RELAXED CONCERT: CARNIVAL

Originally called Fantaisie, the Morceau de concert was composed in October 1887 and a version with orchestral accompaniment quickly followed. It was dedicated to Henri Chaussier, inventor of a new type of valve horn (known as the ‘Cor Chaussier’), the specific instrument for which Saint-Saëns wrote this piece. It is in one continuous movement, divided into three distinct sections: a vigorous Allegro moderato in F minor gives way to a lyrical Adagio in A flat major followed by the concluding Allegro non troppo, which quickly moves from F minor to F major and a brilliant conclusion.  

Nigel Simeone

In spite of embracing the latest technology with his pioneering film score, Saint-Saëns never came to terms with more progressive musical trends as he grew older. He could find ‘no style, logic or common sense’ in Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and was appalled by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (‘If that’s music, I’m a baboon’, he declared). Increasingly resistant to modernism, and viewed as something of a musical dinosaur, he turned instead to strict classical forms and traditional harmony, but always with beautifully-crafted results. In the last year of his life, Saint-Saëns wrote three sonatas scored for what he described to a friend as ‘rarely considered instruments’: oboe, clarinet and bassoon – and he had plans to write others for flute and cor anglais. The Bassoon Sonata, Op. 168, was the last of the three to be written, completed in June 1921 and dedicated to Léon Letellier, first bassoon of the Paris Opéra and the Société des concerts. Its three movements are a fluid and lyrical Allegro moderato, a delectable (and technically challenging) scherzo marked Allegro scherzando, and a final movement which begins with an expansive Molto adagio before a brief energetic section which brings the work to an energetic close. 

© Nigel Simeone 

As well as being a prolific and extremely successful composer, Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) was a brilliant piano virtuoso and a hugely respected teacher whose pupils included Fauré and André Messager. Both of them recalled his gifts as a musical humourist: he would often lighten the serious mood of lessons with pastiches and caricatures. This tendency found its fullest expression in Le carnaval des animaux, now one of Saint-Saëns’s most famous pieces, but originally conceived as a private entertainment. A masterly parody (lampooning, among others, Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust, Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Saint-Saëns’s own Danse macabre), it was written for a Shrove Tuesday concert on 9 March 1886 given at the home of the cellist Charles-Joseph Lebouc, with Saint-Saëns and Louis Diémer as the pianists and Paul Taffanel as the flautist. Often rather severe and earnest in public, Saint-Saëns wanted to be known as a composer of serious pieces, so he was uncertain how a wider audience might react to his ‘grand zoological fantasy’, and apart from The Swan he did not allow any of Carnaval to be published during his lifetime. Performances were usually given among friends: two weeks after the premiere, it was played by the chamber music society called ‘La Trompette’ (for which Saint-Saëns had written his Septet), and on 2 April 1886 it was given at the salon of Pauline Viardot, by special request of Franz Liszt, on what turned out to be his last visit to Paris.