Camille Saint-Saëns is a memorable figure not only for his successes as a
composer of choral and orchestral works, and the eternally popular
opera
Samson et Dalila, but also because he was a keen observer
of the musical culture in which he lived. A composer of vast
intelligence and erudition, Saint-Saëns was at the same time one of the
foremost writers on music in his day. From Wagner, Liszt and Debussy to
Milhaud and Stravinsky, Saint-Saëns was at the center of the elite
musical and cultural
fin de siècle and early 20th Century
world. He championed Schumann and Wagner in France at a period when
these composers were regarded as dangerous subversives whose music
should be kept well away from the impressionable student. Yet
Saint-Saëns himself had no aspirations to being a revolutionary, and his
appreciation of Wagner the composer was tempered by his reservations
over Wagner the philosopher and dramatist, suspicious as he was of what
he called "the Germanic preoccupation with going beyond reality."
Whether defending Meyerbeer against charges of facility or Berlioz
against those who questioned his harmonic grasp, Saint-Saëns was always
his own man: in both cases, he claimed, it was "not the absence of
faults but the presence of virtues" that distinguishes the good
composer.
PDF 208 pages Oxford University Press, USA (October 27, 2008)
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