Camille Saint-Saëns
Introduction to Camille Saint-Saëns
Camille Saint-Saëns: born on October 9, 1835, in Paris, eight and a half years after the death of Ludwig van Beethoven—died on December 16, 1921, in Algiers, eight and a half years after the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du printemps.” A compositional oeuvre comprising some 700 works across all genres: there is likely no other major composer whose body of work spans such a long period and exhibits such diversity.
Yet this long and creative life cast a shadow over his posthumous reputation: time seemed to have passed Saint-Saëns by. “You praise the beauty, clarity, and sincerity of my language and my thoughts,” he wrote to Romain Rolland in 1910— “What more could I want? To be the future, and not the past? I have been the future; in my early days, I was hailed as a revolutionary—in my old age, I can only be an ancestor.” Even though many of his works—most notably *The Carnival of the Animals*—have secured a permanent place in musical life, Saint-Saëns was long regarded—even in his native France—as a marginal figure in music history. Over the past 10 to 20 years, however, this perception has changed significantly: Today—in the 100th anniversary year of his death—no one doubts that Camille Saint-Saëns was one of the great composers of his time.
His music is being performed and recorded more than ever, and with every “rediscovery,” its richness and originality become more apparent: the first film score, the first tango, the first work for saxophone quartet, the expansion of the orchestra to include the xylophone and celesta—an eclecticist? Not at all: In fact, Saint-Saëns was not only a “revolutionary” in his early days, but he also inspired Maurice Ravel and the Groupe des Six. And something else is becoming clearer today than ever before: Saint-Saëns was—much like his mentor and friend Franz Liszt—a true European who always looked beyond national borders and worked on a broader scale. No wonder, then, that his music is now firmly established in the repertoire worldwide—thanks in part to the edition of his “Œuvres instrumentales complètes” (in 39 volumes), the opera “Samson et Dalila,” and several important works of sacred music. Anyone who engages with his work will be unable to resist the “beauty, clarity, and sincerity” of his art.