Mozart famously wrote his first piano pieces at the age of five; Mendelssohn started turning out masterpieces at 16. Yet for astonishing musical precocity, Saint-Saëns outdid them both: he began improvising at 2, composing at 3, and at 10 he began touring as a concert pianist with all thirty-two sonatas of Beethoven committed to memory. Just where does one go from there? For Saint-Saëns, first to the organ and the cathedral, then to the world’s great concert stages as pianist and composer; to the academy, and to the peak of international musical celebrity. Yet Saint- Saëns was always in search of something more: his life’s mission and driving passion had less to do with musical success ultimately than with questions of musical identity. What was French music at its heart in the 19th Century and what was it becoming? Parisian audiences liked drama and spectacle, imported mostly from Italy, and for their nights out at the symphony they wanted Beethoven and Mendelssohn. That was fine, in Saint-Saëns’ view, but audiences wanted them to the degree that French composers were largely shut out, and that of course was not fine. And thus for the young composer, a question took form: Would it be possible to continue building on these well-loved traditions while also launching a multi-pronged movement meant to break their hold over French audiences? And in developing a broad body of chamber and orchestral works in the Germanic tradition could both a radical and a reconciling voice somehow be brought to this debate over identity, over the question of a truly French music? 

As it turns out, it is most clearly and vividly in his summative C Minor Symphony with organ (as he called it) that we get to hear the composer’s answers. Saint-Saëns’ poignant thoughts after the premiere are well known: “What I have done here I will never do again; I’ve given all that I have to give.” Powerful words! Yet just what did he mean when he said them? The piece is large, but he wrote larger; it came at the end of an astonishing streak of productivity, but that too was one of many. Saint-Saëns seems to have meant rather that it was in this piece that he finally was able to say most fully what he worked for decades to say, to speak with a clearly French voice while standing unapologetically in the Austro-Germanic tradition, honoring it while yielding nothing to it. Wonderfully, as it turns out, his voice was indeed heard: it proved to be his breakthrough piece. After it, both his and his colleagues’ work would be seen more and more to anchor concert programs as the big draw—a musical evening’s main event. 

And so to the music itself and to a big question: Just how did he do it? The work is surely a look back, a retrospective of sorts, with its rippling piano scales and its air of the extemporaneous or rhapsodic. In its hints of melancholy and, in the second movement, of unfulfilled longing, it may bear witness to something of the grief Saint-Saëns felt in the wake of unthinkable loss: both of his young sons had recently died within weeks of each other. And of course, the organ appears not only to provide power and color, though it gives generously of both, but to evoke the church that had been his musical home for decades. There is, in short, something deeply personal about this work in a way that is unusual and perhaps unique in the oeuvre of its characteristically cool, reserved composer. 

But finally, it’s in another way that the piece is testimony to all its composer “had to give”—it bears witness to his duty, as he appears to have seen it, to the ways in which he saw his gifts meeting his particular world’s needs. In it, he offered to that world and to the world beyond a quintessentially French symphony, something that until that point was seen as something of an oxymoron. And in it he most fully, boldly, and explicitly took on the shadow and legacy of Beethoven. From the music itself, two dimensions stand out as particularly illustrative: 

The opening theme is derived from the ancient chant Dies Irae from the Mass for the Dead. That’s a deeply French move, tipping the hat to the 

nation’s first great Romantic, Hector Berlioz, who used it famously in his Symphonie Fanstastique. Listen for how this theme is transformed from movement to movement, providing unity. That’s a very French move as well (the technique was beloved of French composers), yet interestingly it also echoes Beethoven’s already-iconic Fifth Symphony, in which an opening four-note motto (you know the one) subtly reappears in each of its subsequent movements. 

The Organ Symphony moves from darkness to light, from hiddenness to revelation, once again echoing the earlier work by Beethoven. Perhaps not coincidentally, that C Minor Symphony was Beethoven’s 5th; this, despite its traditional numbering, is also Saint-Saëns 5th. And perhaps its final blaze of glory is something more than merely heroic, the human triumphing over every circumstance; as the Dies Irae is reworked and transfigured, could the close be in fact a glimpse of the ultimate victory—life over death? In this case, the composer, much like Beethoven before him, never told. 

Program notes by Alan Murchie