Saint-Saëns at the organ

Camille Saint-Saëns was one of the most amazing child prodigies of all time and one of nineteenth-century France’s best composers.

His reputation suffered in part because of the powerful enemies he made and, in old age, his utter intolerance of post-Wagnerian music.

Comparatively few of his many works regularly appear on concert programs. But Danse macabre and his last symphony, the Organ Symphony (in C minor, op. 78, 1886), remain popular.

He started taking piano lessons at age two and first played in public, the piano part to a Beethoven violin sonata, when he was five. At age ten, he gave a concert that included a Mozart piano concerto. He offered to play as an encore any of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas, which he had memorized.

His first jobs, however, were as church organist, ultimately at Église de la Madeleine. There he presented weekly improvisation concerts. Franz Liszt heard one in 1866 and pronounced Saint-Saëns the greatest organist in the world. The two became lifelong friends.

Most French composers of the time aspired only to write operas, Hector Berlioz being the most outstanding exception. Beethoven’s symphonies ruled the concerts of Paris’ major orchestra, that of the Paris Conservatory. Berlioz never got much cooperation from the Conservatory. Saint-Saëns briefly taught at the École Niedermeyer, which was every bit as conservative as the Conservatory. But he introduced his students to the most radical new music, not only Berlioz, but Liszt and Wagner.

Liszt’s influence on Saint-Saëns

Franz Liszt conducting / unknown artist, ca. 1918

Joseph Haydn defined the symphony. Beethoven transformed it. German culture owned it during the years it dominated classical music. The late nineteenth century saw many composers of other nationalities striving to break loose from German domination. Most of them took inspiration from Franz Liszt.

Liszt had begun his career as a popular piano virtuoso. Unlike most of the rest of them, he had formally studied composition. His teachers composed Italian operas and other vocal forms, but not the kinds of instrumental music that required sonata form.

Liszt transcribed plenty of orchestral music for piano, so he knew the repertoire. But when he started to compose his own orchestral music, he saw no need to learn sonata form. Even his Sonata in B Minor makes no attempt at a classical sonata form. He developed his own technique of thematic transformation, although he found the basic idea in Beethoven.

Instead of developing a theme, he repeated it throughout a composition. But he constantly changed it in the process, so much that it often sounds like a different theme. Each new iteration often has completely different emotional content from its first appearance. Although nominally in one movement, his symphonic poems present the theme in so many different tempos and moods that they seem like multi-movement works.

The rise and fall of Saint-Saëns’ influence

Saint-Saëns, ca. 1875

In 1871, Saint-Saëns complained that the name of a living French composer on a concert of instrumental music scared the audience away. So he co-founded the Société Nationale de Musique to combat this prejudice.

It presented premieres of new French music and succeeded beyond expectation. Soon enough, other concert societies began to program some of the same music.

The society grew enough to require additional officers. One, Vincent d’Indy, wanted to include foreign music on the society’s programs, especially Wagner’s.

Saint-Saëns admired Wagner’s music and had actively promoted it. But he feared that it was so popular it would overshadow music composed by society members. He therefore opposed Wagner’s music on the society’s concerts. Saint-Saëns and d’Indy became enemies. For good measure, Saint-Saëns also broke off his friendship with César Franck. These two rivals became more powerful and influential in the society than he. He finally resigned from it in 1886 after serving as its president for 15 years.

That year also saw the composition of the Organ Symphony, the fifth symphony he wrote, but only the third he numbered and published. The London Philharmonic invited him to appear as piano soloist and guest conductor—and to write a symphony for the orchestra to play under his direction. It declined to pay him for the symphony or even the full stipend he asked for. He agreed, mostly because the orchestra was both prestigious and large.

He had broken with the society over Wagner’s influence, so his final symphony showed none. On the surface, then, it was a backward-looking work. Charles Gounod sarcastically referred to Saint-Saëns as the Beethoven of France, meaning that he hadn’t kept up with the times.

But Saint-Saëns had taken Berlioz and Liszt as his starting point as an orchestral composer, not Beethoven. He dedicated the symphony to Liszt, who unfortunately died soon after the first performance.

The structure of the Organ Symphony

Saint-Saëns described the Organ Symphony as having two parts rather than the standard four movements of a conventional symphony. A plaintive introduction leads to a spirited allegro that starts as a sonata form. Its quiet but restless theme resembles the plainchant Dies irae,which both Berlioz and Liszt used so prominently.  Rhythmically, each pair of repeated notes begins after, not on the beat. In a very Lisztian way, this section contains premonitions of what will happen in the rest of the symphony.

The sonata form breaks off without going into a development section. It serves as an introduction to a peaceful and contemplative adagio in D-flat major. That key is a startling and unconventional half a step higher than the opening.  The organ sneaks into the background of this section.

The second part begins with the typical symphonic third movement, a scherzo with trio. Its material is based on the opening of the first movement, fragmented into smaller pieces and manipulated with various contrapuntal techniques. But the trio returns a second time. Saint-Saëns described this unexpected reprise as “a struggle for mastery, ending in the defeat of the restless, diabolical element.” A tune that eventually becomes the fugal second theme of the finale overlays this statement of the trio.

The outcome of this struggle becomes the basis for the chorale-like opening of the finale. It has an unmistakable resemblance to the opening theme of the first movement, but with a vastly different rhythm and character. It’s expressed in two-measure phrases totaling five beats, an unprecedented structure in a symphony. Here, the organ enters with all its majestic glory. Both the use of organ and the character of the theme give it an almost liturgical quality that may be a further tribute to Liszt. In his last years, he turned away from virtuosity and public adoration to take religious orders.

The orchestration is every bit as innovative as the handling of the thematic material. It uses not only organ, but a piano with two players. The organ that gives the symphony its nickname appears only in the second part of each movement, often in the background. The pianists have even less to play: nothing but a minute or so of decoration. Besides the organ, piano, and standard string section, the orchestra uses three flutes, piccolo, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bass clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, three timpani, cymbals, and triangle.

Unlike Liszt, who favored emotion over form, Saint-Saëns always favored form over emotion. He put thematic transformation to work serving an abstract symphony with no program. But the brief quotation above from the program note he provided shows that he clearly intended it to have a narrative element.

The symphony’s reputation, and Saint-Saëns’

The Organ Symphony found great success in England and the US, but it made little impression in France at first. Later, the “big tune” in the finale became a cliché, heard in the movie Babe, in a pop song of the late 1970s, and elsewhere. We mustn’t let its familiarity obscure the audacious compositional innovations that produced it. “I gave everything to it I was able to give. What I have here accomplished, I will never achieve again,” Saint-Saëns noted. And he never again attempted anything like it.

For the last 35 years of his life, he never composed another symphony. In general, he wrote fewer orchestral works than he had before and turned his attention to music for the theater. In fact, he composed the first film score by a major composer (L’assassinat du duc de Guise, 1908).

Hardly any of this music remains in the repertoire––and none of the operas and ballets. Saint-Saëns had made many enemies, and the course of French music went on without him. He became the target of such taunts as, “he writes bad music well.” He so hated newer trends in music led by Debussy and Stravinsky that he started to seem hopelessly old-fashioned. Even some of his remaining friends became alarmed. It became easy to forget how radical his own best music had been. After his death, composer and critic Reynaldo Hahn observed, “It takes courage to admire Saint-Saëns.” For generations afterward, he has been dismissed as an excellent craftsman with little imagination who never developed a distinctive style.

He wrote vast quantities of music, but he is known today for probably fewer than a dozen pieces. As damaged as his reputation became, however, he has fared better than his rivals d’Indy and Franck. They are chiefly remembered for one or two works each.

Camille Saint Saens Symphony #3 (“Organ”) / Peter Guttman, Classical Notes, 2010
Camille Saint Saens / New World Encyclopedia. Last modified January 7, 2017
Camille_Saint-Saens Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony / Jonathan D. Kramer, Cinncinnati Symphony Orchestra. not dated
Symphony guide: Saint-Saëns’s Third (the Organ Symphony) / Tom Service, The Guardian. February 25, 2014