Justice for Camille
Joshua Levine 06.30.08
Rare is the composer who makes good music and good money. Nineteenth-century polymath Camille Saint-Saëns made both.
French composer Camille Saint-Saëns (1835--1921) foresaw his fate and tried vainly to forestall it: In 1886 he composed "Carnival of the Animals," a suite of miniatures so delightful and jaunty that today they are used for ring tones and as background music for commercials and cartoons. Fearing they would undermine his reputation as a serious artist, Saint-Saëns forbade their publication until after his death.
That he could so blithely squelch "Carnival" said two things about his status: He was prolific, having plenty of other works to represent him, and he was prosperous, thus able to forgo the revenue these ditties would have brought. His commercial success had won him entry into what is still one of the world's most exclusive clubs: composers who can pay their bills.
Carl Davis, a present-day composer for television, movies and the symphony, says composers today have it easy by comparison: They can sell their work in many more formats than could Saint-Saëns. Ascap monitors how often works get played and makes sure artists get paid royalties. In Hollywood, a composer can earn a six-figure fee for scoring a big-budget production. John Williams (Jaws, Star Wars, Harry Potter) reportedly gets $1 million a picture.
But artists writing classical music for concert performance--"ivory tower" composers, Davis calls them--have it tougher. They can spend a year or two or three working on a symphony, only to see it die after its premiere. That leaves them with only what the commissioning orchestra paid--a one-time fee of anywhere from $5,000 to $100,000, depending on the artist's reputation. "The hardest thing to do," says Davis, "is have a career as a purely classical composer."
In Quarter Notes and Bank Notes: The Economics of Music Composition in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Harvard professor Frederic M. Scherer writes that few famous composers earned even a bourgeois living. A group of the 23 highest-paid composers, ranked by the size of the estates they left, shows Rossini to have been by far the richest, with an estate worth, in today's dollars, $9 million. Clementi, Handel, Paganini, Verdi and Brahms come next. Mozart, a big earner, was also a big spender. He died broke.
Saint-Saëns' wealth wasn't of this same order, says Scherer, but he did not starve. In his 30s, the 3,000 francs a year (about $11,500 today) he earned from being organist at the Church of the Madeleine, plus income from composing, teaching and writing, allowed him to live comfortably. In 1877, when he was 42, he received a bequest of 100,000 francs from an admirer, which freed him to devote time to composing. He entered into a series of contracts with the publisher Durand, which Brian Rees in his Camille Saint-Saëns: A Life (Chatto & Windus, 1999) calls especially advantageous. The last of these paid 4,000 francs a year. Saint-Saëns lived comfortably in hotels and traveled a great deal, always with a manservant.
He wrote operas, symphonies, concertos, chorales--works of every genre. He composed the first film score, the national anthem of Uruguay and a cantata celebrating the invention of electricity. So facile was he, and so prolific, that critics, finding him hard to pigeonhole, dismissed him as an ingenious lightweight. Though certain of his works are standards of the modern repertoire--"Carnival," the Symphony No. 3 (a.k.a the Organ Symphony), the opera Samson et Dalila and the catchy, kitschy "Danse Macabre"--most of Saint-Saëns' oeuvre has languished since his death.
That's now changing. Recent years have seen Saint-Saëns winning new adherents. "He was an amazing man and a wonderful composer," says cellist Steven Isserlis, who has recently recorded most of the composer's large repertoire for the cello. "It annoys me when people are condescending to Saint-Saëns. They're a bunch of sheep, and once one of them starts bleating, the others follow." (For a discography of new and noteworthy cds, including one where Saint-Saëns himself is at the keyboard, visit forbes.com/extra, where you can also listen to some of his works.)
Saint-Saëns learned to read and write at 3, conquered Latin at 7 and performed Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 15 at the Salle Pleyel at age 10. (As an encore, he offered to play any of Beethoven's 32 sonatas from memory.) At 16, he wrote his first symphony. Franz Liszt, himself a famous organist, considered Saint-Saëns to be Europe's finest. Said fellow composer Hector Berlioz, "He knows everything. But he lacks inexperience."
It wasn't just music at which he excelled. Saint-Saëns wrote articles on acoustics, the decoration of ancient Roman theaters, philosophy and astronomy (he had a telescope built to his own specifications). He published poetry. The plays he wrote were publicly performed (albeit not worth reviving). On the last evening of his life, he played dominoes and won.
The charge that he was too clever by half hounded him to his grave, and, while he lived, his cranky temperament didn't win him many friends. He deserted his wife after the early death of their two children. In response to rumors about his sexuality, he once responded angrily, "I am not a homosexual; I am a pederast!" It is said that on the occasion of his 83rd birthday party, half the people in the room weren't speaking to him.
As an artist, he enjoyed being out of step with many of the fashions of his day. At a time when much of Europe had fallen under the heavy-handed sway of Wagner, Saint-Saëns retained all his French sparkle, for good and ill. He stressed the cool professional pleasures of craft, having little sympathy for the romantic artist in the throes of passion. "Art is intended to create beauty and character," he wrote. "Feeling only comes afterward, and art can very well do without it."
What you get from him at all times is elegance, high polish and absolute mastery of form and line. "He was neoclassic before there was neoclassic," says pianist Stephen Hough. "You never feel there were beads of sweat on his face when he wrote."
Hough's recordings of Saint-Saëns' complete music for piano and orchestra are a good place to start to make your acquaintance of the composer. The fourth and fifth piano concertos are well known, but nearly everything else on these two discs yields unfamiliar pleasure.
Even the fifth concerto illustrates some of the ways Saint-Saëns is more daring and offbeat than he gets credit for: In the middle movement, there's a solo passage where two hands play virtually the same line three octaves apart--an eerie, plinky effect that makes the piano sound almost like an Indonesian gamelan. It is both ingenious and beautiful. "He's a chameleon," says cellist Isserlis. "You can't say when you hear something on the radio, 'Oh, that's Camille Saint-Saëns.'"
New, Recommended
Saint-Saëns: Organ Music (Hyperion Records CDA67713, due for release in July). Andrew-John Smith, using original registrations, plays the same instrument Saint-Saëns himself played for 20 years at Paris' Church of the Madeleine.
- posted on 06/18/2008
圣桑多材多艺,早年曾涉猎地质学、考古学、植物学及昆虫学,他亦是一为数学专家。后来,除了作曲、演奏及撰写音乐评论外,他还与欧洲知名的科学家进行讨论,以及撰写关于声学、巫术科学、罗马剧院装修及古老乐器的学术文章。他曾编写一份哲学着作,名为Problèmes et Mystères,讲述科学及艺术会取代宗教;圣桑悲观及无神的理念,预示了存在主义的出现。他的其他学术成就还包括一册名为Rimes familières的诗集,及一份十分成功的滑稽剧本,名为La Crampe des écrivains。圣桑亦是法国天文学会的成员;他还教导海市蜃楼,又懂得按自己的要求制作望远镜,以及按如日食般的天文现象来计划演奏会。
1870年,圣桑参予了国家防卫军,并参加了普法战争。短短半年的战争,令圣桑心中留了下了一道永不磨灭的疤痕。1871年,圣桑与Romain Bussine成立国家音乐社团组织,借此推广新的法国音乐。巴黎公社瓦解后,圣桑以社团组织主席身分,公开首演社团成员的作品,包括佛瑞、塞扎尔·弗兰克、拉罗及他本人的作品,令他成为塑造法国音乐将来的重要人物。
1875年,圣桑与Marie-Laure Truffot结婚并育有两名孩子,但不幸于1878年先后逝世。三年后圣桑离开了妻子,然二人并无正式离婚。据说圣桑后来牵涉入同性恋的关系中,由于他曾于公开场合被受指责,他竟以自己有娈童癖为反驳。(法:Je ne suis pas homosexuel, je suis pédéraste!;中译:我不是同性恋,我是娈童者!)
Please paste HTML code and press Enter.
(c) 2010 Maya Chilam Foundation