Camille Saint-Saens
Charles Camille Saint-Saëns (Paris, October 9, 1835 - Algiers, December 16, 1921) was a French composer, conductor, organist, pianist and soldier.
A highly gifted musician —he was a virtuoso pianist and also an excellent improviser on the organ—, an inquisitive spirit above all, a writer, caricaturist, a great traveller, Saint-Saëns played an exceptional role in the renewal of French music, both for his teaching —he had students, among others, Gabriel Fauré and André Messager—, as, above all, for his activity in favor of new music —he was one of the founders of the Société Nationale de Musique, destined to play and spread French music. He can be considered an essential link in the renewal that led to Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.
Saint-Saëns was a multifaceted intellectual. Since he was little he dedicated himself to the study of geology, archaeology, botany and entomology, specifically the branch of lepidoptera. He was also an excellent mathematician. In addition to his musical activity as a composer, interpreter and critic, he dedicated himself to the most varied disciplines, engaged in discussions with the best European scientists and wrote scholarly articles on acoustics, occult sciences, theatrical scenery in Ancient Rome and ancient instruments. He was a member of the French Astronomical Society, owned a telescope, and arranged his concerts to coincide with certain astronomical events (such as solar eclipses). He also wrote a philosophical work, Problems and mysteries , a volume of poetry, Rimes familières , and the comedy La crampe des écrivains , which had a great success.
His extensive work —he produced more than four hundred compositions, in which he covered almost all musical genres— is very eclectic, highly classic and even in some compositions part of middle romanticism and perfection that is often a bit forced, which has caused it to be considered too academic in France, above all. However, it is often music of great beauty, with a great quality of writing. He was also the first great composer to write music for the cinema.
Although he lived almost always in Paris, he considered himself the adopted son of Dieppe, a small town in Upper Normandy, where he settled in 1888. Today his legacy is exhibited in the Château-Musée of said town, in a room expressly dedicated to him, the Saint-Saëns room.
Biography
The life of Camille Saint-Saëns spanned the entire romantic period; He was one of the protagonists of the second phase of this movement and witnessed its decline in the middle of the XX century. The year he was born, I puritani by Vincenzo Bellini, Lucia di Lammermoor by Gaetano Donizetti and The Jewess by Jacques Fromental Halévy were released; Robert Schumann composed Carnival and Liszt began Years of Pilgrimage. Felix Mendelssohn, Frédéric Chopin and Schumann had reached the zenith of their careers. When Saint-Saëns died, eight years had already passed since the premiere of The Rite of Spring —which he attended— and three since the death of his hated Claude Debussy; Maurice Ravel —who admired Saint-Saëns for his orchestral skills— had already composed most of his major works, and Igor Stravinsky had just begun his neoclassical adventure with Pulcinella (1920).
Wonder Boy
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Charles Camille Saint-Saëns was born on October 9, 1835 at 3 Rue du Jardinet (in the Latin Quarter of Paris).
His last name is the name of a small town in Normandy where his family came from, of peasant origin. Her father, Victor Saint-Saëns, was a civil servant who settled in Paris and married Clémence Collin (1809–88) in 1834. The father died of tuberculosis just three months after the first and only child was born. son of her The doctors advised his mother to send the delicate boy with a nursemaid to breathe the country air at Corbeil, for a period of two years, as it was likely that his father had transmitted the disease to him (they were right, since that Camille suffered throughout her life from lung conditions). His mother, Clémence, had little means to raise him, and she welcomed the opportunity to continue living with her great-aunt, Charlotte Masson, when she was widowed.
At the end of 1837, little Camille returned to Paris and lived surrounded by the affection of these two women, especially Charlotte, who allowed him to play the piano from a very young age. As a child he was a piano prodigy, gifted with perfect pitch.[citation needed]
At the age of two and a half, he sat down for the first time at a small piano that had not been opened in years. Little Camille played the notes one by one, carefully, until he heard them disappear; she had to tune it and from the age of two he began to practice the piano with his great-aunt who, although she was not a teacher, had a solid musical background. They got her easy pieces by Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, since she didn't want to play the usual pieces from children's albums.She also began composing very early. Her first work was a small piece for the piano, dated March 22, 1839 (when she was 4 years and 7 months old), which is kept in the National Library of France. At the age of five he wrote his first song (Le Soir ), and could already play simple sonatas on the piano. Saint-Saëns's precocity was not limited to music alone, since at the age of three he was already reading and writing, and four years later he began to learn Latin.
He went on stage for the first time playing the Violin Sonata by Ludwig van Beethoven on the piano. In 1842, when he was 7 years old, Saint-Saëns began taking piano lessons with Camille-Marie Stamaty (1811-70), a disciple of Friedrich Kalkbrenner who forced his students to play the piano with their forearms resting on a bar located in front of the keyboard, so that they did not strengthen the arms, but the hands and fingers. He studied the Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach —analyzing the elements of the fugues—, the piano works of Robert Schumann and Franz Liszt, as well as the harmonization and instrumentation of some of the works of Richard Wagner.. On his own initiative he studied in depth the score of Don Giovanni , by Mozart.
The Saint-Saëns family lived wall to wall with Jean-Pierre Granger, a fellow painter of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Both wives became close friends, and the Saint-Saëns often accompanied the Grangers to Ingres's studio and took long walks together. This is how Camille met the famous painter when she was five years old, and Ingres often spoke to her about Mozart, Christoph Willibald Gluck and other musicians of the past. Camille already played quite easily some of Mozart's sonatas and astonished the maestro, who came to listen to him from time to time. At the age of eight, he composed an adagio and dedicated it to him in all seriousness. The painter responded with a small medallion, which had a pencil drawing of Mozart in profile on one side, and, on the other, the following dedication: "To M. Saint-Saëns, charming interpreter of a divine artist".
First recital
The pianist and educator Camille Stamaty arranged for him a recital at the Salle Pleyel, which was his public debut on May 6, 1846, accompanied by Théophile Tilmant, a French violinist and conductor. He performed Beethoven's Concerto in C Minor and Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 15, KV 450 , with a final cadenza of his own invention. He also played various pieces by George Friderich Händel, Friedrich Kalkbrenner, Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Johann Sebastian Bach. As an encore, Saint-Saëns offered to play, from memory, any of Beethoven's thirty-two Piano Sonatas. Reviews of this incredible concert appeared in newspapers throughout most of Europe—and even in some of the United States, from Boston—and he was hailed as a new Mozart. Stamaty wanted Camille to embark on a life as a young soloist prodigy, with him as her manager, but her mother, more concerned with her failing health and giving her a general education, accepted no more commissions, and from then on the relationship between pupil and teacher got cold.
He pursued ordinary studies with brilliance, and showed great interest in all scientific and literary disciplines.
Thanks to Stamaty, he met who would be his composition teacher, Pierre Maleden. He was always very fond of him, despite admitting that his classes were sometimes very stormy. Maleden had perfected his own method of teaching, which was based on considering chords not by themselves—as fifths, sixths, or sevenths—but according to where they appeared on the scale. They had different characteristics depending on where they were, and he could explain certain things that were not themselves inexplicable. This method was taught for some time at the École Niedermeier, but soon fell out of favor.
In 1848, he entered the Paris Conservatoire —the former conservatory on rue Bergère—, where he first attended François Benoist's organ class as an auditor, and later as an official student. He studied composition with the teacher Jacques Fromental Halévy, who was frequently absent because he was very busy with his own operas, which allowed Saint-Saëns to spend long hours in the library studying ancient and modern music. He also took accompaniment and singing lessons and often attended performances by the Concert Society, thanks to Marcelin de Fresne allowing him to stay in his box, which he did for several years. During those years at the Conservatoire, he began to feel a devotion to Victor Hugo, a passion that he maintained throughout his life, impatiently waiting and devouring each new work of the poet, as manifested by the number of his poems to which he set music.He received the advice of Charles Gounod. He won first prize for organ, but never managed to win the prestigious Prix de Rome, which he entered in 1852 — he also did so in 1864 — but was rejected for being still very young. However, the work presented in 1852, the cantata Ode à Sainte-Cécile (Ode to Saint Cecilia), soon had its reward, as it won first prize at the contest organized by the Santa Cecilia Society of Bordeaux the same 1852.
In 1853, at the age of 18, he composed his first Symphony in E flat major, a work that he submitted anonymously to the Santa Cecilia Society itself as a German composer, since in this way he would get it take him seriously and not reject him because of his age. The work was admitted and, once its authorship was known, it was premiered on December 11, 1853, directed by Seghers, with great success. It caused the astonishment of several critics and composers in attendance, such as Gounod, Schumann, Gioachino Rossini and Hector Berlioz, who commented: "He knows everything, but he lacks inexperience." («Il sait tout, mais il manque d'inexpérience»).
Seegers used to invite young talents to his own home and it was there that he met Franz Liszt, with whom he would have planned to give a series of concerts with the last Beethoven quartets, which in the end did not come to fruition. Seegers knew Liszt, since he had been a teacher of his wife, a fairly renowned pianist, and he reappeared in Paris after many years, almost as a legend. This is how the young Camille met him, at the age of 18, attending a performance that he considered prodigious. Although he already knew and admired his works:
Uncounting, he overcame even the hopes he had. The dream of my youthful imagination was only prose compared to Baco hymn evoked in his supernatural fingers. No one who has not heard him in full of his faculties can make an idea of his way of touching.Camille Saint-Saëns
At the concerts of the Société Sainte-Cécile, Saint-Saëns was able to hear for the first time much music from the new French school, which had closed the doors of the Conservatoire Society. There he attended performances of Schubert's Symphony in C ; excerpts from Carl Maria von Weber's opera, Precious; of the symphonies of Gade, Gouvy, Gounod and Reber, and of the Corsaire and King Lear, by Berlioz. He also attended a performance under the baton of Berlioz himself, who conducted L'Enfance de Christ (The Childhood of Christ) and a preview of a work half done, La fuite d'Egypte (The Flight from Egypt).
Full musical activity
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In order to earn a living, that same year, 1853, he began working as an organist in the church of Saint-Merry, a position he held until 1857. When he turned 17, the abbot of the church, Father Gabriel, invited him - as thanks after Saint-Saëns dedicated his Mass opus 4 to him - to accompany him alone on a trip to Italy to listen to the choir of the Sistine Chapel. It was the first of many trips he took throughout his life. Beginning in 1857, he replaced Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wely as organist at the Church of the Madeleine, one of the highest-paid organist positions in the entire Paris—300 francs per year—and for which there was great competition, a position he held until the end of 1877.
His improvisations dazzled the Parisian public and earned him praise from Liszt, who came to hear him and who in 1866 said that Saint-Saëns was the greatest organist in the world. Over time, Liszt became one of his best friends. Also in that year, 1856, he presented his Urbs Roma Symphony to the Société Sainte-Cécile competition, and won another first prize.
In addition to dedicating himself to his own compositions, he collaborated in the edition of works by Gluck, Beethoven, Liszt, Mozart and French harpsichordists. In 1858, the publisher Girod paid him 500 francs for his Six duets for harmonium and piano. With that money he bought a telescope, which he assembled himself following his instructions.
In 1861 he met Richard Wagner while performing as a pianist at the Paris Opera in a performance of Tannhäuser. Wagner was enchanted by this young pianist who played his complicated work at first sight with such ease and understanding. Wagner would say a few years later that Saint-Saëns was "the greatest living French composer". For his part, Saint-Saëns staunchly defended his music—especially Tannhäuser and Lohengrin—, and also that of Schumann, against the general opinion of the Society of the Conservatoire.
From 1861 to 1865 he dedicated himself, for the first and only time, to teaching, obtaining the chair of piano at the École Niedermeyer. He broke tradition by including works by contemporary composers such as Liszt, Charles Gounod, Robert Schumann, Berlioz and Wagner in the programs, when he only expected Bach and Mozart. Among his students there were future great composers, such as Cécile Chaminade, André Messager, Jacques Albert Perilhou, Eugène Gigout and Henri Duparc, and one destined for celebrity, Gabriel Fauré, his favorite disciple, whom he also distinguished with the friendship of him In those years he became friends with the composers Bizet, Rossini and Berlioz, with the singer Pauline Viardot and with the engraver Gustave Doré.
At his mother's house they would meet Lemoine, the music lover polytechnic, founder of La Trompette; Henri Régnault, double painter of a tenor who delighted the cenacle and who, the first, must have sung in one of these intimate gatherings, Samson et Dalila; Clairin, another painter, Cazalis, a doctor, poet and philosopher who wrote the stanzas of The Macabre Dance, and the composer Augusta Holmès, the adored and respected queen and muse of this kingdom of art and thought..
In 1864, already a well-known composer, he surprisingly decided to participate again in the Rome Competition and, second surprise, he was not chosen. The jury awarded a prize to a composer named Victor Sieg.
In 1866 he began to be interested in opera and frequented Berlioz, who was then 64 years old. He attended many rehearsals for Berlioz, who at the time was supervising the production of Gluck's opera Armide at the Lyric Theatre. Saint-Saëns would always be a great admirer of his, although that did not prevent him from criticizing his supposed defects, such as the treatment of voices as if they were an instrument.
In 1867, his cantata The Marriage of Prometheus (Les noces de Prométhée) won first prize in the competition organized in commemoration of the Grande Fête Internationale du Travail et de l'Industrie (Great International Trade and Industry Fair). The members of the jury were Rossini, Daniel François Esprit Auber, Berlioz, Giuseppe Verdi and Gounod, so it can be safely said that he was one of the most outstanding jurors of all time. The following year, in 1868, Saint-Saëns conducted a series of concerts and had the already famous Anton Rubinstein as soloist. They immediately liked each other and Rubinstein told him that he had never directed in France; Saint-Saëns immediately arranged for her a concert three weeks later and proposed that she premiere a piano concerto that he would write for her. This is the origin of one of his most famous works, his Second Piano Concerto, written in seventeen days and which was a resounding success; the composer was at the piano and the Russian pianist and conductor was in charge of the orchestra on May 13, 1868. What happened began to be discussed in musical circles and published in the newspapers and, little by little, this concert was one of the most known all over the world. That same year he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor in recognition of his prestige.
Saint-Saëns in those years wanted to write an opera, and for this reason he did not disdain a libretto offered to him by Leon Carvalho, director of the Teatro Lírico, which other composers did not want, since it had little chance of being interpreted, Le timbre d'Argent. He got Barbier and Carré to polish the libretto for him and he retired to Louveciennes for two months where he finished the score. Carvalho showed no interest in the work for two years but, at Saint-Saëns's insistence, he allowed him to play the score for him on the piano, after a dinner at the businessman's house. Carvalho had the intention of putting on a show with many dancers—he wanted his wife to have a leading role—and he forced him to make constant changes, and when it finally seemed that it was going to happen, the company of the Lyric Theater went bankrupt. A few weeks later it seemed that the work would be seen when Perrin, manager of the Opera, took an interest in the work. Again, he requested changes and adaptations and failed to achieve a climate of cooperation with the composer, eventually losing interest in the work. Coincidentally, a nephew of his from Locle took over the Theater of the Comique Opera, and then it did seem that there was going to be a production... when the Franco-Prussian war broke out. Saint-Saëns, unfortunately, was not able to see his first opera staged, a work that had consumed so much effort and care. The work would premiere in Paris, at the Lyric Theater, on February 23, 1877, and was presented again in 1913.
Franco-Prussian War
In July 1870 Saint-Saëns traveled to Weimar to attend the festivities celebrating Beethoven's centenary, and played with the pianist Theodor Ratzenberger. Days later the war would begin. During the siege of Paris (September 1870-January 1871), Saint-Saëns joined the National Guard as a simple soldier —he served in the 4th Seine Battalion— an experience that, despite only lasting five months, gave him made a deep impression. He made guards on the walls and acted as fire extinguishers. Between outings, he gave concerts to benefit ambulances or revived with his music the failing courage of his comrades.He composed an Heroic March in memory of his friend Régnault, who died in the battle that took place in the vicinity of Paris. During those days Saint-Saëns and a few other composers founded the National Music Society with Romain Bussine (with whom he shared the presidency), Alexis de Castillon, Gabriel Fauré, César Franck and Édouard Lalo, with the aim of promoting a new and original style. French musical. The institution began to function once the German troops withdrew, in 1871, and frequently organized concerts with the premiere of works by its members —as they would do with Fauré, Franck, Lalo, and with Saint-Saëns himself— and more. late from other composers, such as Emmanuel Chabrier, Debussy, Paul Dukas and Ravel. From this presidency, the activity of Saint-Saëns was decisive in the evolution of French music.
In the spring of 1871, given the difficult situation that followed the revolt of the Paris Commune, Camille, in agreement with her mother, gathered some money and took refuge in London, where she met many other compatriots including Gounod. He made his debut with a concert in aid of the Musical Union, which was very well received and in which the public showed him a love that he always remembered and that led him to travel frequently to England. On that occasion he gave several organ recitals at the Albert Hall.
From that moment on, he began to write regularly for newspapers, at the Renaissance littéraire et artistique (Literary and Artistic Renaissance) — where he signed himself as “Phémius” —, in the Gazette musicale (Musical Gazette) and in the Revue bleue (Blue Magazine), where he polemicized with many composers, among others with the very same Vincent d'Indy.
In 1872 he finally premiered an opera, La princesse jaune (The Yellow Princess), a comic work in one act that he wrote for Camille Laclos after having dismissed Le timbre d'Argent. At Laclos's proposal, the librettist was Louis Gallet, whom Saint-Saëns did not know, but who was from then on one of his best friends and collaborators.The work was a great success. That year his great-aunt, Charlotte Masson, died, one of the people he loved the most in his entire life.
In 1873, he organized and conducted a concert in Paris dedicated exclusively to Liszt's works, and was the first to premiere his Symphonic Poems in France. He had also been, the previous year, 1871, the first French composer to write one: The Omphalia distaff . Other poems followed later: Phaéton (1873), The Macabre Dance (1874) and The Youth of Hercules (1877).
In July 1874 he returned to London as a guest at a concert by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, where his Second Concerto was performed. It was considered so modern that even a critic was unable to determine what key it was written in.
Marriage and parenthood
Regarding the news given by some biographers that Saint-Saëns was homosexual (which in those days was considered an abomination) and never showed much enthusiasm for the marriage, Ries considers that there is no firm evidence in this regard. For his part, Mitchell Morris describes as dubious authenticity the story he tells how Saint-Säens on one occasion, publicly accused of sodomy, replied: "I'm not homosexual, I'm a pedophile!" ("Je ne suis pas homosexuel, je suis pédéraste!").
In 1875, at the age of 40, he met a 19-year-old girl, Marie-Laure Truffot († Bordeaux, 1950), daughter of Rodrigues Philippe Truffot, a prosperous industrialist and also mayor of Le Cateau-Cambrésis. They were married on February 3, 1875 in Cateau and as soon as they were married, he declared that he was too busy to make the honeymoon trip and installed his wife in an apartment in Paris, under the direct guardianship of his own mother. he. Somehow they had two sons, André and Jean-François. The first died on May 28, 1878, at the age of two, when he fell from a window of his apartment on rue Monsieur-le-Prince, located on the fourth floor. Marie, due to sadness, was unable to continue feeding little Jean-François and sent him to his mother. Six weeks later, on July 7, the baby, just seven months old, died, unable to overcome malaria. Saint-Saëns blamed both deaths on Marie. Three years later, after one of her escapades outside of her, he wrote to her saying that he would never live with her again. They did not divorce, but they lived apart for the rest of their lives, without seeing each other or establishing any kind of communication. However, in 1921, she attended the funeral of her ex-husband, albeit concealed with a veil. In 1950 Marie-Laure Truffot died in Cauderan, a small town near Bordeaux, at the age of 95.
Years of Maturity
Despite being a very unfortunate time, Saint-Saëns composed tirelessly in what was one of the most fruitful periods of his life. He traveled to Bayreuth (Germany) in 1876 and wrote seven long articles for the newspaper L'Estafette and a series called «Harmonie y mélodie» («Harmony and melody»), for Le Voltaire .
In 1877, he finally premiered the opera Le timbre d’argent, at the Lyric Dramatic Theater in Paris. He dedicated the work to Albert Libon, a wealthy patron who offered him 100,000 francs so that he could dedicate himself solely to composition. Albert Libon died that same year and Saint-Saëns composed, in memory of his benefactor, his Requiem , which he premiered on May 22 in the Church of Saint-Sulpice.
That same year he finished the opera Samson and Delilah, with a libretto by Ferdinand Lemaire, a biblical story (based on chapters 13 to 16 of the Book of Judges) that it was not well received by his relatives when he touched them the parts that he already had written. He only obtained the support of Liszt, who got him a production of the play for Weimar at the end of the same year, which encouraged Saint-Saëns to complete it. Liszt himself directed the premiere with great success, which was attended by his great friend, Gabriel Fauré; then it was performed in Cologne, Hamburg, Prague and Dresden. However, the opera did not open in France until twelve years later, and not in the capital, but in Rouen. In the absence of Saint-Saëns, the publisher Durand had the supervision of Fauré for its premiere. Only when it had already been presented in a dozen provincial cities could it finally be heard, in 1890, at the Eden Theater in Paris. This opera became one of Saint-Saëns' best-known works, and remained in the repertoire for a long time.
In the summer of 1879 he returned to England for a performance of his cantata La Lyre et le Harpe at the Birmingham Festival. Thanks to the Baroness de Caters, he was invited to Windsor Castle and introduced to Queen Victoria. In her memoirs, Saint-Saëns recalls the surprise that this meeting caused him, when the queen went to her room to ask him to play the organ and then the piano for her. The evening ended with the honor of accompanying the queen on the piano as she sang the aria from Etienne Marcel . The queen even suggested the possibility of staging the work herself in Covent Garden, although that initiative did not come to fruition later.
His great love for England led him to choose an English theme for his next opera, Henri VIII, and it had a libretto by Armand Sylvestre and Léonce Détroyat based on Shakespeare and Calderón. His great friendship with the Buckingham Palace librarian enabled him to study many English music scores, including Handel's originals.While working on the work he was elected, in 1881, a member of the Academy of Fine Arts. Rehearsals began in the autumn of the following year and it premiered on March 5, 1883 with great success, but in the absence of Saint-Saëns, for whom the doctors had prescribed a period of rest, which he spent in Algiers and then in Cauterets.. He returned to the French capital in October to find that Henri VIII had been included in the repertoire of the Paris Opera. In 1884 he was made an Officer of the Legion of Honor.
Two years later, in 1886, Vincent d'Indy and his allies finally managed, disgusted with the decision to perform works by foreign composers, to remove Saint-Saëns from the National Music Society. However, it was one of his best years. He completed Symphony No. 3 , for the Royal Philharmonic Society. The work premiered on May 19, 1886 in London, conducted by the composer himself. A few months later, the work was dedicated to the memory of Franz Liszt, who had died in Bayreuth on July 31, 1886. He went on vacation to a small town in Austria, where he composed in a few days The Carnival of the Animals, a work that he always considered a diversion and that was only published in its entirety after his death (he only agreed to publish the tremendously popular Le Cygne, for cello and piano while he was alive). Both became his two most popular works.
The life of Benvenuto Cellini had always fascinated Saint-Saëns, and he decided to dedicate his next opera to him. He called it Ascanio , since Berlioz had used the name of the sculptor in one of his works. He started in 1887 and took up the whole of the following year; The work was accepted, the premiere was set for March 31, 1889, and the rehearsals scheduled for the beginning of that same year. His mother died on December 18, 1888. He fell into a deep depression and even considered suicide. The pain made him move away from France and, to the general surprise, the composer disappeared. At his home they only gave explanations about a sudden trip to an unknown place. Ascanio premiered and Saint-Saëns did not attend. Assumptions were made about an alleged madness and there was even talk of a kidnapping.
He traveled to Algeria, Egypt and then spent a season on the island of Gran Canaria (Canary Islands), where he adopted the pseudonym "Charles Sannois". Canaria and therefore felt compelled to return to Paris. Hence the name of the “Valse de Canariote” due to his devotion to the Canary Islands, even though he dedicated the composition to the young pianist Candelaria Navarro Sigala in Paris in 1890, impressed by the masterful interpretation of his famous "Dance Macabre" believing that he was playing it for a recently-known French commission agent, this without even knowing that he was precisely in the presence of the same composer.
These vacations gave him an enormous desire to travel, something he did not stop doing in the following years.
The years in Dieppe
That same year he settled permanently in Dieppe, a small town in Upper Normandy where his father had been born and which he came to consider as his place of adoption. In 1890 a small Camille Saint-Saëns museum was opened there, to which he bequeathed part of his belongings, which are now exhibited at the Château-Musée de Dieppe, in the Saint-Saëns Hall. That same year, 1890, he published his first book, a collection of poems entitled Rimes familières ( Family rhymes ).
In the winter of 1891 he was in Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), where he revised Proserpina. He returned to Egypt and found Cairo very pleasant, stayed there for a long time and wrote Africa, a fantasy for piano. Because of his concert tours, he traveled frequently and began writing a series of memorabilia articles for La Revue bleue . He visited almost all of Europe, Scandinavia, South America —Argentina and Uruguay, where he wrote the national anthem for the Colorado Party— and Asia —the island of Ceylon (in southern India), Saigon (in Indochina) and the Far East.
In 1892, Samson et Dalila was performed with great success at the Paris Opera. He premiered at the Comédie Française the restored music of Jean-Baptiste Lully Le Sicilien, ou L'amour peintre. He later delivered Charpentier's music for Molière's Le malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid ) at the Grand-Théâtre. He himself published a comedy at the Calmann-Lévy publishing house: La Crampe des écrivains, which was presented at the Municipal Theater of Algiers on March 17 of that year.
In 1893 he conducted Samson et Dalila at Covent Garden, in an oratorio version, since the Anglican Church did not allow the representation of biblical characters in opera. In June of that same year he was named —together with his friend Tchaikovsky, Max Bruch and Arrigo Boito— Doctor Honoris Causa in Music by the University of Cambridge. On that trip he again attended a dinner at Windsor Castle with the queen. In his memoirs he also spoke of this meeting and of the interest the queen showed in the fate of her opera Henry VIII .
Starting in 1894, he supervised the complete edition of the works of Jean-Philippe Rameau for the Durand publishing house. In the eyes of the world, he was already the greatest living French composer.
Last years
In 1895 he made a trip to the Far East, visiting much of China. That same year he performed Frédégonde at the Paris Opera. He himself finished and renamed Brunehilda, a work that Ernest Guiraud had left unfinished.
In 1896 a concert was held in the Pleyel Hall in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of his first public concert. That same year he requested the help of patron Fernand Castelbon de Beauxhostes, to pay for the repair of the Béziers arenas. The existence of unused ruins made Castelbon think of putting on a series of popular shows in the open air, in the same spirit that he animated the representations of Greek tragedies. The Béziers Festivals series opened with the opera Dejanire, with a libretto by Louis Gallet and sets by Marcel Jambon. On August 28, 1898, a total of 8,000 people attended the performance. The orchestra required included the Barcelona Municipal Guard, the Lyre Biterroise (the Castelbon formation), 110 strings, 18 harps, 245 trumpets and more than 200 cornets. The premiere was sensational and was directed by Fauré, and counted for the main roles with Felia Litvinne (Dejanire) and Lucien Muratore (Hercules). The work was repeated the following year. To commemorate the beginning of the century, Castelbon wanted to commission him a new work, but he suggested that Fauré do it, which he premiered Prometheus.
At the opening of the Universal Exposition in Paris (1900), Le feu céleste (Heavenly Fire) was premiered, a cantata that celebrates electricity and shows the Saint-Saëns, at the age of 65, still had an interest in everything that was happening around him, and especially in scientific advances. He was named Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor and awarded the Cross of Merit, awarded by Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany and King of Prussia. In 1901 he was made president of the Academy of Fine Arts and a year later, in 1902, he was made a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, which was followed by the composition of a march for the coronation of Edward VII. On August 2 he premiered in Béziers Parysatis , based on the famous novel by Jane Dieulafouy (who wrote the libretto), and in which he used no less than 450 instrumentalists and 205 cornets. It was also a great success, although Fauré, in a letter sent to his wife, somewhat mischievously compares it to what he himself had had with the premiere of Prometheus: an "olympian" success against to an "olympic" success.
Despite all the public distinctions, Saint-Saëns lived the rest of his life accompanied only by his dogs, especially his poodle Dalila. Sir Thomas Beecham—who directed Saint-Saëns in the performance of the composer's own piano concertos—described him as "a most irritable man").
On February 8, 1903, Sarah Bernhardt danced Andromaque, a ballet to music that she herself commissioned from Saint-Saëns. That same year he published in Calmann Lévy, the comedy Le Roi Apepi, which premiered at the Municipal Theater of Béziers on August 13. In 1905 Saint-Saëns allowed the Russian choreographer Michel Fokine to use Le cygne (The Swan) (from The Carnival of the Animals) for the show by Anna Pávlova The Dying Swan (The death of the swan), which would be the beginning of the dancer's career and one of her most famous ballets.
In 1906 he traveled to the United States for the first time, giving concerts in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington. The tour was very painful, since Saint-Saëns fell ill. He recovered on his return to Paris and, in gratitude, composed Praise ye the Lord , a work for double choir, orchestra and organ. In 1907, he was made an Honorary Doctor of Oxford University, and the city of Dieppe honored him with a statue, an act attended by the composer. In 1908, he was the first renowned composer to write for the cinema, composing the music for L'assassinat du duc de Guise (The Assassination of the Duke of Guise), a film by André Calmettes and Charles Le Bargy, which was the first film to achieve great popular success. The same year he published an Ode à Berlioz ( Ode to Berlioz ) and the comedy Botriocéphale , which premiered in Paris.
In the 1910-1911 season, the Algerian Théâtre programmed five of his operas in a row, and in 1913 he received the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor in Cairo. In 1914 he wrote a series of articles entitled Germanophilie , where he denounced what he considered a progressive trivialization of German music, including in it the music, once so esteemed, by Wagner. In 1915 he traveled to the United States for the second time and gave a series of lectures and concerts in New York and San Francisco. The following year, he went on a four-month grand tour of South America.
On August 6, 1921, to celebrate his 75-year career as a pianist, he gave a concert of his works at the Casino de Dieppe. On the 21st he went to Béziers to direct a revival of Antigone . Back in Algiers, where he spent long periods of time, he worked on the orchestration of some works. Camille Saint-Saëns died, a victim of lung problems, on December 16, 1921, at the age of 86, at the Hôtel de l'Oasis, in Algiers, on a day that passed peacefully and in which he worked a little and even sang some Verdi arias. His mortal remains were transferred to Paris to celebrate a state funeral on December 24, of an imposing majesty, in the Madeleine church. His remains were buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery, next to those of his mother and those of his two little ones, whom he loved so much.In the Montparnasse cemetery, a speech was read by Léon Bérard, Minister of Education Public and Fine Arts. It ended with the following words:
The masterpieces of Saint-Saëns are one of the most glorious glows of the French genius. (Les chefs-d'œuvre de Saint-Saëns sont un des plus glorieux beamnnements du génie français).Léon Bérard
In 1937, sculptor Henri-Louis Bouchard made a marble commemorative stele for the foyer of the Paris Opéra, in recognition of Saint-Saëns' importance to the history of French music. Many cities have dedicated a street to it, such as Paris, Marseille, Carcassonne, Amiens, Brest, Rouen, Béziers, Fontainebleau, etc. In Rouen, since 1956, there has been an institute in his honor, the Lycée Camille Saint-Saëns.
Work
Compositional style
Today Saint-Saëns is considered a composer with an eclectic and refined spirit. His works have been described as logical and clean, with a solid and balanced architecture. His piano work, despite not being as profound or emotional as that of some of his contemporaries, constitutes the stylistic continuity between Liszt and Ravel. He has also been considered "the most German of the French composers", because of his fantastic skill in thematic elaboration.
His music, which follows the French classical tradition, is elegant and precise in detail and form, combining the lyrical style of 18th-century French music XIX with a higher formal quality. Despite the fact that the style of his later works was considered obsolete, in his early days Saint-Saëns had explored many new forms. His works are closely linked to the classical tradition, and some have considered him a precursor of musical neoclassicism.
Compositions
Saint-Saëns, throughout his 86 years of life, left a considerable musical production (more than 400 works). For the stage he composed thirteen operas, among others: La Princesse jaune (opéra-comique, 1872); Le Timbre d’ argent (1877), Samson et Dalila , opera, his masterpiece; Étienne Marcel, opera (Lyon, 1879), Henri VIII, opera (1883); Ascanio, opera (1890); Déjanire, lyrical tragedy (1898); Les Barbares, lyrical tragedy (1901); Parysatis, lyrical drama (1902); Hélène, lyrics (1904); L'Ancêtre, lyrical drama (1906); the comic opera Phryné (1893), the ballet Javotte (1896) and a satire of modern music: Le Château de la Roche-Cardon.
He also composed four symphonies, of which Symphony No. 3 in C minor for organ, piano and orchestra (1886) is the best known; four symphonic poems: Le Rouet d'Omphale [Omphalia's spinning wheel] —the first symphonic poem written by a French composer, in 1871—, Phaéton (1873), La Danse macabre (Macabre Dance) (1874), La Jeunesse d'Hercule (The Youth of Hercules) (1877); orchestra suites, such as the Suite algérienne (Algerian Suite), Une nuit à Lisbonne, the Jota aragonaise (1880), Ouverture de fête (1909); five concertos for piano (premiered by himself), three concertos for violin, for cello; romances for flutes and for horn and orchestra; fantasies such as the Rapsodie bretonne, the Rapsodie d’Auvergne, Africa, for piano and orchestra; a humorous suite: Le Carnaval des animaux (published after his death in May 1922).
He also wrote stage music for Horace (1860), Antigone (1893), Lola (1900), Andromaque (1903), On ne badine pas avec l'amour (1917); cantatas and oratorios, such as Le Déluge (1875), La Fiancée du Timbalier (1887), La Nuit persane (1891), Hymne à la paix (1919), Ivanhoé; religious music: a Messe (1856), the Oratoire de Noël (Christmas Oratorio; 1858); chamber music, among others a Septuor avec trompette (1881), a Quintette avec piano (1855), a Quatuor avec piano (1875), two Quatuors à cordes (1899 and 1918), two Trios for violin, cello and piano; sonatas for various instruments; pieces for two-hand piano, among other Études, or for two pianos, such as the Variations sur un thème de Beethoven (1874), the Scherzo (1889), the Caprice arabe (1894), the Caprice héroïque (1898); pieces for organ, mainly: Trois rhapsodies sur des cantiques bretons (1866), Trois Fantaisies, six Préludes et Fugues (1894 and 1898), seven Improvisations (1898); vocal music, “mélodies” such as Le Pas d’armes du roi Jean, La Cloche, etc.
His most outstanding works are, without a doubt, the opera Samson et Dalila, the symphonic poem Dance Macabre, The Carnival of the Animals and Symphony No. 3 (with organ). He is also remembered for being one of the first film music composers, specifically for the music for the film L & # 39; Assassinat du duc de Guise .
Legacy
Relations with other composers
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During his lifetime, Saint-Saëns was either friend or foe of most of Europe's leading composers. He was a friend of Franz Liszt until his death, and maintained a deep friendship with his student Gabriel Fauré. Despite being an indefatigable defender of French music, Saint-Saëns openly looked down on many of his French colleagues, for example, Jules Massenet or the organist César Franck (Belgian, but in the French musical orbit). Also, he hated the music of Claude Debussy. He himself commented on a certain occasion to Édouard Lalo: «I have come to Paris only to speak ill of Pelléas and Mélisande». Personal hostility was reciprocal; Debussy, for his part, sarcastically said: "I have a horror of sentimentality, and I don't risk being wrong if I say that his name is Saint-Saëns." However, on other occasions Debussy acknowledged that he admired the musical talent of Saint-Saëns: "Mr. Saint-Saëns is the Frenchman who knows music best."
In France, Saint-Saëns was an early advocate of Wagner's music, proposing excerpts from his operas in his lessons at the École Niedermeyer and conducting the first French performance of the Tannhäuser March. Wagner himself was stunned to see Saint-Saëns perform at first sight the full orchestral scores of Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde and Siegfried, and he suggested to Hans von Bülow that Frenchman should be called the greatest musical mind of the age.
Despite this, and even appreciating its strength, Saint-Saëns declared that he did not consider himself a follower of Wagnerian opera. In 1886, after some particularly harsh and anti-Germanic comments after the Paris premiere of Lohengrin, German music critics turned against Saint-Saëns. His relations with Germany improved in the new century, but around the First World War Saint-Saëns drew hostility from both the French and Germans with a series of provocative articles, headlined Germanophilie, who violently attacked Wagner.
In 1898 he cited Jean-Philippe Rameau, Etienne Méhul and Louis Hérold as his favorite composers.
It is known that on May 29, 1913, Saint-Saëns left the theater where The Rite of Spring, by Igor Stravinsky, was being premiered, enraged, according to what he says, by the innovative use of the bassoon (according to him, inappropriate) in the opening bars of the work.
Sarasate and Saint-Saëns
Camille Saint-Saëns was a great friend of the Spanish violinist Pablo Sarasate, to whom she dedicated the Concerstuck op. 20, the Introduction et Rondo Capriccioso (Introduction and rondo capricious), op. 28, and the Third Concerto for violin and orchestra, op. 61. Saint-Saëns, who toured different Spanish cities in 1880 at the invitation of Pablo Sarasate, was inspired for some of his works by Spanish airs and rhythms contributed by the Navarrese virtuoso. This was the diffuser of the music of Saint-Saëns in Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and America. As Leopold Auer points out, "Sarasate deserves the distinction of having popularized the concertos of Max Bruch, Lalo and Saint-Saëns." According to the Spanish violinist Juan Manén, a contemporary of both, in the 1860s Saint-Saëns and Sarasate had to perform duets "in the most conspicuous Parisian salons" with no other reward than the dinners served after the concert. Years later, Saint-Saëns would write: «Many years have passed since I first saw Pablo Sarasate arrive at my house full of youth and vigor, already famous when he barely pointed his mustache on his lip. He asked me with great grace and as if it were a very simple thing that I compose a concert for him. Flattered and pleasantly impressed, I promised what he asked for, and kept my word by writing a concerto in A major which my friend named, without ever knowing why, Concert-Stück ».
Fame
Saint-Saëns began his career as a composer as an innovator, introducing the symphonic poem to France and establishing himself as a champion of the music de l'avenir of Liszt and Wagner, at a time in which the reference models were Bach and Mozart. He represented the personification of artistic modernity in the 1850s and 1860s, but later became a reactionary figure. At the beginning of the XX century, Saint-Saëns was already an ultra-conservative who was fighting against the influences of Debussy and Richard Strauss. But this is not surprising when one considers that Saint-Saëns's career began when Frédéric Chopin and Felix Mendelssohn were at the height of their success, and ended when jazz began to spread; but even today, the one that prevails is the image of an irritable man.
As a composer, Saint-Saëns has often been criticized for his refusal to embrace Romanticism and at the same time, and paradoxically, for his adherence to the conventions of the musical language of the century XIX. The figure of Saint-Saëns has always been located on the border that separates famous composers from those known only to connoisseurs, and he was recognized as "the greatest composer of the second rank" or as "the greatest composer of private genius". ». He is especially remembered for some popular but critically unappreciated works, such as the opera Samson and Delilah and above all for The Carnival of the Animals .
His interpretations of Mozart provoked the emotion of Marcel Proust, who admired him and who —following the advice of his friend Reynaldo Hahn— would make him the character of Vinteuil in his work A Love of Swann.