1835–1921 · France · Romantic
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) was a French composer, pianist, organist and conductor. He wrote in every genre of his day, from piano concertos and symphonies to operas and songs. Among his most frequently performed works are the suite The Carnival of the Animals, the Second Piano Concerto and Danse macabre.
Camille was born in Paris on 9 October 1835. His father, Victor Saint-Saëns, was of Norman origin and worked in the Ministry of the Interior; his mother came from Haute-Marne. Within two months of the child's baptism the father had died of consumption. For the baby's health he was left for two years in the care of a nurse at Corbeil, south of the capital. Back in Paris, he lived with his mother and his great-aunt Charlotte Masson, who brought him up.
The boy showed absolute pitch before he was three. Charlotte Masson taught him the basics of piano playing, followed by Palmira Granger, a friend of his mother. He dedicated his first composition to her: a romance, The Evening, to words by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, written at the age of five and a half. At seven Camille became a pupil of Camille Stamaty, who had himself studied with Friedrich Kalkbrenner.
From the age of five Camille now and then played for small audiences, but his mother was in no hurry to put the gifted boy on a big stage. He made his full debut at ten, at the Salle Pleyel, with Mozart's 15th concerto (K450) and Beethoven's Third on the programme. The performance was a great success, all the more because the boy played everything from memory, a manner that was unusual at the time.
Stamaty advised turning to Pierre Maleden, a professor of composition, and to the organist Alexandre Boëly. From Boëly the young man took a lifelong love of Bach, whose music was then little familiar in France. Besides music, Camille was drawn to ancient languages, philosophy, religion, literature, the history of France, mathematics, astronomy and archaeology; these interests accompanied him all his life.
Aged thirteen, in 1848, Saint-Saëns became a student at the Paris Conservatoire. Its director was Daniel Auber, who had taken over from Luigi Cherubini in 1842; the curriculum was still fairly conservative. Even strong pianists like Saint-Saëns were advised to take up the organ too, since a church organist's post promised more chances than the path of a solo pianist. He studied the organ with François Benoist: Saint-Saëns rated him low as a performer but thought him an excellent teacher. He won the Conservatoire's top organ prize in 1851, and began studying composition with Fromental Halévy that same year.
In 1852 Saint-Saëns entered the Prix de Rome competition without success; in Auber's view the award was due to him rather than to the winner, Léonce Cohen. In the same year, at a competition of the Society of Saint Cecilia, the judges unanimously gave first prize to his Ode to Saint Cecilia.
Having finished at the Conservatoire in 1853, Saint-Saëns took the post of organist at the old Parisian church of Saint-Merri. The parish was a big one, about 26,000 people, and the fees for weddings and funerals plus a modest salary brought a good income. There was time left both for a pianist's career and for composing.
At that time he wrote the Symphony No. 1 in E flat (1853), which he numbered as his opus 2. It has military fanfares and enlarged wind and percussion sections; the piece suited the public of the years when Napoleon III rose to power and brought him another first prize from the Society of Saint Cecilia. The young musician's talent was quickly recognised by Rossini, Berlioz, Liszt and the singer Pauline Viardot, who all supported him in his career. Later he exchanged Saint-Merri for the church of La Madeleine, the Empire's official church. Hearing him there, Liszt called Saint-Saëns the best organist alive.
The École de Musique Classique et Religieuse was founded in Paris in 1853 by Louis Niedermeyer to train organists and choir directors for French churches. In 1861 Saint-Saëns was hired to teach there. Niedermeyer himself taught piano, but he died in March 1861, and that class passed to Saint-Saëns. He surprised his stricter colleagues by acquainting his pupils with modern music: Schumann, Liszt, Wagner. The most famous of his pupils, Gabriel Fauré, remembered this with gratitude for the rest of his life.
It was then that Saint-Saëns began the suite The Carnival of the Animals, counting on playing it with his pupils. He completed it only over two decades after he had left the Niedermeyer school.
In 1864 people in musical circles were surprised that Saint-Saëns applied for the Prix de Rome once more, since his name as a soloist and composer was already firm. Yet again the prize went to someone else. One of the judges, Berlioz, wrote that he regretted his vote against him: Saint-Saëns, he said, was already a well-known artist, but Berlioz gave the award to a student in whom he saw an inner fire.
Having left the Niedermeyer school in 1865, Saint-Saëns threw himself energetically into both concert-giving and composing. In 1867 the cantata The Wedding of Prometheus won a contest arranged for the Paris World Fair; Auber, Berlioz, Gounod, Rossini and Verdi sat on the jury. In 1868 the Second Piano Concerto was heard for the first time, becoming the first of his orchestral works to settle in the pianists' repertoire. With this and other works Saint-Saëns gained fame in Paris, in other French cities and abroad.
In 1870 Saint-Saëns and the singing teacher Romain Bussine discussed founding a society in support of new French music: they were worried by the glut of German music and by how few chances young French authors had. The Franco-Prussian War stopped these plans; Saint-Saëns was then serving in the National Guard. Back in Paris in 1871, he found that the idea had gained many backers. In February 1871 the Société Nationale de Musique came into being: Bussine became its president and Saint-Saëns its vice-president, and Fauré, Franck and Massenet were among the founders.
Saint-Saëns's first London concerts took place in 1871: he performed before Queen Victoria and studied Handel manuscripts kept in the library of Buckingham Palace. An admirer of Liszt's symphonic poems, he took up the form himself, and the first was Omphale's Spinning Wheel (1871); it was performed in January 1872 at a concert of the Société Nationale. That same year his one-act opera The Yellow Princess was put on at the Opéra-Comique, but it was shown only five times.
In November 1875 the Russian Musical Society invited Saint-Saëns to the Russian capital: he conducted Danse macabre and played as a pianist. There he got to know Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky. In the same year, 1875, the composer married; he was nearly forty, and his chosen bride, Marie-Laure Truffot, was nineteen. The marriage turned out badly. Two sons were born, but both died very small: in 1878 two-year-old André fell out of the flat's window and was killed, while the younger boy, Jean-François, succumbed to pneumonia at six months. Saint-Saëns blamed his wife for the elder son's death, and the marriage fell apart. In 1881 he left her, and they never met again.
For French composers of the 19th century the main genre was opera. In 1877 Saint-Saëns's opera The Silver Bell was staged; the libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré draws on the Faust legend. The composer dedicated it to the patron Albert Libon, who had set aside a hundred thousand francs for him so that Saint-Saëns could give himself wholly to composition. The opera was shown eighteen times. Three months after the premiere Libon died, and Saint-Saëns dedicated to him the Requiem he had just finished; it was first performed in 1878.
A more lasting success came to Saint-Saëns in December 1877 with the opera Samson and Delilah, which won an honoured place in the world repertoire. Because of the biblical plot it was hard to stage in France; Liszt helped, and the premiere took place in Weimar. Paris saw the opera only in 1892.
Saint-Saëns loved to travel: from the 1870s to his last days he went on 179 trips to 27 countries. He escaped the Paris winters, which were bad for his weak chest, in Algiers and Egypt. In 1881 he was elected to the Academy of Fine Arts, and in 1884 he became an officer of the Legion of Honour. Henry VIII (1883) was written on commission from the Paris Opéra; the opera succeeded and was often on stage during the author's lifetime.
In 1886 the Philharmonic Society of London commissioned a symphony from Saint-Saëns, and the Third, in C minor, known as the Organ Symphony, appeared. It was first performed in London: Saint-Saëns himself conducted, and he also played the solo in Beethoven's Fourth Concerto, with Arthur Sullivan directing the orchestra. The same year, 1886, saw Saint-Saëns and Bussine leave the Société Nationale, where the followers of Wagner had gained the upper hand.
Saint-Saëns's mother passed away in December 1888. He grieved hard: he sank into depression, suffered from insomnia and sometimes thought of ending his life. He went from Paris to Algiers and stayed there until May 1889; he walked and read, but could not compose.
In the 1890s Saint-Saëns devoted much time to holidays and trips, and wrote less and less often. The one opera of those years, the comedy Phryné (1893), pleased the public. Chief among the decade's concert pieces were the fantasia Africa for piano and orchestra (1891) and the Fifth Piano Concerto, heard in 1896 at an evening marking fifty years since his debut at the Salle Pleyel. Before the performance the composer read a little poem of his own. In June 1893 at Cambridge, together with Bruch and Tchaikovsky, he was given the title of honorary doctor of the university.
From 1900 Saint-Saëns lived in a flat on the rue de Courcelles, and it remained his home for good. He kept travelling abroad often, but now chiefly for concerts. In 1906 and 1909 he toured the USA to great acclaim as pianist and conductor. He planned a pianist's farewell concert for 1913, but the war got in the way; during the war years he performed a great deal more, and the takings went to charity.
A solo recital at the Institut in November 1921 drew a large invited audience. Listeners noticed that for an eighty-six-year-old pianist his playing was strikingly vivid and precise. A month later he set out for Algiers, following his long habit, and on 16 December 1921 he died suddenly of a heart attack. The body was returned to Paris; after an official ceremony of farewell the composer was buried at the Montparnasse cemetery. Well-known politicians and figures of the arts in France came to see him off, as did his widow.
Saint-Saëns composed in every genre his era knew. Among the most often played are the suite The Carnival of the Animals, Danse macabre (1874), the Second Piano Concerto (1868), the opera Samson and Delilah (1877) and the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso for violin and orchestra (1863). He has twelve operas, but since his death only Samson and Delilah is often on stage.
As a young man Saint-Saëns was an eager innovator, yet he knew the music of the older masters well: Rameau, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart. The idea of continuous development popularised by Wagner did not appeal to him, and he preferred traditional forms. His melodies are often built from three or four bars. What is distinctive in his music lies more in harmony and rhythm than in showy orchestration. At the Conservatoire he reached a high mastery of counterpoint, and polyphonic passages appear in many of his works.
Saint-Saëns was the first major French composer to write piano concertos. The First (1858) is little known, while the Second (1868) is one of his most popular works: it opens with a solemn cadenza, and the scherzo and finale contrast sharply with the first movement. The Third (1869) ends with a cheerful finale. The Fourth (1875) is probably the best known after the Second: its parts are bound together by a unity of themes. The Fifth, the Egyptian, appeared in 1896, when the composer was spending the winter in Luxor; he heard its melody from a boatman on the Nile.
Among his orchestral works the Third Symphony (1886) stands out: the organ and the piano play a prominent part in it, which is rare in a symphony. It is dedicated to Liszt and built on a recurring motif that is constantly transformed. Danse macabre depicts skeletons dancing at midnight, and the xylophone conveys the rattle of bones. The First Cello Concerto (1872) holds one of the leading places in the cellists' repertoire, while the Third Violin Concerto and the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso were written for Pablo de Sarasate. Saint-Saëns also composed more than 140 songs, the mélodies.
Where to start: the site currently has two pieces by Saint-Saëns, Morceau de Concert pour cor (catalogue number O94, medium level) and Romance, Op. 36 (medium plus). The first is of medium level; the second is harder.