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Updated: June 1, 2025
From this arise the common faults and failings in our music. It has remained a luxurious art; it has not become, like German music, the poetical expression of the people's thought. To bring this about we should need a combination of conditions that are very rare in France; though such conditions went to the making of Camille Saint-Saëns.
It is an art of peculiar sensitiveness, more delicately expressive than that of Wagner; not satisfying itself with the modern tonality, but going back to old modes a rebel, as M. Saint-Saëns remarks, to the polyphony which had governed music since Bach's day, and which is perhaps, after all, "a heresy destined to disappear."
Besides, he has always been too much of a Frenchman. Sometimes Saint-Saëns reminds me of one of our eighteenth-century writers. Not a writer of the Encyclopédie, nor one of Rousseau's camp, but rather of Voltaire's school.
Aside from the general charm of his art, Saint-Saëns found in the symphonic poem his one special form, so that it seemed Liszt had created it less for himself than for his French successor. A fine reserve of poetic temper saved him from hysterical excess. He never lost the music in the story, disdaining the mere rude graphic stroke; in his dramatic symbols a musical charm is ever commingled.
Early neglect of music by the Exposition management remedied by the appointment of George W. Stewart, of Boston, as manager Engagements of Camille Saint-Saens and the Boston Symphony Orchestra the musical events of the summer Original compositions by the French master Sousa and his great band Other notable bands Lemare's organ concerts- Splendid choral performances by famous organizations A half-million for music.
Here and there, a composer such as Bizet and M. Saint-Saëns, or M. d'Indy and his disciples will build up symphonies and rhapsodies and very difficult pieces for the piano on the popular airs of Auvergne, Provence, or the Cevennes; but that is only a whim of theirs, a little ingenious pastime for clever artists, such as the Flemish masters of the fifteenth century indulged in when they decorated popular airs with polyphonic elaborations.
Camille Saint-Saëns, without doubt the most original and intellectual modern French composer, who at sixty-seven years of age is still in the midst of his activity, and who has made his own the spirit of the classic composers, owes to the symphonic poem a great part of his reputation, and has also written symphonies of great value.
After having been conductor for the Société des jeunes artistes du Conservatoire since 1851, in the Salle Herz, he founded, in 1861, at the Cirque d'Hiver, with the financial support of a rich moneylender, the first Concerts populaires de musique classique. Unhappily, says M. Saint-Saëns, Pasdeloup, even up to 1870, made an almost exclusive selection of German classical works.
The word, "friendship" sat down beside him when the futile meeting was disbanded and all words were sent home; and as it sat there, it transformed itself into human form. "Are you familiar with Camille Saint-Saens his Macabre Dance?" said the word.
And whereas Saint-Saëns' style is over-smooth and glacial, a sort of musical counterpart of the sculpture of a Canova or a Thorwaldsen, Franck's is subtle, mottled, rich, full of the play of light and shadow.
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