Composer: born October 9, 1835, Paris; died December 16, 1921, Algiers
Work composed: 1872. Dedicated to and written for Belgian cellist, gambist, luthier, and music educator Auguste Tolbecque.
World premiere: Édouard Deldevez conducted the Paris Conservatoire orchestra on January 19, 1873, in Paris, with Tolbecque as soloist.
Instrumentation: solo cello, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings.
Estimated duration: 19 minutes

Camille Saint-Saëns’ career spanned seven decades; during that time, he was both vilified by conservatives for his endorsement of Richard Wagner’s music in the late 1850s, and dismissed by Claude Debussy as “the musician of tradition” in 1903.

Debussy’s words were meant disparagingly; nonetheless, many of Saint-Saëns’ contemporaries, including the notoriously opinionated Hector Berlioz, held him in high esteem. Saint-Saëns favored established (and, to his French detractors, foreign) genres: symphonies, concertos, sonatas, and chamber music. During his childhood and teen years, Saint-Saëns immersed himself in the music of Beethoven, Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Schumann. Throughout his lifetime, Saint-Saëns’ most popular and successful works adhered to these Germanic forms.

The A minor Cello Concerto both reflects and departs from tradition: Saint-Saëns compresses the standard three-movement concerto form into one continuous movement with three contrasting sections. The solo part simultaneously showcases the cellist’s skill and incorporates the solo line into the orchestra, resulting in a deft musical collaboration.

The premiere of Op. 33, in the winter of 1873, helped establish Saint-Saëns as a rising young composer, but the conductor, Édouard Deldevez, did not think much of it. He told Saint-Saëns that if acclaimed cellist Auguste Tolbecque were not giving the premiere, Deldevez would not have included it in the concert at all. Deldevez’ opinion notwithstanding, the concerto entered the repertoire immediately, and has been a favorite of cellists and audiences ever since; Pablo Casals featured it in his London debut in 1905. Biographer Brian Rees writes, “The Revue et Gazette Musicale declared that, if he continued in this vein, [Saint-Saëns] would recover much of the prestige he had lost with ‘his all too obvious divergence from classicism and the tendencies in a number of recent works.”