The prolific Camille Saint-Saëns might well be considered the Professor Emeritus of French music. Over the span of eight and a half decades, he composed more than three hundred works in a huge range of genres, performed as piano and organ soloist in hundreds of concerts, taught countless pupils, championed new composers, helped revive the works of Bach and Handel (composers he adored), and was known in every corner of the music world. Berlioz quipped famously of the young genius, “Il sait tout, mais il manque d'inexpérience” (He knows everything, but lacks inexperience). From his very beginnings, music poured forth from the young Camille, who learned the piano at age 2 ½, was composing at three, and became a concert pianist at the age of 10. As Saint-Saëns said of himself, he produced music as naturally as an apple tree produces fruit.
Despite a reputation in his more youthful days as a radical innovator, Saint-Saëns rose in stature to be increasingly adored by even the most snobbish and conservative Parisian music circles. That Parisian celebrity began just after France’s surrender in 1871 in the Franco-Prussian (German) War. Parisians soon thereafter began calling for a new, French-minded music to re-establish France’s national self-esteem – and Saint-Saëns was at the ready. First, he co-founded the Société Nationale de Musique which sought two nationalistic goals: to promote French instrumental music, and to deter interest in German music. Secondly, Saint-Saëns began composing a concerto specifically for Auguste Tolbecque. Tolbecque was one of Paris’s leading musical personalities – a virtuoso of both the cello and viola da gamba, he was also an integral part of one of Paris’s most important concert series, the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. He was also dedicatedly concertizing to promote the wonders of the cello, an instrument that in the early 1870’s was highly overshadowed by the French public’s obsession with showy German piano and violin concertos. By choosing Tolbecque, Saint-Saëns was making as much a pro-French political statement as a musical one.
The Cello Concerto No. 1 premiered in 1873 to thunderous French Nationalist acclaim, hailed not only as new and innovative, but also as Saint-Saëns’s return to tradition from “his all-too-obvious divergence from classicism.”
The Concerto was, indeed, by 1870’s French standards, innovative in several aspects. Most obvious is how the Concerto begins with its unaccompanied cello solo that completely skips the typical orchestral introduction. Saint-Saëns also blended all three movements into one uni-movement without pauses in between. Such techniques were hardly “traditional,” as some critics claimed, but they did, ironically, owe their origins to German composers. Still, everyone could agree on how captivating the Cello Concerto was – filled with the freshness and pacing of a master composer, its themes ripe with alluring lyricism.
Classifications vanish, however, when the opening cello solo sweeps us into the current of that instrument’s majestic power and rich singing ability. The virtuosity of the cello shines brighter as the movement proceeds without sacrificing any musical integrity. The second main theme, though derived out of the first theme, is one of Saint-Saëns’s most lovely and is so well-crafted as to sound completely new. As for how to transition from the quick-paced first movement into the slow movement without the traditional pause, Saint-Saëns handled this in a delightfully novel way – the music begins slowing down abruptly.
The Allegretto is one of those wonderful creations, like Saint-Saëns’s other cello-featured piece, The Swan from the Carnival of the Animals (1886), that takes us to another realm of beauty. There is a genuine, patina-esque kind of allure to this movement – a simplicity of antiquity and gracefulness softly ringing throughout. A brief reprise of the main theme from the first movement returns, as if to apologize for its hasty earlier departure, and it functions as a bridge into the next movement, again, without pause.
The finale offers tunefulness and a certain operatic drama that trade off in turns. The cello passages both melt and burn, the themes blending melancholy, intrigue, and excitement with gleeful gymnastics. The movement paces itself perfectly into a quickening of tempo and an exciting, yet stately, ending – not grandiloquent but the perfect finish to a work of such mastery. It’s hard not to marvel that Saint-Saëns, in his first attempt at a concerto for cello, could have gotten it so right.
© Max Derrickson