed a one-act ballet, Javot (1896), the score for the film L'assassinat du duc de Guise (1908), and incidental music for 12 plays between 1850 and 1916. Three of these scores were for revivals of plays by Molière and Racine, and Saint-Saëns included music by Lully and Charpentier in his scores, showing his knowledge of French baroque music.
Saint-Saëns was the first major French composer to write piano concertos. His First Piano Concerto in D (1858) is not well known, but the Second Piano Concerto in G minor (1868) is one of his most popular works. In this piece, he experimented with form by replacing the usual sonata structure with a more open format, starting with a solemn cadenza. The scherzo second movement and presto finale contrast sharply with the opening, leading pianist Zygmunt Stojowski to say the work "begins like Bach and ends like Offenbach." The Third Piano Concerto in E♭ (1869) has a lively finale, but the earlier movements are more classical with clear, graceful melodies. The Fourth Piano Concerto in C minor (1875) is likely Saint-Saëns's most famous piano concerto after the Second. It has two movements, each with two distinct sections, and maintains thematic unity. Some sources say this piece impressed Gounod, who called Saint-Saëns "the Beethoven of France," while others credit the Third Symphony for that title. The Fifth Piano Concerto in F major (1896) is known as the "Egyptian" concerto, written during a winter stay in Luxor and incorporating a tune Saint-Saëns heard from Nile boatmen.
The First Cello Concerto in A minor (1872) is a serious but lively work in a single continuous movement with a turbulent opening. It is among the most popular cello concertos, favored by Pablo Casals and later players. The Second Cello Concerto in D minor (1902), like the Fourth Piano Concerto, has two movements, each with two sections. It is more technically demanding, and Saint-Saëns told Fauré it would never be as popular as the First because it was too difficult. There are three violin concertos. The first was written in 1858 but published in 1879 as the Second in C major. The First in A was also completed in 1858. It is a short work, with a single 314-bar movement lasting less than 15 minutes. The Second in conventional three-movement form is twice as long as the First and is the least popular of the three, with only three performances in Saint-Saëns's lifetime. The Third in B minor, written for Pablo de Sarasate, is technically challenging for the soloist but balances virtuosity with pastoral moments. It is the most popular of the three violin concertos, though Saint-Saëns's best-known violin and orchestra work is probably the Introduction and Rondo Cap
Honours and reputation
Saint-Saëns was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1867 and promoted to Officier in 1884, and Grand Croix in 1913. He received foreign honors, including the British Royal Victorian Order (CVO) in 1902, the Monégasque Order of Saint-Charles in 1904, and honorary doctorates from the universities of Cambridge (1893) and Oxford (1907).
In its obituary notice, The Times commented:
In a short poem, "Mea culpa," published in 1890, Saint-Saëns criticized himself for not being part of the decadent movement and praised the enthusiasm of youth, while expressing sadness that such things were not for him. An English commentator quoted the poem in 1910, noting, "His sympathies are with the young in their desire to push forward, because he has not forgotten his own youth when he championed the progressive ideals of the day." The composer sought a balance between innovation and traditional form. The critic Henry Colles wrote, a few days after the composer's death:
Grove concludes its article on Saint-Saëns with the observation that although his works are remarkably consistent, "it cannot be said that he evolved a distinctive musical style. Rather, he defended the French tradition that threatened to be engulfed by Wagnerian influences and created the environment that nourished his successors."
Since the composer's death, writers sympathetic to his music have expressed regret that he is known by the public for only a few of his scores, such as The Carnival of the Animals, the Second Piano Concerto, the Third Violin Concerto, the Organ Symphony, Samson et Dalila, Danse macabre, and the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso. Among his large output, Nicholas singles out the Requiem, the Christmas Oratorio, the ballet Javotte, the Piano Quartet, the Septet for trumpet, piano, and strings, and the First Violin Sonata as neglected masterpieces. In 2004, the cellist Steven Isserlis said, "Saint-Saëns is exactly the sort of composer who needs a festival to himself … there are Masses, all of which are interesting. I've played all his cello music and there isn't one bad piece. His works are rewarding in every way. And he's an endlessly fascinating figure."