Parisian Characters: Camille Saint-Saëns
"He is a genius, says an
old legend, but he is a malign genius. King of the spirits of
music and song, he knows all their secrets, and even those, when
we want to get close to him, of escaping to far off places,
always impossible to hold on to." At the time of Ascanio,
while we sought him in France, he was travelling around the
Canaries. This evening, hiding behind the name of a charming,
deceased musician who he is about to bring back to life, he will
steal away once more from our homage. Will he now escape the
clutches of my thoughts as they try to hold him, and will he slip
through my fingers like a vanishing sprite, leaving nothing but
"thin air"?
A genius inspired by music, endowed with a deep
sensibility - you have only, without speaking of the lyre and the
harp, to glance through Ascanio, the lyre, or Samson
et Delilah, the harp, - he prefers, like a Gustave Flaubert,
like an Anatole France, to hide behind his riches, behind his
skill as a great composer. Because nothing seems to bespeak this
famous opinion more fittingly: "All the intellectual
beauties to be found in a fine style, all the aspects with which
it is composed are as many truths... more precious perhaps than
those which make up the core of a conversation".
He understands how to rejuvenate a formula by
using it in its old sense, and to take each musical phrase, so to
speak, in its etymological sense. He borrows their charms from
Beethoven and Bach, or rather, as in one of his most beautiful
transcriptions, bestows on Bach charms which were not his before.
To paint in a harmony, to dramatize as a fugue,
to render eternal through style; to make use of so much creative
invention and genius by taking one scale rather than another to
outline a melody, makes it glide all around an idea, like ancient
ivy that preserves a monument from falling down; to thus confer
through archaism his noble credentials to modernity; to give bit
by bit to a common cause the value of an original imagination the
masterly, singular, sublime quality of expression, to create from
an archaism a flash of wit, a general idea, a summary of
civilisation, the essence of a race, a shaft of genius burst out
of the instrument or fallen from the sky; to give an English
accent to a prelude, the prelude to Henri VIII, a
matrimonial character to a scene, the duo between Anne Boleyn and
Henry VIII, a Neapolitan light to a chorus, Quand vous
chantez Scozzone, make fun of art in a march, Suite
algérienne, transpose the style of a Renaissance goldsmith
into an opera, Ascanio; finally, to make a religion be
understood, to abhor a tyrant, to pity a woman, to see Eros, to
understand the Eternal, to make use of his resources not even of
music but of the language of music, to amuse himself like a god
and like the devil by taking up the world into music, music into
harmony, all the expansiveness of the organ from the slightness
of the piano, these are the expert, disconcerting, diabolic and
divine games of this musical humanist who at every moment
instills bursts of inventiveness and genius into what seemed to
be a field bound by tradition, imitation and knowledge.
Article appeared
in Le Gaulois, 14 December 1895.