At a concert given in Paris in 1846 appeared a new prodigy, a boy pianist, «le petit Saint-Saëns,» as the «Gazette Musicale» announced him, who, only ten and a half years old, played Händel, Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, «without notes, with no effort, giving his phrases with clearness, elegance, and even expression in the midst of the powerful effects of a numerous orchestra using all its resources.» This, the first public appearance of Saint-Saëns, was by no means his first musical exploit. We read that he began the study of the piano with his great-aunt at the age of three, when already his sense of tone was so keen that he would press down with his left hand the slender fingers of the right until they became strong enough to satisfy his exacting requirements; that at five he composed little waltzes; that at ten he played fugues by Bach, a concerto of Hummel, and Beethoven's C-minor Concerto; and that he could tell the notes of all the clock-chimes in the house, and once remarked that a person in the next room was «walking in trochees.» By the time he was seventeen he had earned wide reputation as a pianist, had taken prizes for organ-playing at the conservatory, and had written an ode for chorus, solo, and orchestra, and a symphony. Thus early did he lay the foundations of that skill which in the early seventies, when at Wagner's house he played on the piano the «Siegfried» score, won from von Bülow the remark that, with the exception of Wagner and Liszt, he was the greatest musician living.
The surprising energy and versatility shown at the opening of Saint-Saëns's career have proved, in the course of time, to be the salient traits of his typically Gallic nature. He is, to a remarkable degree, the complete Frenchman. He has all the intellectual vivacity, all the nervous force, the quick wit and worldly polish, even the physical swarthiness and the dry keenness of visage, that we associate with his countrymen. M. Georges Servières, in his «La Musique Française Moderne,» gives the following excellent description: «Saint-Saëns is of short stature. His head is extremely original, the features characteristic; a great brow, wide and open, where, between the eyebrows, the energy and the tenacity of the man reveal themselves; hair habitually cut short, and brownish beard turning gray; a nose like an eagle's beak, underlined by two deeply marked wrinkles starting from the nostrils, eyes a little prominent, very mobile, very expressive. The familiars of his Mondays, those who knew the artist before injured health and family sorrows had darkened his character, remember that there was about him then a keen animation, a diabolic mischievousness, a railing irony, and an agility in leaping in talk from one subject to another with a sprightliness of fancy that equaled the mobility of his features, which were animated at one and the same moment by the most contrary expressions; and I could cite as instances of his gay humor many funny anecdotes that he loved to tell, adjusting on his nose the while, with both hands, in a way peculiar to him, his eye-glasses, behind which his eyes sparkled with malice.» Some examples of this railing irony of Saint-Saëns are preserved. There is, for instance, a story of an ambitious woman at one of his «Mondays,» who fairly browbeat him into accompanying her two daughters in a duet. After enduring as long as he could the torture of their timeless and tuneless performance, he turned to the mother with, «Which of your daughters, madam, do you wish me to accompany?» A man of his wit naturally found himself at home in Paris society, and counted among his friends for years such people as the Princess Pauline Metternich, Mme. Viardot-Garcia, and Meissonier, Tourgenieff, and Dumas. A story told in the «Figaro,» of how at Madame Garcia's, where he often played both the organ and the piano, he would pass from improvising «masterly pages» in the contrapuntal style to waltzes for the young people to dance by, illustrates in little that peculiar combination of distinction and gayety, characteristic of Paris, which is the native air of Saint-Saëns.
But this adept metropolitan is also an inveterate nomad. Not content with traveling all over Europe in his virtuoso tours, he has long had the habit of wintering in outlandish places like the Canary Islands. Often he leaves home without announcing to any one his departure, or even giving friends his addresses; sometimes without knowing himself where he will go. The spectacle of distant lands and alien races has for him an inexhaustible fascination. In writing of his experiences in England, where he went in 1893 to receive the doctor's degree from Cambridge, he dwells with gusto on the procession of dignitaries, at the head of which, he says, «marched the King of Bahonagar, in a gold turban sparkling with fabulous gems, a necklace of diamonds at his throat.» «Dare I avow,» he adds, «that, as an enemy of the banalities and the dull tones of our modern garments, I was enchanted with the adventure?» And in his charming little essay, «Une Traversée de Bretagne,» the same enthusiasm throws about his oboe-playing ship-captain the glamour of romance. On his first trip to the Canaries, made incognito, he is said to have offered himself as a substitute to sing a tenor part in «Le Trouvère,» and to have come near appearing in this incongruous rôle. When his grand opera, «Ascanio,» was produced at Paris, he scandalized his friends and the public by being absent from the first performance. Diligent inquiry, and even the efforts of the diplomatic agents of the Government, failed to discover his whereabouts, and it was actually rumored that he had died in Ceylon, on his way to Japan. But all the while he was happily basking in the sun at Palma, scribbling verses. Finally his fondness for astronomy is well known, and he is said to have a private observatory in some «ultimate island.» There is much about this picturesque Frenchman that reminds one of the heroes of Jules Verne's romances.
When he is at home, Saint-Saëns carries on a many-sided activity of which composition is hardly more than half. For one thing, he is indefatigable in his efforts to improve public taste. In 1864 he gave in a series of concerts all the concertos of Mozart; in 1878, such is the catholicity of his taste, he organized concerts to produce Liszt's Symphonic Poems. He has done much for musical bibliography by his careful editions of Gluck, Rameau, and others. In 1871 he took active measures to better the opportunities of young native composers. At that time, as he puts it, «the name of a composer at once French and living, upon a programme, had the property to put everybody to flight.» The great improvement that has taken place since then is due largely to him and his brother-workers of the National Society of Music.
His two volumes of critical essays, «Harmonie et Mélodie» and «Portraits et Souvenirs,» are marked by soundness of principle, broad eclecticism of taste, and a pungent, epigrammatic style. In general temper he is classical without being pedantic; that is to say, he has no superstitious awe for rules, but a profound reverence for law. The licenses of modern technique and the mental vagueness of which they are the reflection find in him a formidable foe. The thrust he gives, in the preface of «Portraits et Souvenirs,» to those amateurs who are «annoyed or disdainful if the instruments of the orchestra do not run in all directions, like poisoned rats,» is typical of his attitude and method. He is a master of innuendo and delicate sarcasm, which he always employs, however, to protect art against affectation and ignorance. In dealing with the theory that music depends for its effect on physical pleasure, he speaks derisively of the solo voice which one can «savor at one's leisure, like a sherbet.» He says of those orchestral conductors and choirmasters who always complain of difficulties that they «love above all their little habits and the calm of their existence.» Among these sparkling sentences one comes frequently also upon pieces of wisdom, sometimes expressed with rare dignity, as when he writes, «There is in music something which traverses the ear as a door, the reason as a vestibule, and which goes yet further.» A writer so highly gifted with both raillery and eloquence might do mischief were he narrow or intolerant. That Saint-Saëns is neither can be seen from a mere enumeration of some of his subjects, chosen almost at random: there are essays on The Oratorios of Bach and Händel, Jacques Offenbach, Liszt, Poetry and Music, The Nibelungen Ring and the Performances at Bayreuth, Don Giovanni, A Defense of Opéra-Comique, The Multiple Resonance of Bells, and The Wagnerian Illusion.
These titles indicate a wide enough range of interest, but Saint-Saëns is furthermore a writer on subjects entirely unconnected with music. His devotion to philosophy has prompted him to publish a volume called «Problèmes et Mystères;» an antiquarian interest has found expression in his «Note sur les décors de Théâtre dans l'antiquité romaine;» and he has printed a volume of poems under the title «Rimes familières.» Finally, a comedy in one act called «La Crampe des écrivains» (a disease from which he appears never to have suffered) has been successfully produced at Paris.
As a composer, Saint-Saëns impresses the student first of all by his excessive, his almost inordinate, cleverness. It is not seemly for a human being to be so clever; there is something necromantic about it. Look at the opening of the G-minor Piano Concerto and see a modern Frenchman writing like the great Bach. See, in the «Danse Macabre,» Berlioz and Johann Strauss amalgamated. Listen to the rich effects of tone in the 'Cello Sonata in C minor. Study the thematic transformations and the contrapuntal style of the Symphony in the same key. Admire the lightness, the cobweb iridescence, of the «Rouet d'Omphale.» The author of these works is obviously a man of great intellectual skill and versatility.
Looking more closely, one observes a duality of style, for the moment puzzling, which properly understood only emphasizes the peculiarity of his artistic impulse. His compositions are of two well-marked varieties which at first seem to have little in common. To begin with, all those cast in the conventional symphonic mold—the three symphonies, the eight concertos, three for violin and five for piano, and most of the chamber-music—are severely, at times almost aridly, classical in conception and execution. They are «absolute music» of the most unequivocal sort. They depend for their effect on clear form, well-calculated symmetry, traditional though interesting melodic and harmonic treatment; their themes are of the family of Haydn and Mozart; their structure is that perfected by Beethoven; their orchestration is skillful but unobtrusive, a transparent medium rather than a rich material garment. In a word, they are very pure examples in music of a type of art—the French classic or pseudo-classic type—which gains little from richness of material or variety of suggestion, which depends for its appeal on clarity and symmetry of form and on clean workmanship in style. But, in addition to these conventional works, Saint-Saëns has produced a whole museum of exotics, in which his aim is to delineate passions, peoples, and places. There are the four Symphonic Poems, for example, the «Rouet d'Omphale,» «Phaéton,» the «Danse Macabre,» and «La Jeunesse d'Hercule,» in which he assumes the rôle of story-teller. In the «Nuit à Lisbonne,» the «Jota Aragonese,» and the «Rapsodie d'Auvergne,» he makes a tour in southern Europe; in the «Suite Algerienne» he portrays the deserts about Algiers, and in his opus 89 he gives us a fantasy of odd rhythms and outlandish tonalities supposed to introduce us to Africa. Nothing could seem, at the first blush, more diametrically opposite to the pseudo-classic works than these exotics, which among their academic brothers recall the King of Bahonagar at Cambridge. Yet both kinds, after all, when one looks more closely, are products of the widely questing intelligence, whose interests are dramatic rather than personal. They have this in common, that neither is of primarily emotional origin, that both are expressions of a mind objective and alertly observant. The difference between them is that in the one case this observation takes for object the purely musical world of tones, and in the other nature's world of persons, nations, races, and climates. But whether he is seeking a piquant rhythm or a curious turn of harmony, or sketching his impression of Spain or Egypt, Saint-Saëns is always the onlooker, the man of the world, never the mystic who contemplates in his own heart the forces that underlie the universe.
Strong testimony from the man himself to the truth of this view is indirectly afforded by his essay on Liszt, an essay which is furthermore noteworthy as containing in half a dozen sentences the essential truths of that vexed question of programme-music. He is, to begin with, as assertive as we should expect of the necessity, in all music, of absolute beauty. «Is the music itself,» he says, «good or bad? All is there. Whether or no it has a programme, it will not be, for that, better or worse.» Thus far speaks the author of the symphonies, the concertos, and the chamber-works. The composer of the symphonic poems and the geographical pieces continues: «But how much greater is the charm when to the purely musical pleasure is added that of the imagination coursing without hesitation over a determined path.... All the faculties of the soul are put in play at once, and toward the same end. I can see well what art gains from this, I cannot see what it loses.» Here speaks, recognizably enough, the Frenchman. In that phrase about «the imagination coursing without hesitation over a determined path» stands clearly revealed the dramatic point of view characteristic of French art, which is always devoted to the spectacle of life rather than to the elemental passions which underlie it. The satisfactions Saint-Saëns finds in music are those of the formal musical sense and of «the imagination coursing a determined path;» of the emotional satisfaction which music gives so generously he has nothing to say. To take another instance, how admirably logical and how adequate to the composition, which for all its picturesque grace leaves one cold, is the «programme» he appends to the «Rouet d'Omphale.» «The subject of this symphonic poem,» he writes, «is feminine seduction, the triumph of weakness over strength. The spinning-wheel is but a pretext, chosen solely with a view to the rhythm and the general effect of the piece. Those interested in the study of details will see at page 19, Hercules groaning under the bonds he cannot break, and at page 32 Omphale laughing at the vain efforts of the hero.» Both programme and piece are the creations of a keen intelligence which records its observations with accuracy and skill, but makes no personal revelation, cares not to contemplate itself, and is moved by no deep and perhaps vague, but nevertheless creative, emotion.
Lack of emotion, then, is the serious defect of this master. And in a musician it is in truth serious. Emotion is the life blood of the musical organism; without it all the members may be shapely, well ordered, highly finished, but all will be cold and lifeless. So it is with much of this clever craftsman's work. Too often there is graceful melody, arresting harmony, ingenious rhythm, but none of the passion needed to fuse and transfigure them. Impassioned vocal utterance, the song element in music, is seldom heard from Saint-Saëns. In the classic works he manipulates, in the exotic pieces he depicts; nowhere does he speak. But to speak, to voice deep feeling directly, though with the restraint necessary to plastic beauty, is the aim and the justification of music. Complex as the art has become in our day, the essence of it is still, as it ever must be, emotional expression; and though modern composers sing broader songs than the first musicians, and sing them on instruments rather than with the voice, they must equally sing, and their song must proceed from their hearts if it is to touch the hearts of others. Hence Saint-Saëns, when compared with a man of passionate earnestness like César Franck, or Schumann, or Wagner, inevitably seems superficial. Pieces like his B-minor Violin Concerto, with its elaborate classical machinery, its well-planned contrasts and brilliant effects, and the vast Symphony in C-minor, in which the theme undergoes such wonderfully skillful manipulation, seem so little the expression of a personal impulse that we catch ourselves wondering why he wrote them. Elsewhere, to be sure, as in the Andante of the 'Cello Sonata, his very virtuosity achieves such noble effects that we forget the hand-made quality of the work. But it is seldom indeed that, subordinating workmanship entirely, he gives us a genuine song of feeling, such as the second theme of the Finale in this Sonata. The lift and impetus of this beautiful theme emphasizes by contrast the emotional emptiness of the ingenious web that surrounds it.