The Bard Music Festival, “Saint- Saëns and his World”
August 10-12 and 17-19, 2012

At first, Saint-Saëns was ahead of his time. Then, following his decade at the apex of French music, he was old-fashioned. We remember him today as if he were a composer of ‘light’ music, suitable for Pops concerts and to be excerpted. His most wellknown work was a private joke that he hesitated to publish. And yet, as demonstrated by the Bard Festival, he was considerably more than that, a figure through whose music and career a new light is cast on the art and culture of the second half of the nineteenth century.
What emerged from 12 concerts , numerous pre-concert talks and panel discussions, and debates
among the patrons over sandwiches and coffee in between, was a figure we didn’t know. Saint-Saëns was a supremely conscious creative personality who chose to adhere to an individual aesthetic and link it to French national culture in the wake of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870), and persisting through World War I to the end of his long life in 1921. He cultivated it through his own virtuosity as pianist and organist, his prodigious skill with counterpoint, his fresh approaches to classical forms, his characteristically French lyrical melos inclining toward modal ambiguity, his prophetic grasp of the significance of French baroque music, and his eventual fascination with and incorporation of non-western musical influences. Also unknown to most of us was the prolific and under-valued opera composer whose one widely-known opera, “Samson and Delilah,” is probably an atypical example of the eleven he composed, having been planned initially as an oratorio.
None of this guarantees the production of great music, but with the opportunity the
festival afforded of hearing a larger sample of his output than most of us were
acquainted with, along with the context provided by sampling both familiar and
unfamiliar works of his contemporaries, his best work stood out as powerful and
occasionally thrilling demonstrations of the viability of his aesthetic and his artistic
personality. These included three chamber works: the Piano Trio and Piano
Quartet heard on the opening concert and the Violin Sonata heard later on; two
orchestral works: the Fifth Piano Concerto, Egyptian, and Third Symphony with
organ, both heard on the first Saturday night program; and an opera, Henry VIII, in
a powerful performance that ended the festival on the second Sunday.
The undervaluing of Saint-Saëns began during the latter phase of his career,
when he appointed himself an articulate and provocative spokesman critical of the
modernist stirrings of French and other composers after the turn of the century. It
was perpetuated even on the present occasion by Leon Botstein whose opening
remarks somewhat apologetically justified having a festival devoted to a composer
of “less than top rank” by pointing out (provocatively) that most of the audience
were in that same category. He went on to down-play expectations by comparing
Saint-Saëns’ music-theater abilities somewhat unfavorably to those of his towering
contemporaries Wagner and Verdi, saying that he failed to exploit dramatic
situations in his operas as thoroughly as they did, failing to squeeze the last drop
of dramatic juice out of the climactic moments. I believe that such comments were
cleverly calculated to throw the audience off-guard for the wonderful surprises that
lay in store, since Botstein himself was on the podium for many of them, and for
the most part delivered them convincingly.
The power of such a festival is that it establishes a different framework within
which to experience and assess the music offered, a framework other than the
repetitious and static one offered by ordinary concert life (of which the Bard
Festival stands as a critique). Late romantic music was dominated by Germans,
with a strong supporting role played by Italian opera. The general aesthetic
projected by this period is one of increasing emotional intensity with some
corresponding loss of subtlety as middle-class audiences expanded and venues
for symphony and opera grew correspondingly larger. French contributions are
often seen as eccentric, either as prophetic forerunners (Berlioz), unique, isolated
voices (Fauré), Wagner wannabe’s (Franck, D’Indy) or modernist rebels (Debussy
and Ravel).
But it is a bit misleading to speak of Saint-Saëns’ “world,” which was in fact many
worlds. The composer spent almost a quarter of his life in the twentieth century,
and these were active, not retiring years. We had the pleasure of hearing oboe
and bassoon sonatas written after the end of World War I, eight years after the
premier of Le Sacre du Printemps. The chronological span of the Festival’s
repertory by other composers ranged from Gottschalk’s Bamboula of 1844 to
Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne of 1932-33, not to speak of Rameau’s Pièces de
Claveçin en Concert of 1741. There was some justification for including all of it, as
Saint-Saëns was vigorously involved in the public world of music either as an
advocate (Rameau, Mozart) or an opponent (Debussy, Stravinsky). It was also
good to have an opportunity to hear the almost unknown cello sonata of Alberic
Magnard, whose quintet for piano and winds had been a highlight of the Debussy
festival at Bard over a decade ago; as an acolyte of Franck and D’Indy, Magnard’s
style moves further in the direction of hyper-seriousness and refusal to repeat or
to display formal symmetry. It shares almost nothing with the composer’s French
contemporaries, least of all Saint-Saëns. While Zuil Bailley gave a strongly
characterized and technically adroit reading of the score, it was clear that he and
his accompanist Blair McMillen had not acquainted themselves with this knotty,
tough-minded work sufficiently to sort out its formal complexities, and the piece
seemed to ramble aimlessly at times, an impression dispelled upon consulting the
excellent recording by Mats Lindström and Bengt Försberg.
But while listeners could relish the enormous variety afforded by the composer’s
many connections, the more enlightening resonances were found in works of his
contemporaries that demonstrated artistic sympathies or parallel endeavors.
Franck’s Prelude, Chorale, and Fugue, splendidly performed by Danny Driver,
draws on many of the same influences, forms, and gestures as Saint-Saëns, but
his work displayed an utterly different personality: earnest, dark-hued, with a
formal trajectory that seems at times to waver, only to arrive at its climactic
destination with a sense of spiritual triumph, in contrast to Saint-Saëns’
fundamentally secular narratives. D’Indy’s harmonically sophisticated Suite dans
le style ancien neatly paired with Saint-Saëns’ freshly enthusiastic Septet as two
examples of a late-romantic neo-baroque development. Perhaps the greatest
stretch was provided by the pairing to two unusual narrative pieces performed
together on a program led by James Bagwell: Berlioz’s melodrama Lelio whose
self-indulgent autobiographical spoken text loosely threaded together some of his
less memorable choral pieces; along with Saint-Saëns’ effective and pioneering
film score for a 1908 film, The Assassination of the Duc de Guise, scored for
chamber ensemble. Aside from unusual generic strategies, the two works had little
in common.
French music historians reject the notion that their 17th-18th century composers
such as Couperin and Rameau are “baroque” and prefer the term “classical” since
they (along with Lully and others) contributed to bringing French music under
Louis XIV and XV to a high-point. One can find a parallel historical situation in
which French composers in the 19 century stand apart from their
contemporaries in Germany and Italy; most of them are associated with opera,
such as Meyerbeer, Halévy, Gounod, Bizet, Massanet, and Saint-Saëns. One
might propose a separate kind of romanticism for these composers, based on
mutual influences, common language, traditional audience expectations, etc, with
an identifiable aesthetic, perhaps most clearly embodied in Saint-Saëns. If late
Romanticism in general is Dionysian, French music of this period, particularly that
of Saint-Saëns, inclines toward the image of Apollo. It is ironic that Nietzsche gave
us this image of cultural forces in his 1872 encomium to Wagner, “The Birth of
Tragedy in the Spirit of Music” of 1872; but afterwards turned against Wagner and
placed in opposition a truer manifestation of life-forces, Bizet’s Carmen.
While Saint-Saëns’ theatrical muse may not rise to the heights of colorful dramatic
intensity of Bizet’s masterpiece, it can offer its own brand of well-paced narrative
drama, as heard not only in the full operatic offering of Henry VIII, but also in the
oratorio Le Déluge (The Flood) performed in a program of French choral music on
the second Saturday evening. This program included choral works by Gounod
(Stabat Mater, 1867), Florent Schmitt (Psalm 47, 1904) and Lili Boulanger (Psalm
130, Du fond de l’abîme, 1910-1917) as well as an orchestral tone-poem, Les
djinns, of Fauré. Within, let’s say, the climatic range of French romanticism, Saint-
Saëns’ treatment of the story of the Flood occupied the temperate zone. His work
was modeled on the English oratorio with touches of Mendelssohn. The musical
idioms ranged from salon music representing the easy life before the flood, and
returning for the music of the dove; to brooding romantic orchestral music
indicating the Lord’s dissatisfaction with human degeneracy; and to a uniquely
“Saint-Saëns-ish” musical flow (think “Aquarium” from Carnival of the Animals) for
the spreading of the waters. The influence of earlier music was felt in the
recitatives, but also the orchestral depiction of the flood with its wide-spaced
chords, flutes on top, that could have come from the innovative orchestrations of
Rameau. (In his short opera Pygmalion, Rameau uses a similar texture for the
magic moment when the statue of Galatea comes to life.) And of course, the finale
illustrating the Lord’s command to “be fruitful and multiply” gives an excuse for a
grand choral fugue, the kind of technical feat that Saint-Saëns could bring off
apparently without effort.
The other works on this Saturday night program (entitled “The Spiritual
Sensibility”) occupied different latitudes: Gounod’s treatment of the depiction of
Mary at the foot of the cross was, shall we say, Floridian: sweetly sentimental
verging on the saccharine, in contrast with Saint-Saëns’ narrative restraint.
Schmitt’s singing and dancing before the Lord came from below the Dionysian
tropics, all the way from a desert where no amount of clapping, banging, and
shouting could rise to a level of articulate communication. It had the distinction of
being the loudest work in the festival, without gaining any value from the effort, just
as his Piano Quintet, performed at the Debussy festival many years ago, gained
similar distinction from its length, filling at least 55 minutes with empty bluster.

In contrast, the Boulanger setting of only a fragment of the Psalm 130 text seemed
to originate in a harsh northern climate. It provided one of those “ah-ha” moments
that are de rigueur at Bard Festivals: the discovery of a composition so inspired
and obviously significant that you can’t understand why it is not more familiar until
you realize the its composer lived only to the age of 23. A truly impressive masterpiece, almost a half-hour in length, it possessed a unique, dark-hued, urgently compelling voice with a singular, unconventional harmonic vocabulary,
which never loses its way in the course of its grand structure. Although conceived earlier, the work was completed on the composer’s deathbed in 1917 in the midst of World War I. Its idiom is progressive in a way that owes little to either the impressionists or the expressionists; had she survived to a normal age, one can easily imagine the composer occupying a position alongside the great figures of the early twentieth century. The performance was committed and stirring.
Saint-Saëns’ connection to the Apollonian side of French music was exhibited by his early (and unnumbered) Symphony in A (1850?) presented at the start of the first orchestral concert. As the work of a ca. fifteen-year-old, it is precocious, almost in a category with the prodigious works of the teen-aged Mendelssohn, and in its fleet, cheerful version of the Haydn symphonic template it anticipates the initial symphonic efforts of Gounod and Bizet which followed five years later. The tone and approach to symphonic structure exemplify an alternate symphonic tradition emanating from late Haydn and early Beethoven and including the first six symphonies of Schubert. There is scant evidence of the darker drama of the Germanic tradition of later Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, or even Gade. Its portentous introduction, quoting the first four notes of the finale of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony to be used later on, sets up the buoyant and almost anachronistically light-hearted Allegro that follows, just as in one of the Haydn London symphonies. Its second theme-area has the easy-going lyricism (with a touch of the salon) that will become characteristic of the composer. It is disrupted by sly melodic fragments as if to play hide-and-seek with the audience; it could
almost have come from a page of Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants. The whole movement is
a thoroughly accomplished and surprisingly satisfying classical sonata-allegro.
And the rest of the symphony follows suit. Its placement toward the start of the
festival foreshadowed what we would find in the composer’s other classical-genre
works: easy mastery of the proportions of classical form, readily available if not
always distinguished lyricism, lucid and colorful, if not spectacular, use of the
instrumental forces, and a joyful acceptance of the eighteenth century heritage of
these forms. The work is poised at the balance-point between the classical and
the neo-classical, and is worth getting to know if only to ponder the distinction
between these two movements, neither of which is normally associated with the
nineteenth century.
The three chamber works mentioned earlier exemplify the continuing importance
of established genres as frameworks for some of the composer’s most
accomplished structures. For example, the opening concert featured Trio no. 1 in
F, op. 18, from 1864, which launches into its material with tremendous vitality,
works with cross-rhythms and pentatonic motifs foreshadowing middle-period
Dvorak. The light scoring gives plenty of space for lyrical cello-writing and the
piano provides the kind of sparkling filigree texture that would become very
familiar over the course of the festival. Compelling flow, seamlessly traversing a
well-balanced and dramatically varied sonata-form also characterized the later
movements, including an Andante whose melody is broken into two-note
fragments that are knit together by a larger lyric force. This two-note finger-print
shows up repeatedly in the composer’s oeuvre: in the theme of the last movement
of the Trio, in the development section of the Organ Symphony, in the Fifth Piano
Concerto’s opening theme, and in the Fourth Piano Concerto’s first and final
movements (among many other places). Another characteristic trait shows itself in
the scherzo, where the constant juxtaposition of on- and off-beats leads to a kind
of rhythmic vertigo reminiscent of Beethoven’s more playful scherzos such as in
the Fifth Violin Sonata (Spring) or in his last string quartet. Classicism of form and
containment of rhythmic disruptiveness remind us that one of Saint-Saëns’
sobriquets was “the French Beethoven.”
Similar or even greater satisfactions arrived in the Piano Quartet op. 41 (1875)
whose second movement is a contrapuntal tour de force. Here a chorale tune
(close to Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern but in a minor key) is subject to
varied treatment, in both strict and free counterpoint. Its form is that of a chorale-
prelude into which two large-scale fugues are inserted; the contrapuntal texture
has room for a layer of virtuosic piano writing. The structured development of this
texture spans the movement, and is a far cry from the brief fughettas that many
romantic composers throw in to certify that they have passed their counterpoint
courses. The other movements display Saint-Saëns’ comfort in freely restructuring
classical models without sacrificing balance and formal coherence. The second
and third movements depart from the home (major) key of the first, and the finale
begins off-key with the tonality of the previous scherzo, only gradually
approaching the return to the home key of the first that was last heard almost 20
minutes before. During this return the chorale and the counterpoint of the second
movement reappear as if the music were working its way backwards toward the
beginning, which finally arrives about seven-and-half minutes into the movement
in a passage whose lyricism is multiplied by the structural tensions that have been
overcome. This is followed by yet another return of the chorale and counterpoint,
but finally in the major of the home key. A grand synthesis of formal, contrapuntal,
thematic, and harmonic elements produces a truly well-earned moment of
romantic but rationally-based ecstacy at the conclusion, a characteristic Saint-
Saëns moment.
This kind of structural drama, one oriented toward process and listener
involvement rather than psychodrama that plumbs the depths of the soul, forms
the basis for the most powerful of the composer’s instrumental works, including
the third of the great chamber works heard: the Violin Sonata in D minor, op 75
(1885). Structurally this work is paired with the Organ Symphony, op. 78 (1886).
Both works use a two-part structure of two linked sections each, and both have a
totally cyclic thematic structure in which materials undergo metamorphosis and
reappearance across the entire span. Both have integrated harmonic plans that
make use of the relationship of the half-step which juxtaposes the most distant
harmonies and unfolds a reconciliation between them that plays out across the
whole structure.
Virtuosic piano writing became a connecting thread among many works heard in
the festival, pointing to the composer’s important role as one of the leading
performing pianists in France. He began piano lessons at age three, wrote his first
piano piece a year later, began performing at the age of five, and made his official
debut at eleven. As a boy, he knew all the Beethoven sonatas by heart. Reviews
of his playing quoted in the volume of articles published along with the festival
indicate that as a youngster his style was rather dry and literal. They indicate,
however, that as he matured, he became more expressive and varied. He was an
infallible sight-reader, occasionally giving performances on no rehearsals
whatsoever. His writing for the piano was always brilliant and resourceful, drawing
on the full range of the instrument and the full resources of the completely
equipped pianist. He first met Liszt when he was seventeen and the two became
highly esteemed colleagues. One can hear recordings that he made near or at the
end of his life, at ages 69, 84, and 86. They indicate that his light, clear, and
precise touch remained unaffected by age, and that he retained total accuracy and
agility to the end. This prodigious performing talent informs both his manner of
composing for the instrument and his aesthetic: the piano is rarely employed at full
force, but touches every register between the utmost delicacy of sparse single
notes and the assault of rapidly alternating double-octave passages. When the
piano is included in his compositions, its brilliance often provides climactic
material, especially in an ecstatic “race to the finish” closing passage. Even in his
“organ” symphony, Saint-Saëns could not avoid using this piano color in the
scherzo.
