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Camille Saint-Saëns 1835–1921

Saint-Saëns as I Knew Him

by Herman Klein

‘Why is it, Maître,’ I once asked him, ‘that you love slipping away from your friends and lying perdu where no one can find you for weeks or even months at a time?’

‘Because,’ he answered, ‘there are times when I feel that I must have solitude – to be alone and think and dream; above all, to work just when the humour takes me. I like good company, but I like hard work still better.’

‘But what if some day you should slip away and never come back?’

‘Oh! I am bound to come back.’ Then, with a shrug of the shoulders, ‘Only if I do not bring myself it won’t be my fault!’

And precisely in this fashion it was to happen. Soon after witnessing the revival of his Ascanio at the Opéra at Paris towards the middle of November, he went off quietly to Algiers, his favourite spot for escaping the detested fogs and wintry cold. It was not to work this time, but to take a rest – a long rest. For he died there very peacefully on the morning of Friday, December 16, nine weeks after celebrating his eighty-sixth birthday. A week later they took him back to Paris, and on Christmas Eve, amid all the pomp and circumstance of a State funeral, buried him at the Montparnasse cemetery, after singing a Mass before a vast congregation at his old Church of the Madeleine, where he had officiated as organist for nineteen years (1858-77).

Charles Camille Saint-Saëns, membre de l’Institut, Grand Croix de la Légion d’Honneur, Commander of the Victorian Order, Mus. Doc., honoris causa of the University of Cambridge, &c., was born at Paris on October 9, 1835. A musical prodigy of the most amazing type, he could play early Mozart and Haydn well and compose capital waltzes and galops at the age of five. Six years later – for three of them a pupil of Stamaty – he made a brilliant débût as a boy pianist at the Salle Pleyel. At the age of fourteen he entered the Conservatoire and studied the organ under Benoist, composition and orchestration under Halévy. In 1851 he carried off the premier prix for organ playing; two years afterwards, when eighteen years old, he was appointed organist of the Church of Saint-Merry. Meanwhile, he was beginning to earn a reputation as a pianist and composer. Ere long his fame grew world-wide, especially after his cantata, Les Noces de Prométhée, had won the first prize at the Paris Exposition of 1867; though, as an operatic composer, not until some years later, when his Timbre d’Argent was produced at the Théâtre-Lyrique and his Samson et Dalila, through the good offices of Liszt, at Weimar. The extraordinary story of the rise to popularity of the latter work is too familiar to need to be recounted here.

His other operas are little known outside France. They include La Princesse Jaune (Opéra-Comique, 1872), Etienne Marcel (Lyons, 1879), Henry VIII. (Paris Opéra, 1883), Proserpine (Opéra-Comique, 1887), Ascanio (Paris Opéra, 1890), Phryné (Opéra-Comique, 1893), L’Ancêtre (Monte Carlo, 1906), Déjanire (Monte Carlo and Paris Opéra, 1911), and the one-Act opera, Hélène (Monte Carlo and Covent Garden, 1904). To their composer it was always a matter for wonder that the English public, who made so much fuss over him and his music whenever he visited us, did not insist upon having most of these operas produced in London, instead of giving nothing but Samson. Well, if Henry VIII. had succeeded better at Covent Garden in 1898, things might have been different. Ten years later another French school had come into vogue.

When Saint-Saëns began touring immediately after the Franco-Prussian War he was a delightful pianist – in fact, with Alfred Jaëll, quite at the ‘top of the tree’ among his compatriots. Both used to appear every season at the Musical Union, whose refined concerts (directed by the late John Ella) were held in the middle of the floor of St. James’s Hall, the subscribers and their friends being grouped in a circle round the performers. Amid these intime surroundings – the most perfect ever devised for listening to chamber music – I heard Saint-Saëns play several of his early works, including the Pianoforte Quartet and the Trio in F, long before I had the privilege of being introduced to him at my parent’s house by my old master, Manuel Garcia. His music at that period had about it a strange, exotic ring, a touch of newness that suggested Berlioz rather than the modern German school, yet not exactly reminiscent of either. In short, it sounded original.

Original, too, was the man himself. He could be the soul of politeness, yet he was often brusque and impatient to a degree, and never hesitated to deliver himself of an emphatic adverse opinion, uttered generally with a rapidity, a staccato jerkiness, that made him difficult even for a Frenchman to understand. He knew more English than he would admit, but my efforts to make him converse in or write it rarely succeeded. One of his jokes was to sign formally a long letter in French, ‘Your obedient servant, C. S.-S.’

He was not much over forty when I first knew him (myself being little more than a youth), and I recollect noticing that he had never shaved. All through life, indeed, his dark, neatly-trimmed beard always looked shapely, even when it had turned grey; while his piercing eyes, which seemed to penetrate to one’s very brain, never lost a vestige of their fire. His pen, like his tongue, could combine a charming ready wit with a pungent irony and spirit of satire which spared nothing and nobody that roused his ire. I often felt glad that he had quickly taken a liking to me, and later in life, when I saw how few people he really cared for, I was proud to be reckoned among his intimate friends. If genuinely fond of anyone it was surprising how affectionate he could be for so undemonstrative a man. His letters prove this, and I possess over a hundred of them.

His was the most versatile mind that I ever encountered in a musician. There seemed to be no great subject that he had not studied, no great question that he had not pondered deeply. Had he not been a famous composer and a distinguished artist, he might have been the Sainte-Beuve of music in his own epoch. His many clever writings show that he had a brilliant pen; they also prove that he rarely if ever allowed his prejudices, strong as they were, to override his commonsense. If he had a weakness it was for tremendous speed in everything. He talked, wrote, composed, read a thirty-line score, corrected his proofs, got through rehearsals, walked on and off a platform, all at the same consistent allegro, yet without undue haste or a trace of carelessness. He would travel by the fastest express, and he loved our London hansoms; but he drew the line at the Paris taxis because he knew they were not safe.

To realise the universality of his genius and his abnormal capacity for hard work, it is only necessary to glance at the long list of his compositions included in the recently-published biography of Saint-Saëns by my friend, Arthur Hervey. That he could write in any style we all know, but he had too much imagination, too much resource, too rare a wealth of melody to stoop to plagiarism. When in the early days he was accused (stupidly) of borrowing from Wagner, his answer was:

‘I admire deeply the works of Richard Wagner in spite of their bizarre character. They are superior and powerful, and that is sufficient for me. But I am not, I have never been, and I shall never be of the Wagnerian religion.’

For many years Saint-Saëns stood in the van of French musical progress. Withal he respected and obeyed tradition, he hated sensationalism, he despised eccentricity and pose. For this reason – for no other that I can conceive – it has become a habit with certain writers in this country to disparage and belittle his talent. In France they know better. To prove this, let me quote some sentences from the eloquent oration pronounced over his grave by the gifted composer and critic, Alfred Bruneau:

‘The enormous, formidable, mighty life-work that he leaves behind brings him into direct relation with the great classics of whom he is the last descendant. Like them, he approached every kind of music with equal mastery – was he not the Mozart of his time, the boy-prodigy, and the prodigious man also? – and he trod all the paths of his art with the same sureness. Tradition attracted him more than innovation. To defend it when threatened he fought with a vivacity, a courage, a violence that was extraordinary. If he would not consent as a composer to alter the customs established by his predecessors, if he refused to overthrow the existing harmonic system, his creative rôle was marked no less by exceptional magnificence, his lion’s claws cut no less deeply, no less incomparably, in every score that he wrote. Samson et Dalila, Le Déluge, the Symphony in C minor – those three splendid peaks, with innumerable lesser heights – have won in universal estimation a place that they will hold so long as beauty lasts, so long as orchestras and choirs shall gather together to move and charm us.’

That is a very fine eulogy, and I think it is true. Certainly it is shared by the whole – or very nearly the whole – of musical France. Even his most extreme ‘futurist’ countrymen thought no less of him because he openly combated their views. They may have feared such a ‘born fighter’ (de tempérament batailleur), as M. Bruneau described him, but they also admired him as a splendid Frenchman.

He would often tell me how sincerely and deeply he was attached to this country:

‘I can never forget how I was received when I first came to London, a refugee from Paris during the siege of ‘71. I was just starting my series of symphonic poems with Le Rouët d’Omphale. But it was to England that I naturally looked later on as the field for my choral works. I was happy when La Lyre et la Harpe was given at Birmingham, and my 18th Psalm at Norwich. One likes to be appreciated in the home, par excellence, of oratorio.’

He was to have his disappointment in this direction before he bade us his final farewell; but never, to my knowledge, did he retract the opinions expressed in his Portraits et Souvenirs, apropos his visit to Cambridge in 1893 to receive his doctor’s degree. Here they are:

‘Since I have been studying England I have always found it eager for music, patient in listening, reserved in its appreciation, interested in the art, and quite capable of welcoming with enthusiasm the works and artists that have been able to please it. The British public is polite to the point of applauding when it is bored; but what nuances there are in its applause, how easy to sift the truth when one is not too anxious to cherish illusions!’

And again:

‘These fêtes at Cambridge have left behind one of the happiest impressions of my artistic career. I have come back confirmed once more in the belief that the English love and understand music, and that the contrary opinion is a mere prejudice.’

On one point, perhaps, he formed a wrong idea. He thought because, as he said, English appreciation had been responsible for some of the masterpieces of Handel, Haydn, Weber, Mendelssohn, and Gounod (omitting, curiously, Beethoven’s ‘Choral’ Symphony), that it demanded at least in oratorio, a partial adherence to certain stereotyped forms and methods of treatment adopted by those composers. When he took in hand, after many years of indecision, my biblical text of the oratorio, The Promised Land, which he wrote for and conducted at the Gloucester Festival of 1913, I distinctly suggested to him that this was not the case. He understood, but did not heed my warning. Whilst looking over the score with him at the Grosvenor Hotel, he saw me smiling at the Handelian passages where Moses brings forth water from the rock. His remark was characteristic:

‘Que voulez-vous? To properly illustrate, must not music be realistic? Handel and Mendelssohn thought so. So did Gounod, with his descending chromatic scale, when Mephistopheles at the Kermesse brings wine out of the cask. This incident appeals to me in the same way.’

Obstinacy was one of the maître’s failings, and he paid for it in this instance by setting some of the critics against a work that the world will one day estimate at a higher value. Nevertheless he did not mind that so much as he did the fact that one or two of them had printed their adverse criticisms before hearing the music. He mentioned this to Sir Hubert Parry when we met him in the street, just after the full rehearsal of The Promised Land in the Cathedral. Genial, lovable Sir Hubert thus made reply:

‘Don’t let it annoy you, cher docteur. You have put much beautiful music into your score, and I have thoroughly enjoyed listening to it. For a man of your years it is a marvel. Remember we cannot applaud in a Cathedral, but have no fear about the ultimate verdict.’

A night or two later he gave an exquisite performance of the Mozart Pianoforte Concerto in B flat – the same work that he played at the ‘Saint-Saëns Jubilee Festival’ which I had had the honour of organizing at Queen’s Hall in June of the same year – and was recalled to the platform quite half-a-dozen times. The memory of that evening was the pleasantest reminiscence that he carried away from Gloucester. After all, applause is the very salt of the artist’s existence.

Saint-Saëns was then seventy-eight, and still a wonderfully healthy, clear-headed man for his years. I found him looking remarkably well the following summer, when I assisted him to descend from the train at the busy station at Namur, in Belgium. I had gone there on purpose to meet him on my way to Switzerland with my wife and some friends. We had been spending the day at Dinant (poor Dinant!), and though none of us knew it, was the actual eve of the Great War. As we drove together up the long hill leading to the Hôtel de la Citadelle (three weeks later a mass of blackened ruins) the maître told me how he had just come from Brussels, where the King and Queen of the Belgians had promised him to arrive at Namur in time to hear him play at the ‘joyeux festival’ about to begin there.

Alas! the King and Queen were never to come; the Festival was never to be held; for next day the Belgian mobilization began. Yet, as we sat together after dinner in the palm garden of the doomed hotel, refusing to believe that if there were really to be war the Germans would dare to invade Belgium, I was to enjoy the most delightful chat (very nearly two hours of it) that I ever had with the venerable maître. What marvellous form he was in! Too often inclined to be reticent in company, that night he unbent and held forth with eloquence upon every imaginable subject, musical and otherwise. His only offensive epithets were for ‘ce chien de Kaiser,’ whom he declared to be a charlatan et poseur of the first order. He admitted that he was Chauvinist to the core, and had gradually grown to hate the Germans, though there had been a period in his life when he liked them immensely.

Then his thoughts reverted to Bayreuth, and he described with rare gusto and humour the ceremonial manners of the Wagner family – Frau Cosima in particular – on the occasion of a reception at Wahnfried. His imitations were most amusing; they ranged from personages to instruments, and he brought out some extraordinary varieties of tonal effect when producing leitmotiven from the Nibelungen. Yes, he still had great admiration for Wagner as an orchestrator, but could never forgive him for the outrageous burdens that he imposed upon the human voice; he could have avoided them had he pleased. Finally, speaking of the younger school of French composers, the venerable musician declared that he saw great talent and originality in the works of Debussy, and referred with affection to Gabriel Fauré, Vincent d’Indy, Alfred Bruneau, and Gabriel Pierné. For the rest, he was only afraid lest eccentricity and extravagance should get the upper hand.

On the following morning Saint-Saëns left Namur for Aix-les-Bains, whilst I rather foolishly persisted in going on to Switzerland and Italy, with the result that I got back to England only with difficulty after the outbreak of war. The last time I saw the dear maître was at his apartment in the Rue de Courcelles in September, 1920. He was then growing rather feeble. Somehow I feel that I shall always miss him.

Musical Times, February 1922