(b Paris, 9 Oct 1835; d Algiers, 16 Dec 1921). French composer. He was prolific in all spheres of music, performed in France as pianist, organist and conductor, cultivated many intellectual pursuits and left extensive writings. Within this vast range of activity lay an abiding interest in opera. He composed 12 operas, along with ballets, incidental music, dramatic choral works and even a film score, and acted as his own librettist when required. Although most of his operas were performed and revived in his lifetime, only one, Samson et Dalila, has retained a permanent place in the 20th-century repertory.
His early musical experience directed him towards a career as a virtuoso pianist and organist, and his tastes ranged from Bach and Rameau to Wagner and Liszt. At the Paris Conservatoire (1848–52) his success as a virtuoso impeded his reputation as a composer and he did not win the Prix de Rome; in contrast with most French composers he composed symphonies and chamber music rather than operas, although his interest in opera was aroused by his teacher Halévy, by the early support of the singer Pauline Viardot and by Gounod. As early as 1854 he began an opéra comique on a Persian subject but quickly abandoned it. He also composed an overture for a nameless opera proposed by Jules Barbier but never written. There exist unpublished dramatic scenes dating from the late 1850s, one entitled La toilette de la marquise de Présalé, one on the sleepwalking scene from Macbeth. From 1858 for 20 years his duties as organist of the Madeleine in Paris and his career as a pianist occupied his main energies, and a great number of his compositions were religious works (despite his professed lack of faith).
But his interest in the theatre was keen; he wrote a comic drama in three acts and sustained a number of literary friendships. During Wagner’s stay in Paris in 1860–61 he had the opportunity to play Lohengrin, Tristan and Rheingold on the piano in the composer’s presence. His enthusiasm for Wagner took him to Munich in 1869 to hear Rheingold and to Bayreuth in 1876 to hear the Ring.
After Saint-Saëns again failed to win the Prix de Rome in 1864, Auber, director of the Conservatoire, persuaded Carvalho, director of the Théâtre Lyrique, to find him an opera libretto, perhaps as consolation. Carvalho offered him Barbier and Carré’s Le timbre d’argent, a fantastic tale in the manner of Hoffmann which might have been expected to enjoy the same success as Gounod’s recent Faust. Although Saint-Saëns composed the opera within a year or two, it was over 12 years before Le timbre d’argent was staged, many mishaps and misunderstandings coming in its way, chief of which was the prejudiced belief of critics and managements that a pianist and organist who wrote symphonies could not be entrusted with an opera.
His next opera, Samson et Dalila, was almost equally delayed; indeed if Liszt had not displayed his legendary faith in younger composers by having it mounted in Weimar in 1877, the work might have had to wait even longer than it did. Thus his third opera, La princesse jaune, was the first to be staged. An unambitious opéra comique for only two singers on a Dutch-Japanese subject, it was played by the Opéra-Comique in 1872, without much success. It was the first of many collaborations with Louis Gallet, who provided librettos for many other composers of the day. Saint-Saëns remained a close friend until Gallet’s death in 1898.
The next years were more concerned with symphonic poems, choral works and the running of the Société Nationale de Musique which Saint-Saëns had founded during the political turmoil of 1870–71. But the eventual staging of Le timbre d’argent at the Théâtre Lyrique in February 1877 and of Samson et Dalila in Weimar at the end of the same year gave Saint-Saëns the reassurance and confidence he needed to devote himself regularly to opera. Every three or four years thereafter he produced a new work, each one immediately performed, until the series closed with Déjanire in 1911.
His profound patriotism after the experience of the Franco-Prussian war led him to favour themes drawn from French history. He accepted the standard model of grand opera with ballets and scenes of pageantry, and he adopted Gounod’s lyrical style. He opposed modernism for its own sake and liked to use historical and regional pastiche to evoke scenes from distant times and places. The most extreme case of this was his attempt to recreate the music of the Greeks for his incidental music to Sophocles’ Antigone at the Comédie-Française in 1894.
Saint-Saëns’ first historical opera was Etienne Marcel, staged in Lyons in 1879 and based on events in Paris in 1358. Gallet provided the libretto. Its success was only moderate and it never reached the stage of the Paris Opéra. Henry VIII, the next, was more successful. Commissioned by the Opéra, it was the first Saint-Saëns work to be played there; neither its libretto nor its librettists were of Saint-Saëns’ choosing, yet he threw himself into the work with ardour and took considerable pains to find the correct English tone for the music. Its merits place it perhaps second to Samson et Dalila in quality and invention. Before his next opera, Proserpine (performed in 1887), he considered an opéra comique entitled Guillery based on a story by Edmond About but soon abandoned the idea. Proserpine was a Gallet libretto based on a play by Auguste Vacquerie, a story of intrigue and jealousy set in 16th-century Florence: Proserpina kills herself since the man she loves is to marry her rival Angiola. The Opéra-Comique, where it was staged, had begun to raise the dramatic level of its repertory; this is a through-composed drame lyrique, no lighthearted comedy with dialogue. But the theatre burnt down two months after its opening, curtailing its success.
Gallet next proposed a Brunehilda and an Arthurian story named Drougha, both of which Saint-Saëns perhaps wisely rejected. Agnès de Méranie, set in 1196 in the reign of Philippe-Auguste, was also spurned. He decided finally on Ascanio, based on Paul Meurice’s play Benvenuto Cellini, which elaborates an incident during Cellini’s stay in France at the court of François I. Saint-Saëns added an elaborate divertissement in an imagined Renaissance style, and the work was played at the Opéra in 1890 only a few days after Samson et Dalila finally reached French soil with a performance in Rouen. Saint-Saëns, who now spent more and more time abroad following the death of his mother, attended neither. Phryné, a comedy set in 4th-century BC Athens, was next. Sibyl Sanderson sang in the title role when it appeared at the Opéra-Comique in 1893, and its light, witty style made of it a considerable success.
Frédégonde, though, the opera started by Guiraud on Gallet’s Brunehild libretto and dutifully completed by Saint-Saëns, was a failure at the Opéra in 1895. At that point he spoke gloomily of giving up the theatre. But he found a renewed enthusiasm thanks to three very different theatres in the south of France where his music was welcomed: at Béziers, where an open-air space intended as a bull-ring was converted into a theatre, Saint-Saëns was invited in 1898 to act as musical adviser, planning a grand work with Gallet on the story of Hercules and Dejanira. Déjanire was a play with text declaimed in what was thought to be a Greek manner and incidental music for a very large orchestra and chorus. Les barbares, another large-scale work on an ancient, this time a Roman, subject, was similarly intended for the open-air theatre at Orange. Although that project did not come off, Les barbares, to a bloodthirsty story by Sardou, was played at the Paris Opéra in 1901 and remained in the repertory until 1913 despite – or perhaps because of – its inflated old-fashioned staginess. Parysatis (incidental music), set in Persia in the reign of Artaxerxes, was his second work for Béziers, consisting of choruses and dances again requiring immense forces. It was played in 1902.
The richly decorated Garnier opera house in Monte Carlo was the stage for Saint-Saëns’ last three operas. Prince Albert of Monaco’s patronage and Raoul Gunsbourg’s direction offered the most enticing stage for French composers at that time. Still entranced by the ancient world, Saint-Saëns composed his one-act opera Hélène for production in Monte Carlo in 1904, followed by L’ancêtre two years later. This tale of a Corsican vendetta set in Napoleonic times was too strong for Saint-Saëns’ restrained musical language, although individual numbers such as the evocation of bees and Margarita’s long vocalise are effective. Saint-Saëns closed his operatic career with an adaptation of Déjanire as an opera, played in Monte Carlo in 1911.
Despite Saint-Saëns’ early admiration for Wagner, he later came to see him as a malaise to be avoided, both on stylistic and on national grounds. Eschewing modern tendencies, his style remained essentially unchanged and was consequently too pale to be successful in the era of Puccini and Strauss. Saint-Saëns was jealous of Massenet’s greater operatic gift and outspokenly hostile to Debussy. Except perhaps in Phryné, his admiration for Mozart had little occasion to show itself since he was never afraid of huge operatic canvases in which he could paint episodes from French history or scenes from the ancient world. The legacy of Meyerbeer and Gounod remained strong.
His operas are fluent and well crafted and his word-setting is always impeccable. He used a straightforward framework of motifs in all his operas. Samson et Dalila owes its success to the emotional intensity of the second act, the exotic colour of the Philistines’ music and the fine choral writing, derived from its original purpose as an oratorio; an indebtedness to Wagner and Berlioz is more evident here than in his other operas.
HUGH MACDONALD