Camille Saint-Saëns

• Born: October 9, 1835 in Paris
• Died: December 16, 1921 in Algiers

Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 22

• Composed: Spring of 1868
• Premiere: May 13, 1868 in Paris with Anton Rubinstein conducting with Saint-Saëns at the piano 
• Instrumentation: solo piano, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, cymbals a2, strings
• CSO notable performances: First Performance: February 1902 with Frank Van der Stucken conducting and Harold Bauer at the piano. Most Recent: November 2012, Louis Langrée conducting and Cédric Tiberghien at the piano.
• Duration: approx. 24 minutes

Saint-Saëns had an extraordinarily long and productive career. He was active as a composer for 83 years! He wrote his first composition, which is preserved in the Paris Conservatory, at age three, and he continued to compose virtually nonstop until the day of his death. His career as a pianist was equally impressive. He began giving informal concerts in his neighborhood at age four, he played his first public recital at age eight, and he remained an agile and active performer until his final day (when he practiced two hours in the morning before dying in the evening).

He composed incessantly and effortlessly. He had no trouble, for example, writing and orchestrating a massive oratorio in a week. He created well over 300 works, many of major proportions. Saint-Saëns also immersed himself in archaeology, astronomy, botany, conducting, play-writing, musicology, teaching, poetry and philosophy. He was a world-renowned celebrity, making frequent concert tours and being received everywhere with great enthusiasm and respect. He was one of few composers ever to have statues of him erected and streets named after him during his lifetime.

Saint-Saëns was a prodigious correspondent, often writing as many as 25 letters in a day. These letters, like his music, reveal little of his inner feelings. He knew many of the world’s great musicians from several generations—a close friend of Rossini, Liszt and Berlioz, he lived long enough to know Stravinsky and Ravel. Saint-Saëns was a sarcastic atheist with a caustic wit, but he was also quite generous. Having accumulated considerable wealth from his spectacularly successful career, he often gave money away as “scholarships” to young composers.

Among the famous musicians with whom he was friendly was Russian pianist-conductor-composer Anton Rubinstein. When the two musicians first met in 1858, Saint-Saëns impressed Rubinstein by sight-reading at the piano the latter’s enormous Ocean Symphony. Rubinstein in turn overwhelmed his French colleague with his piano playing. Saint-Saëns later recalled:

With no other resource but himself and a piano, Rubinstein has packed the enormous Eden Theater with quivering multitudes and filled it with such resounding and gradated vibrations as might have been those of an orchestra. And when he joined forces with the orchestra itself, what an astonishing role was played by the instrument at his fingers across that ocean of sonority! You can get an idea of it by imagining a flash of lightning through a strong cloud. How he made the piano sing! What magic did he possess to give those velvety sounds a lingering duration which they do not, cannot have under the fingers of any other?

The two friends collaborated on concerts. Saint-Saëns continued:

We were very close and often played duets together. The pianos that served as our battlefield had a rough time of it, and we took little pity on the ears of our listeners. Those were the days! We made music simply for the joy of it, and we never had enough.…

One year he asked me to take the orchestra at a series of concerts he planned to give. I had conducted little as yet and hesitated at the task. In the end I agreed, and during those eight concerts I served my apprenticeship as a conductor. At rehearsals Rubinstein would hand me the manuscript scores he had scribbled, full of crossings-out, cuts and what looked like intricate geometrical diagrams. I could never persuade him to let me see the music beforehand—it was too amusing, he said, to see me at grips with the difficulties! Moreover, when he played he took not the slightest notice of the orchestra which accompanied him, so that one had to follow him at risk, and occasionally there was such a cloud of sonority rising from the piano that I could no longer distinguish anything and had to rely on the sight of his fingers on the keyboard as my guide.

After that magnificent season we happened to be at some concert or other in the Salle Pleyel, when he said to me, “I haven’t conducted an orchestra in Paris yet. Let’s put on a concert that will give me an opportunity of taking the baton.” “With pleasure.” We asked when the Salle Pleyel would be free and were told we should have to wait three weeks. “Very well,” I said, “in those three weeks I will write a concerto for the occasion.” And I composed the G Minor Concerto, which accordingly had its first performance under such distinguished patronage.

Saint-Saëns was able to complete the concerto in the short time allotted, but he was unable to learn the piano part sufficiently. “I played very badly, and, except for the scherzo, which was an immediate success, it did not go well. The general opinion was that the first part lacked coherence and the finale was a complete failure.” Nonetheless, the work went on to become the most popular and respected of Saint-Saëns’ five piano concertos.

Rubinstein subsequently performed the concerto as pianist. He recalled that it “served me for many years as a first-rate warhorse! It has everything—dash and elegance, dazzling brilliance and temperament; it is good music, too, if not devoid of a certain banality.”

Eventually the composer learned the piano part. In 1893 he played it at a London Philharmonic concert, where he shared the program with Tchaikovsky. Both composers were in England to receive honorary degrees from Cambridge University. Saint-Saëns heard and liked Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, and the two men spent most of their time at a banquet honoring them talking about music.

In 1908 Saint-Saëns became the first famous composer to write music specifically for a film. Always interested in anything new, he was fascinated by the movies and eager to compose a chamber suite to be performed during Charles Pathé’s The Assassination of the Duke of Manners. Soon silent films were produced at a rate faster than composers could create music for them, and pre-existing music often had to be used. The scherzo of the Second Concerto frequently accompanied comedies.

***

The concerto is truly a virtuoso’s showpiece, as might be expected from a collaboration of two extraordinary pianist-composers. It also has a marvelous freshness and spontaneity that is no doubt a product of the rapidity with which it was composed. The virtuosity is immediately evident when the concerto starts with an elaborate cadenza.

Through much of the first movement, the pianist plays dazzling runs, arpeggios and other figurations, culminating in a second cadenza. Virtuosity is present even in the hushed interlude that follows this cadenza, just before the end of the movement.

The wonderfully melodic scherzo is full of deft touches of orchestration. Notice in particular the imaginative use of timpani and the virtuosic passage accompanied by the entire string section playing tremolo. The lightness of this nonetheless dazzling movement is reminiscent of the best Mendelssohn scherzos.

The whirlwind finale is an amazing tour de force for the pianist. It is no wonder that Saint-Saëns had difficulty learning to perform this music in a short time! The soloist is rarely granted a respite from the continually varied demands on his technique. Yet the music never slips into empty virtuosity. It is always delightful, always elegant. As biographer James Harding concludes, “Those who criticize Saint-Saëns for his frivolity should try one day to write music as airy and sure-footed as this. They would not find it easy.”

—Jonathan D. Kramer