Saint Saens - Hardcover

Rees, B

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1856197735 ISBN 13: 9781856197731

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 1999

Synopsis

Saint Saens has been variously described as 'The childhood of Mozart, the old-ag of Titan' and 'as gifted as Voltaire with unexpectedness and diversity. ' Saint Seans was the greatest among the many great organists of 19th century France, and composer of the witty zoology, THE CARNIVAL OF THE ANIMALS (including 'The Swan'), as well as DANSE MACABRE and the opera SAMSON AND DELILAH. Numbered among his best-loved works are his famous organ concerto, second piano concerto and first cello concerto, as well as his 'romances' for violin and cello. He supposrted both Faure and Debussy, and championed innovations in symphonic and chamber music. He introduced the symphonic poem, and was one of the first to blend folk-song from rural France and music from the Arab world into the classical tradition. He lived in colourful times and his private life was combative, tragic and surrounded by rumour.

About this title

Review

Reputations are made and altered whimsically and sometimes unfairly; we remember composer Camille Saint-Saens more for the frivolous Carnival of the Animalswhich he reserved as much for private performance as for the philosophical cantatas, monumental organ works and grand operas on which his sense of himself depended. He was a delicate child prodigy, whose performances of Mozart were much admired; he was a friend and advocate of Liszt who lived to denounce Debussy, Strauss and Stravinsky as prophets of musical chaos.

Brian Rees's thorough Life tries ill-judgedly to defend those areas of Saint-Saens' music criticism which are indefensibly thoughtless; it is the hard-won pluralism of late 20th-century music which makes us value Saint-Saens once again, rather than any attempt to turn the clock back to 1870 or 1910. He was a superb miniaturist, a gifted virtuoso with a sense of what others might perform--Rees is good on his generosity and commitment to keeping the music of the past fresh, while making innovations that both public and performers could follow. His account of Saint-Saens in his time is intelligent; this is music which had the intellectual strength, as well as the occasional superficial pretentiousness, of his bourgeois republicanism. --Roz Kaveney

About the Author

Brian Rees was born in Sydney, Australia, but educated at the Bede Grammar School, Sunderland. He was a Scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, and as a History Master at Eton College, he collaborated with the satirist, the late John Wells, on a musical version of Aristophanes' Birds. He was Headmaster of three public schools: Merchant Taylors', Charterhouse, and Rugby, and is the biographer of Sir Edward German and editor of the papers of Sir Robert Birley.

Edition details

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1856197735
• ISBN 13: 9781856197731
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496