GABRIEL URBAIN FAURE (1845 – 1924)
It can be a little difficult at times to penetrate into Fauré’s music and the life of this composer. For many he remains something of a mystery and somewhat difficult to pin down. He remains something of an enigma both about the nature of his musical output and about the man himself. What is also problematic is placing him in time.
His music to begin with does not exactly make you jump out of your chair. The 19th century is overloaded with heroics, fate knocking at the door, elation, emotion, hysteria and dramatics. Its dependence is on form, question and answer, exposition and recapitulation. With Fauré there is none of this. The one quality which constantly comes through is restraint. His works rarely contain carefully sculptured and repeated themes as of a Beethoven or of a Cesar Franck. Often Fauré’s compositions, his piano quintets for example, appear simply to unfold from point to point as if improvised. It is almost a style of creative anonymity which in turn reflects on our perception of him as a person, who he was and also when he was. It is a fairly safe bet that most people know Fauré from only a very few of his works. The best known and most loved is his Requiem with its tranquil and devotional character, and of course the ever popular Pavanne, with or without choral supplement, and whose popularity reached a far wider audience than Fauré could ever have envisaged with the 1998 World Cup hosted in France even though it never had a chance in hell of outdoing the Italians with the Three Tenors. Still, despite Nessun Dorma, Italy went to sleep in its attempt to win the World Cup and it was France who won at the Stade Français, thanks to Zinedine Zidane …and Gabriel Fauré
Incidentally I am prepared to hazard a bet that when it comes to the next World Cup in Brazil, we are going to hear Bachianas Brasilieras No 5 by Villa Lobos. If you don’t know it, sample it now, preferably the recording sung by Victoria de Los Angeles, before they ruin it for you.
Now I stated above “who he was and also when he was”. Most people if asked and, familiar with the Requiem and the Pavanne, would rightly say late 19th century. The perception is that Fauré would have come and gone by the turn of the century to be followed by Debussy and the impressionists and the twentieth century modernists. It therefore comes as a shock to find that Fauré’s long active musical life extends to 1924. He not only outlived the Belle Epoque, was principal of the Conservatoire when Debussy was at his height, but outlived Debussy and still continued to compose. He travelled across time, a suitable companion Dr. Who may be with his droopy moustache. One can easily be misled in that he was born in 1845 and thus a contemporary of Dvorak and Tchaikovsky. A more appropriate comparison might be made with the English composer Charles Villiers Stanford, born 1852 and who died the same year as Fauré. Stanford is little known today but he was a stalwart of Victorian England, writing hymns, anthems and much religious music as well as seven symphonies. He became unfairly in my view consigned to the world of the forgotten. Fauré on the other hand continued to write, notwithstanding deafness, aware of emerging new trends and even flirting with atonality. His cause was taken up by Aaron Copland, who as a young man in the early twenties took lessons in France.
Fauré was born in Midi-Pyrénées, in the south of France, the youngest of six children and the only one of them to display musical talent. His father became a schoolmaster. He recalled in his last years, “I grew up, a rather quiet well-behaved child, in an area of great beauty. … But the only thing I remember really clearly is the harmonium in the little chapel of my school”.
Helped by a scholarship from the local diocese, Faurés father arranged to send him for his education to a new school run by one Niedermeyer in Paris. There, from age 9 till he was 20 Fauré was educated at a boarding schoold in a gloomy austere régime. Niedermeyer, whose goal was to produce qualified organists and choirmasters, focused on church music. When Niedermeyer died, Camille Saint-Saëns took charge of piano studies and introduced contemporary music, including that of Schumann, Liszt and Wagner. Fauré recalled in old age, “At the time I was 15 or 16, and from this time dates the almost filial attachment … the immense admiration, the unceasing gratitude I had for Saint-Saëns, throughout my life.”
Saint Saens who was ten years older became his mentor and the close friendship between them lasted until Saint-Saëns died sixty years later. Fauré won many prizes while at the school, including the Cantique de Jean Racine, the earliest of his choral works to enter the regular repertory. He left the school in July 1865, as a laureate in organ, piano, harmony and composition, a Maître de Chapelle .
Fauré’s first appointment from 1866 was as an organist at Rennes in Brittany. During his four years there he supplemented his income by taking private pupils. He continued to compose, but none of his works from this period survive. He was generally bored at Rennes and had an uneasy time with the parish priest who in early 1870, decided to give Fauré the push after he turned up to play at Mass one Sunday still in his evening clothes after a night out at a ball. Almost immediately and with the help of a quiet word from Saint-Saëns, he secured the post of assistant organist at a church in the north of Paris but he was to remain there for only a few months. On the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 he volunteered for military service. He took part in the action to raise the Siege of Paris, and saw action in other theatres. He got awarded a Croix de Guerre.
With the defeat by Prussia there followed the Paris Commune with its brief but bloody conflict from March to May 1871. Fauré got out and took up a teaching post at the École Niedermeyer, which, to avoid the violence in Paris, had temporarily relocated to Switzerland. His first pupil at the school was the composer, André Messager, who became a lifelong friend. (Messager could do with a separate note. He was a distinguished organist and conductor. He was known for opera, operetta and light music. He conducted the first performance of Debussy’s Pelléas and Melisande, he conducted Wagner at the Opéra whilst becoming also chief conductor at the Folies Bergères. Messager came to London and was the only French composer to be commissioned by D’Oyly Carte for one of the Savoy operas).

When Fauré returned to Paris in October 1871 he was appointed choirmaster at Saint Sulpice under the composer and organist Charles-Marie Widor. During some services Widor and Fauré improvised simultaneously at the church’s two organs, trying to catch each other out. Fauré regularly attended Saint-Saëns’s musical salons. He was also a founding member of the Société Nationale de Musique, formed in February 1871 to promote new French music. Other members included Saint-Saëns, Bizet, Chabrier, d’Indy, Franck, Lalo and Massenet. Fauré became secretary of the society in 1874 and a number of his works were first presented at the society’s concerts.
In 1874 Fauré moved from Saint-Sulpice to the Église de la Madeleine, in order to deputise as principal organist for Saint-Saëns during the latter’s many absences on tour. He was gradually moving up the ladder of distinguished churches with their organs albeit on the coat tails of his more famous mentor. Fauré had made it to the top as an organist but although he played the organ professionally for four decades, he left no solo compositions for the instrument. He preferred the piano to the organ, which he played only because it gave him a regular income.
1877 was a notable year for Fauré, both professionally and personally. In January his first violin sonata, an impassioned work compared with later, was performed at a Société Nationale concert with great success and marked a turning-point in his composing career. In March, Saint-Saëns retired as official organist from the Madeleine and was succeeded as organist by his choirmaster, Dubois. So Fauré was appointed choirmaster to take over from Dubois.
On the domestic front Fauré became engaged in July to Marianne Viardot. She was the daughter of Pauline Viardot Garcia, a founder member also of the Société Nationale de Musique, a famous mezzo of the day and a rare woman composer of the period. We are told that Fauré was deeply in love with Marianne but for whatever reason and to his great distress which he no doubt got over, she broke off the engagement in November 1877. Well these things do happen. Saint-Saëns again came to the rescue and, to distract Fauré, took him off to Weimar where he was introduced to Franz Liszt. This visit gave Fauré a taste for foreign travel, which he pursued for the rest of his life. The next year, he and Messager made trips abroad to see Wagner operas at Cologne , a complete Ring cycle in Munich and again at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London and Die Meistersinger in Munich and at Bayreuth, where they also saw Parsifal. Fauré admired Wagner, as did many of his French contemporaries, and had a detailed knowledge of his music. Nevertheless whilst he enjoyed listening to his Wagner he remained one of the few composers of his generation who did not come under Wagner’s musical influence. Fauré and Messager frequently were to perform as a party piece a joint composition, the irreverent Souvenirs de Bayreuth. This short, up-tempo piano work for four hands sends up themes from The Ring.
In 1883 Fauré married Marie Fremiet, the daughter of a prominent sculptor. The marriage was affectionate, but Marie did not share his passionate nature, according to his biographer, Duchot who presumably gathered his evidence under the bed. Marie became resentful of Fauré’s frequent absences, his dislike of domestic life – “horreur du domicile” – and his love affairs, while she remained at home. How not understanding is that! Fauré valued Marie as a friend and confidante, writing to her often when away from home. According to Duchot, Fauré was extremely attractive to women and “his conquests were legion in the Paris salons.” The bourgeois looking man with the droopy moustache now begins to resemble something out of Collette. A romantic attachment to the singer Emma Bardac from around 1892 was followed by another to the composer Adela Maddison. In 1900 Fauré met the pianist Marguerite Hasselmans. This led to a relationship which lasted for the rest of Fauré’s life. He maintained her in a Paris flat, and she acted openly as his companion. A good French tradition maintained still by the present President of the Fifth Republic.
Now with a family to support, Fauré spent most of his time in running the daily services at the Madeleine and giving piano and harmony lessons. His compositions however earned him very little. Having sold them outright to his publisher at an average of 60 francs a song, Fauré received no royalties. During this period, he wrote several large-scale works, in addition to many piano pieces and songs, but he destroyed most of them after a few performances. One work to survive from this period fortunately is the Requiem. It was begun in 1887 and revised and expanded until its final version dating from 1901. After its first performance, in 1888, the priest in charge told Fauré, “We don’t need these novelties. the Madeleine’s repertoire is quite rich enough”.
During his thirties he began to suffer with bouts of depression not helped by his broken engagement and his lack of success as a composer. In 1890 he received a prestigious and remunerative commission to write an opera but Verlaine, his librettist, failed to deliver which plunged Fauré into so deep a depression that his friends became seriously concerned about his health It took a trip to Venice and writing some songs for him to recover his spirits and it was at this time that his liaison with Emma Bardac began. His principal biographers all agree that this affair inspired a burst of creativity and a new originality in his music. Bardac had a daughter, Hélène, known as “Dolly” and there is some suspicion that Fauré was her father although it is said to be unlikely. Come what may, Dolly was the inspiration for a suite for two pianos, a delightful work which is not susceptible to DNA testing. It is better known in its orchestral version of 1906
During the 1890s Fauré’s fortunes improved. His career is like something out of Shepherd Meade’s “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”. You follow someone; you give them your support and you help them to get promotion and then you step into the hole which they have left behind. In 1892, the position of professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire became available. Saint-Saëns as usual encouraged Fauré to apply for the vacant post. The Conservatoire regarded Fauré as “dangerously modern”, and its head, Ambroise Thomas, blocked the appointment. Instead, Fauré was appointed as inspector of the music conservatories in the French provinces. He disliked the prolonged travelling around the country but it was enough to put him on the first rung of the academic ladder and gave him a regular income which enabled him to give up teaching amateur pupils. Four years on, Ambroise Thomas died, and Dubois – remember him, the organist at La Madeleine – took over as head of the Conservatoire. So Fauré took a step up and succeeded Dubois as chief organist of La Madeleine. Dubois’ move created another hole to fill. Jules Massenet, professor of composition at the Conservatoire, had himself more than fully expected to succeed Thomas and might well have got the job. But he got greedy by insisting on being appointed for life and was promptly turned down. He was probably a football manager at some time. Thus it was that Dubois was appointed instead of Massenet who resigned his professorship in fury and thus it was that Dubois got Fauré appointed professor of composition in his place. Another shunt up the ladder.
Amongst the up and coming composers that came under Fauré were Ravel, Florent Schmitt, Charles Koechlin, Louis Aubert, George Enescu, Alfredo Casella and Nadia Boulanger. Fauré’s ensured his students obtained a firm grounding in the basic skills, a task which he delegated to his assistant. His role was to develop each student’s individual talents, not to hand out recipes for composing according to his style. Each of them were to find their own paths in differing and often opposed directions.
Fauré’s works of the last years of the century include incidental music for Maeterlink’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Prométhée, a tragedy composed for outdoor performance. The work is unusual for Fauré being originally scored for huge instrumental and vocal forces. From 1903 to 1921, Fauré undertook musical criticism for Le Figaro but he was too nice and only liked to emphasise the positive aspects of a work.

Fauré’s further climb to the top of the conservatoire hierarchy eventually came about in 1905 some 13 years after he had started out as a teaching member of staff. The occasion centred around Fauré’s pupil, Maurice Ravel, who was already by then established as a composer. Most composers of note had managed to win the country’s top musical prize, the Prix de Rome, if not always at the first attempt. Berlioz who had had four goes described in his Memoires the difficulties and opposition he had met from the Establishment. Ravel is the most distinguished of French composers not to have won the Prix de Rome at all. It was in 1905 that a scandal of near Dreyfus proportions erupted in French musical circles after Ravel, at his sixth attempt, the top favourite, was eliminated in an early round. Reactionary elements within the Faculty had played their part. Dubois, him again, head of the Conservatoire, became the target of the protest and, whether because he had been actively involved or simply because it happened on his watch, he announced his retirement and stepped down. And who was there to fill the gap in his place? Yes, you’ve got it in one. None other than Gabriel Fauré with Government support to boot. This mild looking man radically changed the administration and curriculum. He appointed independent external judges to decide on admissions, examinations and competitions, a move which enraged faculty members who had not only formed the jury but had given preferential treatment to their own private pupils. Deprived of what had been a good earner, many of them resigned. Fauré became dubbed “Robespierre” by the old guard as he modernised and broadened the range of the musical curriculum which now included not only some Wagner – previously an unmentionable name within the Conservatoire – but was extended so as to range from Renaissance polyphony to the works of Debussy.
Previously, when he was struggling to earn a living as an organist and piano teacher Fauré did not have as much time for composition as he would have liked. Now, with his new position, he was decidedly better off financially and he became much more widely known as a composer. Still, running the Conservatoire left him with no more time for composition than before. If he had only one thing in common with Mahler it was to spend the summer months, usually by a lake, in composition. His works from this period include his opera, Pénélope, a number of songs and for the piano some of his Nocturnes and Barcarolles written between 1906 and 1914. I was first introduced by Matthew Taylor to Fauré’s piano works during his Chopin series and I was struck by their musicality, more than I had been of his more celebrated predecessors, Chopin or Liszt. That’s purely personal.
In 1909 Fauré was elected to the Institut de France, a body grouping together five académies including the Académie française. It helped to have two long-established members canvassing on his behalf. One as ever was Saint-Saëns and the other Fauré’s father in law, the sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet, whose equestrian statues including Napoleon on horseback and Joan of Arc on horseback, bedeck Paris. During this period, Fauré began to develop serious problems with his hearing. Not only did he start to go deaf, but sounds became distorted, so that high and low notes sounded painfully out of tune to him.
He began to visit England frequently where he was invited in 1908 to play at Buckingham Palace, the year of the first London performance of Elgar’s First Symphony at which he was present as well as dining with the composer afterwards. Elgar described him as a real gentleman – the highest kind of Frenchman whom he admired greatly. Elgar tried hard to get Fauré’s Requiem performed at the Three Choirs Festival, but it did not actually get its first English performance until 1937, nearly fifty years after its first performance in France.
Faure was in Germany at the outbreak of the First World War but managed to get back to Paris. He remained in France for the duration of the war. He was against a boycott of German music led by Saint-Saëns but their disagreement did not affect their friendship.

In 1920, at the age of 75, Fauré retired from the Conservatoire because of his increasing deafness and frailty. In 1922 a presidential public tribute was accorded to him, a national homage, at the Sorbonne. Despite not being able to hear a single note it was nevertheless a great joy for this illustrious composer surrounded by other illustrious artists to receive such acclaim.

In his last months Fauré struggled to complete a string quartet. Twenty years earlier he had been the dedicatee of Ravel’s String Quartet. Ravel and others urged Fauré to compose one of his own. He refused for many years, on the grounds that it was too difficult. When he finally decided to write it, he did so, telling his wife, “I’ve started a Quartet for strings, without piano. This is a genre which Beethoven in particular made famous, and causes all those who are not Beethoven to be terrified of it.”

Aaron Copland wrote that although Fauré’s works can be divided into the usual “early”, “middle” and “late” periods, there is no such radical difference between his first and last periods as is evident with many other composers. Copland found premonitions of late Fauré in even the earliest works, and traces of the early Fauré in the works of his old age.

Fauré suffered from poor health in his later years, brought on in part by heavy smoking. Despite this, he remained available to young composers, including members of Les Six, most of whom were devoted to him. Fauré died in Paris from pneumonia on 4 November 1924 at the age of 79. He was given a state funeral at the Église de la Madeleine.

D’Indy by name and dandy by nature one might say, always assuming we were more familiar with this, the least known of those figuring in this parade of French composers. Vincent D’Indy scarcely appears much in concert programmes on this side of the channel. One may come across an occasional performance of either his symphony, “Jour D’été Dans La Montagne” (Summers Day on the Mountain)  or his Symphonie Sur Un Chant Montagnard Français (Symphony on a French Mountain Air) for piano and orchestra but you will then have to wait a long time till the next occasion. I heard the former under Eugene Goosens round about 1954. So be patient and let’s get to know who Le Comte Vincent D’Indy was and what made him tick and let the music speak for itself.

The major difference there is between D’Indy and the other composers we encounter in this series, apart from the fact that most people haven’t heard of him anyway, is that D’Indy was born into an aristocrat family, a committed monarchist and of a strongly conservative Catholic persuasion. He was, not unsurprisingly, anti-Semitic. He claimed not to feel anything against Jewish colleagues amongst whom was his pupil Darius Milhaud who came from a long line of Provençal Sephardic Jews. As to the Dreyfus Affair, D’Indy, as you might imagine, was an anti-Dreyfussard and in the pro and anti campaign he joined the League for the French Fatherland. Not altogether the sort of person to be inviting to one of your dinner parties. Most of the other composers that Matthew is discussing display that 19th century appearance of wonderful whiskered bourgeois respectability. Here there is another difference, a physical one, which they have with D’Indy with his clean shaven aristocratic credentials. His support for the monarchy after the war of 1870 was not some evidence of being an eccentric variant. There was in fact, following the fall of the Second Empire, majority support in the country for the return of the monarchy. The Bonapartes were clearly done for and this left a clear choice between the return of a king or the re-establishment of a republic. The problem with the former was that monarchist support was equally divided between the Bourbons who had previously abdicated and their relatives from the Orléaniste line. They could not agree between them and the Republicans, many from the middle class right as well as the radical left, simply carried on until the two lineages could put their respective houses into order, which they never did. Still, if Vincent D’Indy were around to-day he might still be calling in the wilderness for the disbandment of the Fifth Republic and the return of the Bourbons or the Orleanistes as the case may be.

 D’Indy was born in Paris in 1851, a descendant of a noble family from the Ardèche. His mother was to die of a fever little more than a month after his birth and he was brought up by his paternal grandmother who helped him on the way with piano lessons. It was said that his strong beliefs coupled with a tendency toward narrow-mindedness were evident during his childhood and stemmed from his grandmother’s influence. He was frequently described “as stubborn to the point of fanaticism.” His religious beliefs ran deep. However, he clearly did display a musical talent although he did not begin formal music lessons until his early teenage years. In 1871, aged 19, he enlisted in the National Guard for the Franco-Prussian War. With the result of that war quickly decided he was soon to return to musical life. The first of his own works he heard was a Symphonie Italienne, performed, not publicly, but at an orchestral rehearsal and was admired by Georges Bizet and Jules Massenet, with whom he had already become acquainted. It was Henri Duparc who recommended him to Cesar Franck with whom he was eventually to become a devoted student at the Paris conservatoire. Through Franck, d’Indy came to admire the German school of music. His enthusiasm for Beethoven was inherited from Franck and D’Indy was to write an authoritative biography of Beehoven.

D’Indy would go on to be the most ardent of Franck’s followers, his champion, and biographer. His own musical education was further developed through playing percussion and keyboard and through conducting. He himself would go on to become a reputed teacher and theorist publishing his own Course On Composition.

In the summer of 1873 he visited Germany in what one can only conclude to have been a heavy drinking holiday because it was there that he met Brahms and Liszt.   In January 1874 his overture Les Piccolomini was included in a concert of works by Bach and Beethoven. Around this time he married one of his cousins. In 1875 he figured notably but unseen at the first performance of Bizet’s Carmen. He was the prompt!

 1876 saw D’Indy present at the first production of the Ring Cycle at Bayreuth converting him into a fervent Wagnerian. In 1878 d’Indy’s symphonic ballad La Forêt Enchantée was performed. In 1882 he heard Wagner’s Parsifal. And thus he progressed between performances of his own works and performing Wagner or making the Bayreuth pilgrimage.

 Dissatisfied with the standard of teaching at the Conservatoire and inspired by his own studies with Franck who had died following a coach accident in 1890, d’Indy, together with Charles Bordes and Alexandre Guilmant, founded the Schola Cantorum de Paris in 1894. D’Indy taught there and later at the Paris Conservatoire until his death. Among his many students were Isaac Albéniz, Joseph Canteloube (who later wrote d’Indy’s biography), Arthur Honegger, Albéric Magnard, Darius Milhaud, Leevi Madetoja, a successor to Sibelius in Finland, Cole Porter, Albert Roussel, Erik Satie and Xian Xinghai who was one of the earliest Chinese composers of western classical music. Now what a motley group that is! It makes me wonder. What if Matthew were to do a series on pupils of Vincent D’Indy, what a variety of styles that would produce.

 It is hard to sum up D’Indy’s output on what I confess to be a limited knowledge of his works. He scored over a century in opus numbers which include a symphony in B♭, a symphonic poem, Souvenirs, written on the death of his first wife, chamber music, including what are said to be two of the finest string quartets of the latter 19th century, piano music, songs, and a number of operas, including Fervaal (1897) described as a kind of French Parsifal. Like many French composers of the period he depended on opera to make his name and all of this is lost to us because, as with many other composers – Rimsky-Korsakov, Dvorak and Smetana are examples – their operas just don’t get performances in the opera houses.

 Anyway I will not usurp Matthew’s role in this but just give you an inkling. One aspect of D’Indy I had expected was that as a devoted adherent of César Franck he was going to sound like him. Not a bit of it. Pupils are not always able to reproduce the sound of the master and it is better they develop their own persona anyway. If I could think of a colour to describe Franck it would be brown, something like Cherry Blossom shoe polish, dark rich and deep. D’Indy comes through to me as a light blue and on the whole rather airy. His Symphony on a French Mountain Air contains an important piano solo. It reminds one more of Bizet than Franck – not the Bizet of Carmen but the pre-Common Agricultural Policy Bizet of L’Arlesienne with its country rounds. D’Indy was obsessed by French mountains and his Summer Day on the Mountain written twenty years later in 1905 is different again. Debussy and D’Indy had little in common and yet there is a strange linkage between Summer’s Day and Debussy’s La Mer, both written in the same year. Each is a symphonic triptych and both works commence with dawn. One has dawn at sea and the other dawn on the mountain. Debussy gives us half lights and reflections. D’Indy gives us a pastoral painting of Central France, reminiscent in mood in some ways of the opening of Mahler’s first symphony without the cuckoo,

 I can only summarise by saying we know too little about this almost unknown composer. What Matthew will give us can only be a taster. Better that than nothing. We need to know more

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)

Saint-Saëns was born in Paris in 1835 with his father, a government clerk, dying three months after the birth. He was an only child and raised by two people his mother and her aunt who moved in at the time. It is not generally recognized that Saint-Saëns was probably the most awesome child prodigy in the history of music. It was the aunt who gave Saint-Saëns his first piano lessons, aged two. At about this time he was found to have perfect pitch. His first composition, a little piece for the piano in 1839 when he was three and a half is now kept in the Bibliotèque Nationale de France. Saint-Saëns’s precociousness was not limited to music. He learned to read and write by the time he was three, and had some mastery of Latin by the age of seven. His first public concert appearance occurred when he was five years old, when he accompanied a Beethoven violin sonata. He went on to study in-depth the full score of Don Giovanni. At ten years of age, Saint-Saëns gave his debut public recital at the Salle Pleyel. with a performance of Mozart’s piano concerto no. 15 (K.450), and various pieces by Handel, Hummel and Bach. As an encore, Saint-Saëns offered to play any of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas from memory. Word of this incredible concert spread across Europe, and as far as America. So eat your heart out Daniel Barenboim, you weren’t the only one.

In the late 1840s, Saint-Saëns entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied organ and composition and won many top prizes. He soon gained a reputation that resulted in an introduction to Liszt who would become one of his closest friends. He was sixteen when he wrote his first symphony. It is not numbered and it is his second which was published as his Symphony No. 1 and was performed in 1853 to the astonishment of many critics and fellow composers. Hector Berlioz, who also became a good friend, famously remarked, “Il sait tout, mais il manque d’inexpérience” (“He knows everything, but lacks inexperience”). The truth in that remark is that throughout his long career the music of Saint-Saëns always sounds thoroughly professional and finished and, whatever its character, there is never any sense of his having had an off day.

Saint-Saëns’ first professional engagements came from playing the organ at various churches in Paris. He started off in the Beaubourg area (Les Halles). In 1857 at age 22 he gained the eminent position of organist at L’Église de la Madeleine, which he kept until 1877. His weekly improvisations stunned the Parisian public and earned Liszt’s 1866 observation that Saint-Saëns was the greatest organist in the world. Still, as we shall see, Saint-Saëns did not view organ playing as his be all and end all but as a job, and once given the opportunity, which he eventually was, he was glad to hand it over to someone else.

From 1861 to 1865, Saint-Saëns took up the only teaching position he ever had, that as professor of piano at the École Niedermeyer. With the ultra conservative reputation of Niedermeyer who had just died, Saint-Saëns raised eyebrows by adding contemporary music—Liszt, Gounod, Schumann, Berlioz, and Wagner—to the school’s equally conservative curriculum. His most successful students at the Niedermeyer were Messager and Fauré, the latter being Saint-Saëns’s favourite pupil and soon his closest friend whom we will examine in a separate note on him.

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We have seen how multi-faceted Saint-Saëns was as a child. Precocity can disappoint but not so in the case of Saint-Saëns. From an early age, he studied geology, archaeology, botany, and lepidopterology, (moths and butterflies to you). I had to look that one up. So, just in case, I thought I would save you the bother, crossword addicts of the class excluded. He was an expert at mathematics and held discussions with Europe’s finest scientists. He also wrote scholarly articles on acoustics, occult sciences, Roman theatre decoration, and ancient instruments. He was into philosophy and wrote his philosophical work, Problèmes et Mystères, which spoke of science and art replacing religion. His literary achievements included Rimes Familières, a volume of poetry, and for the theatre, a successful farce. In the field of astronomy he became a member of The Société Astronomique de France. He gave lectures on mirages, had a telescope made to his own specifications, and he even planned concerts to correspond with astronomical events such as solar eclipses. I have in my own record collection a poem by Saint-Saëns entitled “To the Conquerors of the Air”, set to music by him for women’s chorus. We tend to have a distrust of all-rounders, those brilliant people who seem to know it all. But wouldn’t the world be a duller place without the Leonardo’s, the Constant Lamberts, the Noel Cowards, the likes of the Stephen Fry’s and yes, the Camille Saint-Saëns’s too?

Saint-Saëns was fortunate in being relieved from active duty during the Franco-Prussian war but it was a grim time and became worse during the Paris Commune in the winter of 1871. He felt himself threatened and his fame and standing posed him as a possible target. So he decided to make for London where he resided for several months until the Commune was put down. Soon after his return he led the way in founding the Société Nationale de Musique in order to promote a new and specifically French music group of composers . (see also my note on Fauré who became its secretary). The Society premiered works by members such as, César Franck, Édouard Lalo, Fauré and Saint-Saëns himself, who served as the society’s co-president.

He still remained at this time chief organist at the Madeleine. Oddly enough the pastor wanted him to produce good tunes which would please a fashion-conscious congregation whose tastes were being nurtured at the Opera-Comique. But Saint-Saëns objected to this. He was, it seems, considered a bit stuffy and with a reputation for being somewhat austere. His aim in life was to get out of organ duties as soon as he felt he could earn sufficient to support himself from composing and performing.  In 1875, nearing forty, Saint-Saëns married Marie Laure Emile Truffot, who was just 19. To begin with all went well. Their first son, André, was born soon after the marriage and the following year there was a further one on the way. In 1877, twenty years after taking up his position as organist at the Madeleine, Saint-Saëns resigned the post. At the same time his lease in Central Paris was expiring and he was helped in finding a new home across the river by a wealthy friend and admirer, Albert Lubon, chief of Paris’s postal services. This gentleman was a fan of Saint-Saëns and had been a regular guest at the composer’s Monday musical evenings. Saint-Saëns had honoured Lubon by dedicating one of his early operas to him. It was Libon who generously offered the finance for a fourth floor flat near the river for Saint-Saëns, his pregnant wife and child to move into. With this new found freedom from the Madeleine, Saint-Saëns could happily take off on a concert tour through France, Switzerland, Holland and England. However on his return he was to learn that Albert Lubon had died. There was a greater surprise. Lubon had left in his will to Saint-Saëns a legacy of 100,000 francs. Wow. Originally he had imposed a condition that Saint-Saëns should first compose a requiem to be performed on the first anniversary of Lubon’s death. However Lubon had had second thoughts and had removed that condition. Even so, Saint-Saëns felt a debt of gratitude – who wouldn’t when coming into 100,000 francs? – and decided towards the end of the year to honour the original wish and to compose the requiem, which he did at great speed within a period of eight days. So, the requiem did get its first performance as Lubon had first stipulated, at St Sulpice on 22nd May 1878 with Widor playing the organ.

Now however comes the sorry sequel with the sting in the tail. Six days later, the 28 May, the older of the two sons, André, was playing in their fourth floor flat when he fell from the fourth floor open window and was killed. Saint-Saëns was devastated and this was made worse when only six weeks later the second boy, Jean, aged 6 months, also died, of natural causes, a case of infant mortality. Comparison has been made to the stranger who commissioned Mozart’s requiem and the grim premonition of death associated with that. An even closer comparison can be made to Mahler composing his song cycle based on poems by Ruckert, Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the death of Children). Alma Mahler felt a deep sense of superstition and revulsion which was borne out when one of their daughters died soon afterwards. In his case Saint-Saëns blamed his wife for the first death and one can only guess at the ensuing recrimination, the rows and the silences as they ploughed on until one day in 1881 when they were on holiday he simply disappeared one day. She returned to her family and he went back to live with his mother with whom he lived until she died. They never divorced or went through the process of a judicial separation. They were never to see each other again.

Saint-Saëns was devastated when his mother died in 1888, and he moved from France to the Canary Islands under the alias “Sannois”. He spent much of his time in travelling around the world, visiting exotic places in Europe, North Africa, South East Asia, and South America. He chronicled his travels in many popular books using Sannois as his nom de plume.

At the beginning of his career Saint-Saëns was considered one of France’s musical revolutionaries but he became known as he grew older as an arch conservative. The problem was that he did not change with the times as did Fauré for instance. In the world of technology Saint-Saëns was modern; writing poems about aviators and writing background music for the new fangled cinema. In 1908 he became the first composer of note to write a musical score for a motion picture, The Assassination of the Duke of Guise, featuring actors of the Comédie Française. It was a mere 18 minutes long, but by the standards of the day; a considerable time.

But in music he stood still. He had his friends, Liszt and Fauré in particular; but he began to make enemies and made no secret of his contempt of those he did not like. He could not stand Franck’s music nor that of the stuck up, Vincent D’Indy. His nose was put out of joint when Massenet was elected a member of the “Institut” and not Saint-Saëns. Massenet sent a telegram to Saint-Saëns saying “My dear colleague the Institut has made a terrible mistake” to which Saint-Saëns wired a reply “I entirely agree with you”. When eventually Saint-Saëns did get elected he made sure that Debussy was not. Pierre Lalo, music critic, and son of the composer, Édouard Lalo described Saint-Saëns with his lisp as saying “I have thtayed in Parith to thpeak ill of Debuthy and hith Pelléath et Mélithande.” The personal animosity was mutual with Debussy getting his oar in with : “I have a horror of sentimentality, and I cannot forget that its name is Saint-Saëns”. Yet as Harold C Schonberg pointed out, he was not only a progressive in his day with the founding of Société Nationale de Musique in 1871 but stood godfather to an entire new generation of French composers between 1870 and 1900.

If Debussy was a bit too much for him there was no chance on earth with Stravinsky. Saint-Saëns went to the notorious first performance of Le Sacre du Printemps and walked out. He was not the only one of course.

As a composer, Saint-Saëns is remembered chiefly for works such as The Carnival of the Animals (and don’t forget the Swan) which was not published in full until after his death. It had been written for a private party and Saint-Saëns feared it would affect his reputation as a serious composer, the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso for violin and orchestra, the opera Samson and Delilah (but please Matthew don’t play the dreaded Bacchanal with its phoney belly dance), the symphonic poem Danse Macabre, the Symphony No. 3 with organ; the second, fourth and fifth piano concertos; the third violin concerto and the first cello concerto. There is also the Rouet d’Omphale which gets an outing on the BBC once in a while. The Symphony no 3, the Organ Symphony remains the most popular. It was in fact written as a symphony with organ but in the 1970’s it was recorded by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in its home hall under Barenboim whilst the organ was recorded separately at the Madeleine and the two recordings streamed. Saint-Saëns might well have approved. I don’t.

Saint-Saëns spent his last years in Algeria where he died of pneumonia in December 1921. Where therefore more fitting for his funeral than the Madeleine? There, the whole of the State establishment and the Music establishment congregated as befitted one of such repute. Doubtless those in attendance had their invitation cards. There was however one lady in her sixties who limped in dressed in black and veiled. She had no invitation card and the stewards questioned her as to who she was. She replied “I am Madame Saint-Saëns and I have come to see my husband buried.” She had not seen her husband for thirty years, since they had separated after the tragic deaths of their children, but she had come to do her duty. She lived on as his widow until 1950 when she died at the age of 94.

 This was the third composer in the series La Belle Epoque presented by Matthew in 2012

Note written by Lionel J L