Danse macabre - Camille SaintS

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Danse macabre

Camille Saint-Saens

Although Saint-Saëns possessed every technical gift a composer could wish for - perfect pitch, virtuosity at the keyboard, innate understanding of the orchestra - he was always keen to learn more. As a young man he knew the superbly named George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, mulatto violinist and dedicatee of Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata, who stimulated his interest in the violin and passed on useful practical details about the instrument. Saint-Saëns was later to bene 313h71d fit from his professional partnership with the Spanish virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate a child prodigy, as Saint-Saëns himself had once been, and prize-winning graduate from the Paris Conservatoire at the age of thirteen. As audiences then demanded, trivial fantasias on such operas as La Favonta made up the bulk of Sarasate's recitals, and he was sick of them. So one day he called on Saint-Saëns, "...fresh and young as Spring itself", the composer recalled. "As if it were the easiest thing in the world, he had come quite simply to ask me to write a concerto for him. Flattered and charmed to the highest degree, I promised I would." This was the Concerto No.1 in A major, written at the age of twenty-four, an earlier concerto, now classified as the second, being more in the nature of a 'prentice effort. He also composed the Introduction et Rondo Capriccioso for Sarasate, as well as the Concerto No.3 in B minor. The latter, which Sarasate premiered in 1880, is Saint-Saëns' best-known violin concerto. Inspired by the example of Sarasate's brilliant playing, it opens with a questing, imperious theme, later opposed by a motif of thoughtful tenderness. A nostalgic barcarolle, briefly interrupted by a passionate interlude, leads to a wide-ranging cadenza and a jaunty Allegro as finale. The concerto was tailor-made for Sarasate's elegant mastery and his pure bright tone, and also profited from the secrets of the instrument's resources which the virtuoso imparted to Saint-Saëns. It is no wonder that other violinists refused to play at the weekly receptions Saint-Saëns held at his home, since, as the composer remarked, they were all "terrified at the idea of being compared with Sarasate". Awarded the Hon. D. Mus. of both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, not to mention the C.V.O. (third class), Saint-Saëns was much admired in England during his lifetime. Queen Victoria received him at Windsor and wrote in her diary that he played "very beautifully at the organ...He also played some of his compositions on the piano and plays and composes very beautitully". A little later he also performed on the piano for Queen Alexandra at Buckingham Palace, where she gave him a gold medal and, he recalled, a cup of tea which "she deigned to pour with her own royal and imperial hand".His sober frock coat and the dapper bowler hat and the neat beard that made him look like her husband King Edward Vll were reassuring symbols of respectability in English eyes. He often visited the country and found England a valuable source of commissions, among them a cantata for the Birmingham Festival and a large-scale oratorio for Gloucester. The most flattering of them was a request from the Philharmonic society not yet "Royal" - for a new work. At the time Saint-Saëns was already meditating on ideas for his C minor symphony, some of which he had recently played to Liszt, the friend and patron who sponsored the first performance of Samson et Dalila when no French theatre would touch it, and who had done him many a good turn. Liszt's death soon afterwards inspired the dedication "À la mémoire de Franz Liszt". Lisztian influences can certainly be traced in the score, such as the incorporation of the organ (which Liszt had introduced into his symphonic poem Hunnenschlacht), and the grandiose forces employed.