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Camille Saint-Saëns The Swan Intermediate Piano Solo sheet music, Noten, partitura partition, 楽譜
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Charles Camille Saint-Saëns
(Paris, 1835—Algiers, 1921) French composer, organist, conductor, and pianist of the Romantic era. His best-known works include Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (1863), the Second Piano Concerto (1868), the First Cello Concerto (1872), Danse macabre (1874), the opera Samson and Delilah (1877), the Third Violin Concerto (1880), the Third (“Organ”) Symphony (1886) and The Carnival of the Animals (1886).
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He lost his father when he had only four months, and received the first musical training from his mother and an aunt; He was so early in such an aspect that at five he could already compose for the piano. He was then entrusted to the guide of the pianist Stamaty, who presented him as a small piano virtuoso in 1845.
Charles Camille Saint-Saëns studied organ with Benoit and composition with Halévy. In 1852, he won a contest with an ODE à Sainte Cécile ; In 1853 he was appointed organist by St. Merry, and in 1857 he reached the same position at Madeleine.
In 1861, he obtained the piano chair of the Nievedermeyer school. His first play, Le Timbre d’Art (1864-1865), could not reach the scene.
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Battle and energetic temperament, founded in 1871 the Société Nationale de Musique, specifically oriented to the promotion of the execution and dissemination of the new French music. The initiative, to which, among others, Édouard Lalo, César Franck, Georges Bizet and Gabriel Fauré adhered, had great importance in its aspects of propulsion and organization.
In 1872, Camille Saint-Saëns could finally see his scenic aspirations rewarded: even with little success, he represented his work La princesse jaune in the Opéra Comique.
At this same time, some of the most important symphonic productions of Camille Saint-Saëns were composed: the poems Le Rouet d’Omphale (1871), Phaéton (1873), Dance Macabre (1874) and La jeunesse d’Hercule (1877), in which an intense influence of the analogous works of Franz Liszt can be perceived. And the concerts second, third and fourth for piano, in G minor (1868), E Flat Major (1869) and C Minor (1875), whose pianistic virtuosity reaches a high level of perfection in terms of the form and the structure, and according to imposing and great schemes, but generally shallow.
Saint-Saëns held only one teaching post, at the École de Musique Classique et Religieuse in Paris, and remained there for less than five years. It was nevertheless important in the development of French music: his students included Gabriel Fauré, among whose own later pupils was Maurice Ravel. Both of them were strongly influenced by Saint-Saëns, whom they revered as a genius.
The indefatigable creative activity of Saint-Saëns covers all possible instrumental and vocal combinations. However, his great aspiration was always theater. Liszt, his great admirer, who promoted in Weimar the representation of Samson and Dalila , held on December 2, 1877; This is the best work of the musician, both for his vigorous approach and by the force of the choirs and the descriptive amplitude of the environment, and is the only one even represented today.
After that period, Camille Saint-Saëns composed with an academic and formal value, even within a careful construction dignity, for instance: Henri VIII (1883), Ascanio (1890), Léjanire (1898), the two concerts for violin in C major and B minor (1879 and 1880), the symphony in C minor with organ and two pianos (1886), and the Piano concerto no. 5 (1895), or merely descriptive and pleasant, as in the “Zoological Fantasy”, The Carnival of the Animals (1886).
During the last years of his life Camille Saint-Saëns was increasingly interested in Arab popular music; but its production did not go, in this area, beyond a generic affected Orientalism. Stroked by honor and fame, he ended almost suddenly his days in Algiers, where he had spent the wintertime for some years, shortly after World War I, at which he was among the most ardent nationalists. Notable are also the articles he published during his life in various newspapers and magazines, gathered in the volumes of Harmonie et Mélodie , Portraits et souvenirs and, singularly, École Buissonnière.
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In the early years of the 20th century, the anonymous author of the article on Saint-Saëns in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians wrote:
Saint-Saëns is a consummate master of composition, and no one possesses a more profound knowledge than he does of the secrets and resources of the art; but the creative faculty does not keep pace with the technical skill of the workman. His incomparable talent for orchestration enables him to give relief to ideas which would otherwise be crude and mediocre in themselves ... his works are on the one hand not frivolous enough to become popular in the widest sense, nor on the other do they take hold of the public by that sincerity and warmth of feeling which is so convincing.Although a keen modernist in his youth, Saint-Saëns was always deeply aware of the great masters of the past. In a profile of him written to mark his eightieth birthday, the critic D C Parker wrote, “That Saint-Saëns knows Rameau … Bach and Handel, Haydn and Mozart, must be manifest to all who are familiar with his writings. His love for the classical giants and his sympathy with them form, so to speak, the foundation of his art.”
Less attracted than some of his French contemporaries to the continuous stream of music popularized by Wagner, Saint-Saëns often favored self-contained melodies. Though they are frequently, in Ratner’s phrase, “supple and pliable”, more often than not they are constructed in three- or four-bar sections, and the “phrase pattern AABB is characteristic”.
An occasional tendency to neoclassicism, influenced by his study of French baroque music, is in contrast with the colorful orchestral music more widely identified with him. Grove observes that he makes his effects more by characterful harmony and rhythms than by extravagant scoring. In both of those areas of his craft, he was normally content with the familiar. Rhythmically, he inclined to standard double, triple or compound meters (although Grove points to a 5/4 passage in the Piano Trio and another in 7/4 in the Polonaise for two pianos). From his time at the Conservatoire he was a master of counterpoint; contrapuntal passages crop up, seemingly naturally, in many of his works.