A Season Opener for the Ages

Camille Saint-Saëns’ fifth birthday present from his great-aunt Charlotte was a full orchestral score of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Under ordinary circumstances, we might wonder if Auntie’s ambitions had gotten the better of her, or if perhaps she had gone a bit off her rocker. But these were not ordinary circumstances, this was no ordinary five year old, and the gift was just the thing for little Camille, who happily spent part of each day drinking in the rich score. He had been composing for the past year and a half, after all, was already learning Haydn and Mozart sonatas, and had nothing but disdain for tickety-tock kid’s music.  

Neither Mozart nor Mendelssohn had anything on Saint-Saëns in the prodigy department. He was the most amazing of them all, and like his illustrious predecessors, he was also intellectually gifted, fascinated by… well, just about everything. Although he became an utterly dazzling pianist, he made his primary living as the organist of La Madeleine, the official church of the French Empire. He was a success by any conceivable standard.

As a composer Saint-Saëns never quite broke through to the absolute top rank where he would seem to belong, despite a bevy of superlative works that have remained solidly in the repertory. A near-obsessive focus on technique appears to be the culprit, in that it rendered him reluctant to plumb the depths of his musical psyche. “The artist who does not feel completely satisfied by elegant lines, by harmonious colors, and by a beautiful succession of chords does not understand the art of music,” he wrote. As he aged he became increasingly unwilling to stretch past his self-defined boundaries, while French music was undergoing the exponential advances brought about by Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel. Saint-Saëns could have made the effort to understand them, but he didn’t.

Nowadays we’re taking a good hard second look at this supposed relic of La Belle Époque, and what’s emerging is a vastly more interesting and compelling composer than previously thought. Clearly his major works bear comparison with the finest achievements of the late Romantic. Violin Concerto No. 3 in B Minor, Op. 61, written in 1880 for violinist-composer Pablo de Sarasate, presents Saint-Saëns at his considerable best. Not only is it expertly crafted (as we would expect), but it also manifests a subtle but unmistakable vein of passion, contrary to those scurrilous charges that all of Saint-Saëns’ music lacks heat. (Just consider the palpitating aria “Mon coeur ouvre à ta voix” in Samson et Dalila. The thing melts the paint off the walls.)

The big-boned opening movement contains all the ingredients for a truly effective concerto: a powerfully etched primary theme, a sweetly lyrical secondary theme, rock-solid structure, and an unexpected restraint regarding empty-calorie pyrotechnics from the soloist. Which is not to say that it’s kids’ stuff; the soloist must be fully up to snuff vis à vis such techniques as double stops and high-speed arpeggios. But those are enhancements, not fundamental content. The second-place Andantino quasi allegretto is the stuff that dreams are made on – a captivating barcarolle, a.k.a. Venetian gondola song, redolent with moonlight on the Grand Canal. It ends with a bewitching duet between violin and clarinet, definitely not your usual combination.

In most Saint-Saëns concertos, the finale is a dizzy romp filled with virtuoso fireworks, but here he provides a full-weight counterbalance to the opening movement. After a recitative-like introduction in the solo violin, a robust primary theme with a whiff of Spanish flair is contrasted with a reserved, chorale-like secondary idea. Saint-Saëns employs the full strength of his superb craftsmanship to developing and expanding those materials, before heating it all up to end the concerto in a white-hot bravura display.

© Scott Foglesong

Georges Bizet went to his grave believing that Carmen was a flop. And so it was – at least as of its initial run at the Opéra-Comique, where it was greeted with stony silence at the March 3, 1875 premiere. If Bizet’s coronary arteries had held out just a little longer, he would have seen his masterpiece vindicated when the Vienna staging on October 23, 1875 was a smash hit. But it was not to be, and Bizet died of a heart attack at a tragically young 36.

Alphonse Daudet’s play L’Arlésienne (The Girl from Arles) was premiered on October 1, 1872 with Bizet’s incidental music, which ranged from brief sound-bite cues to more substantial fare. It closed after a mere 19 performances. Daudet griped that “It was a resounding flop amid the prettiest music in the world, silk and velvet costumes, and comic-opera scenery.” Fortunately, that prettiest music in the world lives on via the two orchestral suites drawn from the score, the first by Bizet himself in 1872 and the most frequently performed. (The second suite was assembled in 1879 by the Choudens publishing house.)

Bizet chose wisely for the first suite. The four selections together comprise what is in effect a picturesque short symphony, starting with a quite substantial Prelude that begins with a distinctly strutting march that tails off into wistful, yearning lyricism with even a bit of foreboding. But the second-place Minuetto dispels even the slightest hints of gloom or unease; perky and toe-tappy, it makes wonderful use of the harp in its contrasting ‘trio’ section, its soaring melody passed between strings and winds.

In third place comes a heartfelt and touching Adagietto, a wonderful reminder that Bizet was one of the all-time supreme melodists. (How many terrific tunes are there in Carmen, anyway?) Then comes the Carillon, a three-part affair in which the main reprise trips the light fantastic while the central contrasting episode calms down a bit while retaining its overall lilt. 

© Scott Foglesong

It was 1909 and Sergei Diaghilev was in a bind. That wasn’t unusual. The flamboyant impresario of the Paris-based Ballets Russes thought big. He needed a steady stream of hits to pay for his lavish productions and even more lavish lifestyle, not to mention his roster of high-voltage dancers. He could have churned out a few reliable chestnuts to fill the seats and balance the books. But Diaghilev didn’t do retreads. He wanted it exciting, innovative, and above all, brand new.  

For his 1910 season Diaghilev planned a ballet based on Alexander Afanasyev’s fairy tale The Firebird with a new score by Nikolai Tcherepnin. But Tcherepnin turned him down. Then Diaghilev offered the job to Anatoly Liadov, who accepted but did little except putter, fritter, and procrastinate. Thus the aforementioned bind. With disaster looming, Diaghilev fired Liadov and decided to take a chance on a kid he had hanging around. Recently he had added the youngster – a former student of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s – to a team charged with refreshing Glazunov’s orchestrations of Chopin piano pieces for the company’s 1909 Les Sylphides. It wasn’t much of an assignment, and no doubt Diaghilev figured that if the kid blew it, the other composers could take up the slack.  

But the kid didn’t blow it, so Diaghilev gave him The Firebird. That little gamble on an untried young composer paid off spectacularly. At its 1910 premiere The Firebird knocked ‘em dead, established the Ballets Russes as a primal force in modern ballet, and launched Igor Stravinsky into overnight celebrity. Two more ballets soon followed – Petrushka in 1911 and the epochal The Rite of Spring in 1913. Those three scores ensured Stravinsky’s elevation to the topmost rank of the world’s composers, a position he would hold for half a century.  

The ballet’s instant success is no mystery. The story has it all: a prince charming, a magical ‘firebird’ for his love interest, an evil wizard-like villain, a troupe of winsome dancing maidens, an enchanted egg, assorted monsters, and the requisite happy ending. But when all is said and done it’s just your basic fairy tale. Stravinsky’s score makes all the difference. Steeped in Ukrainian and Russian folk music and blessed with an exceptionally vivid orchestration, The Firebird employs short melodies similar to the leitmotifs of Wagnerian opera to accompany the various characters and locales, such as the magic garden, the evil Katschei and his minions, and the wondrous Firebird herself. Stravinsky mined his score for three concert suites, of which the 1919 version is easily the most popular, containing particularly memorable highlights such as the exquisite lullaby, Katschei’s Infernal Dance, and the radiant sunrise that concludes the ballet.  

In his sunset years Stravinsky was both grateful for and exasperated by The Firebird’s continued popularity. After all, he had evolved, and it hadn’t. But there it was. In the early 1960s he was approached by a star-struck matron who gushed that of all his works, she liked The Firebird best.  

Stravinsky replied: “What a lovely hat you’re wearing.” 

© Scott Foglesong