Saint-Saëns’s five piano concertos bucked the trend of the French musical establishment – and, says Roger Nichols, remain a legacy to be reckoned with
It is generally accepted that French composers of the 19th and early 20th centuries were not by nature writers of symphonies and concertos. Perhaps the symphonies by Gounod and Saint-Saëns and the delightful early one by Bizet may be classed as exceptions.
But where in the repertoire now are the piano concertos of Castillon, Dubois, Godard, Diémer and Gedalge? Those of Lalo and Massenet occasionally surface, Litolff’s Fourth Concerto Symphonique had a brief period of fame some years ago, and the C minor Concerto of Pierné is certainly not negligible. But it’s a fairly meagre haul, and not notably expanded by any concertos in the 20th century until Ravel’s two of around 1930.
A guide to Saint-Saëns’s five piano concertos
Saint-Saëns’s five piano concertos need, then, to be seen in the context of this dearth, and seen as something rather extraordinary. Happily, this composer is no longer viewed as some desiccated promoter of threadbare traditions, but even so his contribution to the genre is little short of revolutionary.
One point, barely mentioned in the context of these works, is that of course they reflected the composer’s own pianism. Recordings of his playing show that he was a master of what was dubbed ‘le jeu perlé’, a style of crystalline delicacy, often with light pedalling or none, that came later to be rudely rejected by players of the German and, especially, Russian schools, where weight and brilliance were to the fore, with fingers pressing down to the key bed.
This light-fingered keyboard style had the virtue, for the composer of concertos, of lending itself to a contrast with richer, louder sounds emanating from the orchestra – which is not to say that Saint-Saëns’s piano parts are not sometimes loud, but volume never rules for very long.
Among the works that influenced him in this domain were naturally the pairs of piano concertos by Chopin, Liszt and Mendelssohn. As a boy of ten or so, Saint-Saëns had been forbidden by his teacher Camille Stamaty from presenting himself to Chopin, whether out of jealousy or because Stamaty actually felt Chopin’s influence might be dangerous.
But in any case, the paucity of the orchestra’s role in the Chopin concertos could never have satisfied Saint-Saëns; at the same time, a balance between the two forces had to be maintained, and he had no time for works in which the instruments of the orchestra ‘run in all directions like poisoned rats’.
As for Liszt, Saint-Saëns later recalled meeting him as a 17 year-old: ‘I already considered him to be a genius. Imagine my astonishment then, when I found that he far exceeded even this expectation.’ But again, the flashier moments in Liszt’s concertos bore with them the possibility of endangering the form. Mendelssohn’s influence appears mostly in the more light-hearted moments. Whatever the influences from those three predecessors, one thing is certain – these five concertos are all entirely different from each other.
Saint-Saëns’s First Concerto
The first one dates from 1858, the same year as a rather different piano concerto, Brahms’s First. Saint-Saëns later recalled that it had been inspired by the Forest of Fontainebleau where he and his friends used to picnic, which explains the open-air horn calls that begin the work – very unusually for a concerto.
This beginning is then leavened by groups of paired notes (the ballerina enters en pointe) so that the movement can partly draw its energy from the contrast. The repeats of the horn calls at crucial moments in the structure are all the more effective because the horns have nothing else of note to contribute.
The slow movement, in which the orchestra is reduced to solo clarinet and bassoon with strings, begins solemnly, but is then invaded by piano cadenzas mostly without barlines whose figuration, writer Philip Borg-Wheeler suggests, ‘anticipate Ravel by a good 50 years’.
The finale presents a good humoured, lively conversation between piano and full orchestra, the humour extending to the piano’s spoof beginning to a hymn which immediately turns into something far more secular. This is the Saint-Saëns who, a few years later, would dance a little ballet number in private with Tchaikovsky, the Frenchman as Galatea to the Russian’s Pygmalion. The horn calls return to announce the final peroration – nothing as serious as a cyclic appearance on the lines of Liszt, more a perky ‘Remember us?’.
Saint-Saëns’s Second Concerto
The Second Concerto, for some time in the composer’s head then written down over a mere 17 days in 1868, has for years been the most popular, and it’s not hard to see why. The long, freely dramatic piano solo that opens it originated from one of the composer’s organ improvisations in the style of Bach, and provides a comfortable, familiar entrance to the work.
The piano theme that follows was borrowed from a choral ‘Tantum ergo’ by the composer’s pupil Fauré with the unflattering explanation, ‘Give it to me and I’ll make something of it!’ (Their friendship nonetheless lasted some 60 years until Saint-Saëns’s death in 1921.) The second theme, marked dolce cantabile, is likewise familiar, this time referring back to the style of Chopin’s Nocturnes, then developed through ‘perlé’ figuration to more majestic utterance.
The scherzo, the score of which is peppered with the instruction leggieramente, may or may not have been inspired by that in Litolff’s Fourth Concerto Symphonique of 1852, but in any case it’s a locus classicus for the use of le jeu perlé.
It needs saying that this is very much imperilled by the widespread habit of playing the second tune more slowly and with heavy, galumphing accents: notice should be taken of the exemplary 1957 recording by Jeanne-Marie Darré, whose performances of the concertos as a teenager were approved by the composer and who allows herself no such licence.
The finale, the climax of the accelerando operating over the three movements, is a wild tarantella, whose demonic progress is barely halted by a prolonged dose of piano trills. Has the composer lost the plot here? A final tease comes in the concluding bars where orchestral crashes arrive on the wrong beats. But fear not… All is under control.
Liszt was warm in his praise of the Second Concerto, noting that it showed ‘the pianistic effects to good advantage without sacrificing any compositional principles, a basic rule in this genre.’
Saint-Saëns’s Third Concerto
It seems likely that this response immediately encouraged Saint-Saëns to try his hand at the medium again, but as usual there could be no question of rewriting a success: the Third Concerto of 1869 lacks the crowd-pleasing attributes of its predecessor, though in 1906 Fauré wrote that it ‘especially deserves to emerge from the shadows where it has been left to slumber’.
At first, the opening E flat piano arpeggios (borrowed from Wagner’s Das Rheingold?) seem to be going nowhere. Then there are two cadenzas in the first movement, where such things are not normally found. The first performance, given by the composer at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1869, was greeted with hostility, driven also by a technically inventive start to the slow movement – another of his teases, but one ill adapted to a German audience, for many of whom concertos were matters of serious import, so that afterwards parties pro and con resorted to punch-ups in the corridors.
The finale is less problematic, with its upward leaps followed by small downward steps possibly echoing the finale of Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto in the same key. Even so, one French critic of the first performance claimed that the work foretold the death of the concerto as a genre, a position that may, as Borg-Wheeler suggests, have stemmed from the importance of the orchestral contribution, in accordance with Liszt’s ‘compositional principles’.
Saint-Saëns’s Fourth Concerto
With his Fourth Concerto in C minor of 1875, Saint-Saëns seems to have been set on repairing the damage inflicted by its predecessor. It begins not with the outdoor horn calls of No. 1, nor with the piano solos of Nos 2 and 3, but with a theme of two regular eight-bar segments, each precisely echoed by the pianist. No listeners, even in Germany, could complain about this Classical structure: immediately we know where we are.
As to the theme’s emotive character, was the opening of Mozart’s C minor Concerto K491 perhaps lurking in the background? Saint-Saëns played a Mozart concerto in his first public concert, in Paris in 1846, and did so again in Gloucester at the Three Choirs Festival 67 years later. When the piano then breaks into virtuosic figuration, this is still based on the theme, thus combining the decorative with the substantial, with the result that for the first three minutes or so of the movement we hear nothing but the theme.
Also Classical is the arrangement of the five sections of the work into fast-slow-fast-slow-fast. Against this pattern is set the Romantic, Lisztian one of repetition across the movements: the woodwind chorale of the second section reappears in the last one as the main theme, again of eight bars, though now instead of the orchestra being echoed by the piano, the pattern is reversed.
Altogether, as musicologist Michael Stegemann claims, the concerto represents a ‘perfect union of Classic intellect with the structural freedom of Romanticism’. Comparison of the recordings by Darré and Alfred Cortot, demonstrating Classical and Romantic approaches respectively, proves that the work can flourish in both environments.
Between that concerto of 1875 and the Fifth of 1896, much had changed in the French musical world, most notably the arrival of Wagnermania. Saint-Saëns, while accepting that Wagner was a genius, refused to regard the German as all-conquering, and the Fifth Concerto suggests other influences were equally valid. It has to be said that, for him, Debussy was not one of these, the two composers waging a subterranean duel that ended only with Debussy’s death in 1918.
Saint-Saëns’s Fifth Concerto
Even so, Saint-Saëns was happy to include in the Fifth’s last two movements at least a couple of ‘Impressionist’ elements. The first movement shows his peerless ability to bend Classical elements to his own ends: in structure it retains some traces of sonata form, but its ten sections leave the impression rather of a fantasia, massive chordal passages being contrasted with those of jeu perlé.
He had made sketches for this movement in 1894, but the last two movements date entirely from his stay in Egypt in the winter of ’95 and spring of ’96. The central movement’s Impressionist element is the croaking of frogs, while a specifically Egyptian one is a Nubian love song he heard sung by boatmen on the Nile. Impressionism assumes a more aggressive tone in the finale, with what the composer described as the thumps of a ship’s propeller.
The composer premiered this concerto on 2 June 1896 in a concert celebrating the 50th anniversary of his first public appearance as a pianist.
Why did Saint-Saëns only compose five piano concertos?
He lived for another 25 years, but seemingly without any thoughts of a sixth concerto. Maybe he simply felt he had said all he had to say in the genre, or perhaps he thought it bad form to outdo Beethoven.
It is also possible that he was the victim of French musical politics. The 1896 concert more or less coincided with the foundation in Paris of the Schola Cantorum, a conservatory directed by Vincent d’Indy to promote the values of César Franck, among which religion figured largely.
The concerto as a genre, with its embrace of virtuosity as a main ingredient, was increasingly regarded as vulgar, superficial and self-promoting – by 1904, as the pianist Marguerite Long later remembered, concerto performances in Paris were regularly being disrupted by shouts and whistles.
It is therefore quite conceivable that Saint-Saëns, on the brink of his eighth decade, preferred not to put his head in that particular noose. Certainly, if the five concertos we possess provoke any shouts these days, they are subsequent ones of ‘bravo’.
Five of the best recordings of piano concertos
Piano Concerto No. 1
Louis Lortie (piano)
Lortie, with prompt support from Edward Gardner and the BBC Philharmonic, emphasises the fun of this early concerto. (Chandos CHAN 20031)
Piano Concerto No. 2
Jeanne-Marie Darré (piano)
In a masterclass for the jeu perlé, Darré, with Louis Fourestier and the French National Radio Orchestra, sparkles inimitably. (Warner Classics 9029635384)
Piano Concerto No. 3
Jean-Philippe Collard (piano)
In arguably the most challenging of the five, this is a bravura account from Collard and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under André Previn, with a second movement of almost Brucknerian spaciousness. (Warner Classics 586 2452)
Piano Concerto No. 4
Stephen Hough (piano)
From the cautious tiptoing of the opening bars to its radiant finish, Stephen Hough’s performance with the CBSO under Sakari Oramo combines thrilling pianism with Gallic elegance. (Hyperion CDA 67331-2)
Piano Concerto No. 5
Bertrand Chamayou (piano)
In the company of the Orchestre National de France and Emmanuel Krivine, Chamayou conjures up vivid Nile vistas in the evocative middle movement and dances with sheer delight in the finale. (Erato 9029563426)