While, however, we may with propriety recognize the lack of personal ardor in Saint-Saëns that reduces the song element in his music to a minimum, it would be a sad mistake to exaggerate the limitation or to forget that from another and perhaps an equally valid point of view he is a great musician. However he may fall short as a melodist, he is a past-master of rhythm and harmony, spheres in which feeling counts for less, logic for more. His harmonic style is eminently lucid. To him a chord is part of an organism, not a bit of color or a phase of feeling. A series of chords has for him all the tendency, the direction, and the self-fulfillment of a sentence of words; to omit or to change one would be like striking out a predicate or an object—the sentence would not parse. He uses most those chords which point in a definite direction, which carry in themselves, so to speak, the indication for their fulfillment—the dominant and secondary sevenths, and suspensions of triads. He avoids the vague and the ambiguous. And although he is a lover of novel harmonic effects, and an ingenious inventor of them, the novelty is always a new form, not a new formlessness. His modulation, too, is of an extreme clarity: he never falls into a new key, so to speak, as Dvořák does; he proceeds thither.
But even more striking than the clearness of his harmony is the trenchant perspicuity of his rhythm. The sense of rhythm is perhaps the prime criterion of intellectuality in a composer. For just as determinations of accent and measure, such as occur in the dances of the most primeval savages, were undoubtedly the earliest means of formulating the cries and wails of emotion which underlie all musical expression, so throughout musical history rhythm has been the chief formative or rationalizing agent, and a vivid sense of it has always characterized the more intellectual musicians. The dreamers and the sentimentalists are never fastidious of accent; it is the clear, active minds who delight in precise meter. Quite inevitable to a man of Saint-Saëns's temperament, then, is the instinct for strong, various and subtle rhythms that his compositions reveal at every page. One discerns it in his fondness for pizzicato effects and for the percussion instruments, both of which emphasize the accent. And his devotion to the piano, which he uses more in combination with other instruments than almost any other composer, is doubtless due to the fact that it compensates for its lack of sustained tone by a special incisiveness of attack. Another significant peculiarity is the short groups of repeated notes that occur so often in his writings as to be a mannerism. They are found, for example, in the fourth of his Variations on a Theme of Beethoven, opus 35, in the «scherzando» section of «Africa,» at the opening of the Trio, opus 92, in the accompaniment of the well-known air from «Samson et Dalila,» «Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix,» and in the third of the Six Études, opus 52. The effect of this device, which throws a strong emphasis on the first of the reiterated notes, is a peculiar rhythmic salience. Again, on the principle that minor irregularities in a regular plan bring out all the more clearly the larger orderliness, Saint-Saëns loves to alternate groups of four notes with groups of three, or three with two, and to displace his accent entirely by syncopation, which, when properly handled, deepens the ideal stress by setting the actual in competition with it.
In all these and countless other ways are revealed the accuracy and virtuosity of intellect that distinguish this brilliant Frenchman. Clearness of form is, on the whole, so much rarer in modern music than wealth of meaning, that the art in our day has peculiar need of such workers. Their office is to make us remember, in our welter of emotion, the perennial delightfulness of order and control. They are the apologists of reason, without which feeling, however noble, must become futile, inarticulate. In their precise, well-constructed works we find a relief from the dissipating effects of mere passion. We breathe there a serene, if a somewhat rarefied, atmosphere. Of this classic lucidity Saint-Saëns is a great master. However dry he may sometimes be, he is never turgid; however superficial his thought, it is never vague; he offers us his artistic sweets never in the form of syrup—he refines and crystallizes them. If, then, we of a race emotionally profounder and mentally more diffuse find his music sometimes empty for all its skill, we must not for that reason underrate the service he does for music by insisting on articulateness in feeling, logic in development, and punctilious finesse in workmanship.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.—Saint-Saëns's best orchestral works are arranged not only for four hands, but for two players at two pianos, a combination of which he is extremely fond. It is interesting to play in this way the four symphonic poems, «La Rouet d'Omphale,» «Phaéton,» the «Danse Macabre,» and «La Jeunesse d'Hercule.» The five Piano Concertos are also excellent. The symphonies are rather dry. Of the chamber-music, the 'Cello Sonata, op. 32, and the Violin Sonatas, op. 75 and 102, are particularly good. The piano music is less original, being for the most part pseudo-classic in conception and style. Thus the Suite, op. 90, is like a suite of Bach's with the sincerity taken out. On the whole the Six Études, op. 52, and the Album of six pieces, op. 72, are better worth study. The former contains two able fugues, the latter an odd «Carillon» in 7-4 time and an attractive «Valse.» There is charm in «Les Cloches du Soir,» op. 85, and also in a well-known melody, without opus-number, called «Le Cygne.» Saint-Saëns has little power as a song-writer; those who wish to realize this for themselves, may purchase the Schirmer Album of fifteen of his songs. To his numerous operas no reference is made in the present essay, the subject of which is his contribution to pure music.
V
CÉSAR FRANCK
CÉSAR FRANCK