CamilleSaint-⁠Saëns

Camille Saint-⁠Saëns was born at 3 rue du Jardinet in Paris on 9 October 1835. His father, a clerk in the Ministry of the Interior, died of consumption on 30 December, when the boy was not yet three months old. He was a sickly child and was raised by two widows, his mother Clémence and her aunt Charlotte Masson, who taught him piano. At two and a half he pressed the keys one at a time and waited for each note to die away before playing the next. By his own account he already listened at that age to the kettle on the drawing-room fire, which he called a “microscopic oboe”, and to its sound swelling until the water boiled.

1848–⁠1861The organ loft and the library

At the Conservatoire he attended François Benoist’s organ class as an auditor until the day Benoist, with no other student prepared, put him at the instrument. Halévy, his composition teacher, often sent word that he would not come. On those days Saint-⁠Saëns went to the library: “what I devoured there of old and modern music is unimaginable.” In December 1853 François Seghers’s Société Sainte-⁠Cécile played a symphony in E♭ that Seghers had presented as the work of an unknown German. Berlioz and Gounod discussed it at the rehearsal. When the composer’s name became known, Gounod wrote that he had taken on “the obligation of becoming a great master”.

At Seghers’s house in 1854 he first heard Liszt. The dreams of his youth, he wrote, were “only prose beside the Dionysian poem” played by Liszt’s supernatural fingers. In December 1857 he took over the organ of La Madeleine, where Paris came to hear him improvise. He held the post for twenty years.

1861–⁠1875Société nationale and Danse macabre

In March 1861 he took over the piano class at the École Niedermeyer, where he thought himself “more pupil than teacher” and played the boys new scores by Chopin, Liszt, Schumann and Wagner. Gabriel Fauré, one of the boys, remembered it. During the siege of Paris his friend the painter Henri Regnault was killed at Buzenval on 19 January 1871. On 25 February Saint-⁠Saëns and Romain Bussine founded the Société nationale de musique, with the motto Ars Gallica, to have new French music performed. When the Commune was proclaimed in March, Saint-⁠Saëns, a former national guardsman and the organist of the Madeleine, left for London and stayed until the end of May. On 24 May the Commune shot the curé of the Madeleine, the abbé Deguerry.

1877–⁠1881Samson et Dalila at Weimar; two sons

In 1877 a legacy of 100,000 francs from his friend Albert Libon, left to free him from “the servitude of the Madeleine organ”, let him resign the loft. Paris opera directors had turned down Samson et Dalila, a biblical subject. Liszt, he wrote, “did not know a note of it” but had promised in 1870 to stage it at Weimar. On 2 December 1877 the court theatre gave it in German under Eduard Lassen. The Paris Opéra did not stage it until 23 November 1892.

In 1878 both his sons died. André, two and a half, fell from the fourth-floor window of their flat on 28 May. Jean-⁠François, seven months old, died on 7 July. In July 1881, at La Bourboule, the couple separated for good. They never divorced; he paid her a pension all his life, and she attended his funeral.

1886Le Carnaval des animaux and the Third Symphony

His book Harmonie et mélodie (1885) said of Wagner: “I have never been, I am not, I shall never be of the Wagnerian religion.” In January 1886 a Berlin concert was disrupted, and German theatres dropped his works. He withdrew to Chrudim in Bohemia and in a few days wrote a zoological fantasy for the Mardi Gras concert of his friend, the cellist Charles Lebouc. Le Carnaval des animaux was played on 9 March 1886. He allowed a few performances and forbade publication, except for Le Cygne; the rest appeared in 1922.

1888–⁠1914Travels and the Fifth Piano Concerto

His mother died on 18 December 1888. He gave much of his collection to the town of Dieppe and, for some fifteen years, kept no fixed address. In December 1889 he disappeared, and newspapers reported him dead or mad. He had written to Louis Gallet that he wanted to look far away, under other skies, for “the means of making myself another self”. In April 1890 he was recognised from a newspaper portrait in the Canary Islands, where he was travelling as Charles Sannois. In the following years he spent the winters in the south, in Algiers, Las Palmas, Ceylon and Cairo.

In February 1896 he was in Egypt, at Luxor and Karnak with the painter Georges Clairin. On Sunday 22 March he reached Cairo, and the next day began to fill manuscript paper; by 26 March he had 35 pages of the Fifth Piano Concerto. He finished it on 15 April. At the Salle Pleyel on 2 June, fifty years after his debut, he played it himself. Its slow movement uses what he said was a Nubian love song, heard from boatmen on the Nile. In 1908 he wrote the music for a short film, L’Assassinat du duc de Guise, which the Société Camille Saint-⁠Saëns calls the first film score.

1914–⁠1921The last recital

In 1915 he sailed for California as a representative of French artists at the Panama–Pacific Exposition, taking Hail California, a large new piece for organ, orchestra and military band. At San Francisco he gave recitals and conducted three concerts. In 1916, at eighty, he toured France and then South America. “They will say that I cannot sit still,” he wrote; “I should love to stay at home and work in peace. Fate does not want it.”

On 6 August 1921 he gave his farewell recital at the Dieppe casino, after seventy-five years before the public. That November the Opéra revived Ascanio with the role of Scozzone again sung by a contralto. On 4 December he reached Algiers and took rooms at the Hôtel Oasis. He died there on the evening of 16 December. In his last year he had written sonatas for oboe, clarinet and bassoon. A national funeral followed at La Madeleine, and he was buried at Montparnasse, in the chapel he had built for his children.