Piano Concerto No. 2

Camille Saint-Saëns was born in Paris on October 9, 1835, and died in Algiers on December 16, 1921. He composed his Piano Concerto No. 2 in Paris in April and May 1868, and played the solo part in the first performance on December 13 that year at a Concert Populaire in the Salle Pleyel, Paris, with Anton Rubinstein conducting.

In addition to the solo piano, the score of Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 2 calls for an orchestra of two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses). The last movement includes three notes for (optional) cymbals. The duration is about 23 minutes.

If Saint-Saëns had been just a pianist, he would have been as famous and as acclaimed as Anton Rubinstein, Leschetizky, Paderewski, or any other lion of the age. His piano concertos, all of which he played himself, provide scintillating evidence of his astonishing technique both in weight and nimbleness. Yet playing the piano was only one of many activities, not all of them concerned with music, that consumed him over a very long life. He was an immensely productive composer, producing music “as an apple-tree bears apples,” as he described it himself. No genre of music was untouched: operas, symphonies, concertos, tone poems, chamber music, songs, choral music, all in abundance; even a film score, one of the first ever composed. For many years he was organist at the Madeleine church in Paris; he conducted frequently; he wrote articles for the press and published half a dozen books; he wrote poetry and plays; he took a close interest in astronomy, archaeology, philosophy, and classical literature; he spoke many languages and traveled all over Europe giving concerts, including a series of all of Mozart’s piano concertos in London; he went to Scandinavia, Russia, Indochina, and Uruguay; he was involved in the whole spectrum of music-making in France for all of his career, and was a prime mover in the Société Nationale de Musique. His tastes ranged effortlessly from Wagner to the Baroque, and the composers he most admired were Mozart, Rameau, Gluck, Schumann, Berlioz, and Liszt. He was a modernist and a reactionary at the same time, an atheist who composed a huge quantity of religious music, a deeply serious and thoughtful composer whose best-known work is the frivolous Carnival of the Animals.

Such a man is rare in any culture, and now that we test his achievement solely by his music and his writings, his immense gifts are not so readily appreciated. Much of his music is bound to remain in obscurity, and there are few who would be bold enough to measure his achievement as a composer against Wagner or Verdi or Brahms. His works are appealing, superbly crafted, and full of surprises. Only at rare moments (such as in the second act of his opera Samson and Delilah) does he shake the heavens. He is very French in his desire to impress his hearers with the delicacy and rightness of every movement, to display impeccable taste, and to paint always in sensitive colors. His word-setting is faultless, his fugues are full of ingenious invention. His piano writing bears the signature of a brilliant pianist, and it takes a player of special gifts to throw off those cascades of scales and arpeggios as though they were the easiest thing in the world—as for him they were.

His first four piano concertos appeared between 1858 and 1875, the fifth (and last) following much later in 1896. The Second has always been the most popular. It was requested by the great Russian pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein, a frequent visitor to Paris, who was planning to appear as conductor in Paris’s Salle Pleyel. Saint-Saëns agreed to compose a concerto for the occasion, and with a deadline three weeks away he completed the task in seventeen days. Eleven further days, between May 2 and May 13, 1868, were needed to prepare the orchestra for the first performance. He kept the concerto in his concert repertoire for the rest of his life, playing it for the last time with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1906.

The concerto’s grand opening reminds us that Saint-Saëns was an organist, the “greatest organist in the world” in the judgment of Liszt, no mean organist himself. The style is that of Bach’s organ fantasias. One can imagine the pedal holding the low G while the two hands appear to improvise in the upper register. After a strong entry from the orchestra the piano presents the first main theme. (The composer Gabriel Fauré told the pianist Alfred Cortot that this theme was borrowed from a Tantum ergo he had written, which perhaps occurred when Fauré was a pupil of Saint-Saëns, since none of the three works by Fauré with the title Tantum ergo contains the theme. In any event, the two remained close friends for nearly sixty years, so no sense of injury can be imputed to the younger man.)

The tempo of the first movement is broad, not the Allegro that most concertos offer. It has real substance as well as opportunities for deft fingerwork from the soloist, and it can also generate considerable force for the return of the main theme. The Bach-like introduction returns to round off the movement, this time accompanied by the strings, a touch that Liszt particularly admired.

The remaining two movements are both swift, and both quite distinct in character from the first movement. The scherzando second movement is delightfully playful, requiring the timpani to set the pace and with at least two strongly memorable tunes to take home. The horns too are allowed to tease the soloist, and the feathery ending is worthy of the master of fairy music, Mendelssohn.

The finale is a breakneck tarantella that keeps the soloist fully occupied with scarcely a moment’s respite. A secondary brief idea with a trill as its marker, repeated many times, at least requires only one hand at a time. The cascade of notes stops only for some huge alternating chords with both hands plunging from low to high and back again, but from there to the end the torrential flow is unstoppable.

We are left in no doubt of Saint-Saëns’s effortless virtuosity as a pianist and also of his range as a composer. The earnest, churchy tone of the first movement is set in relief by the playfulness of the second and the whirlwind perpetuum mobile of the third.

Liszt thought the scherzo needed more development and complications, but Saint-Saëns quite properly declined to revise his score despite his profound admiration for Liszt and his acknowledged indebtedness to that unrivalled keyboard virtuoso. The concerto’s eternal popularity and unfailing effectiveness suggest that the composer was right.

Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald taught music at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford and was Professor of Music at Glasgow and at Washington University in St. Louis. His books include those on Scriabin, Berlioz, Beethoven, and Bizet, and he was general editor of the 26-volume New Berlioz Edition. His Saint-Saens and the Stage was published in 2019 by Cambridge University Press.

The first American performance of Saint-Saëns's Piano Concerto No. 2 took place on February 3, 1876, in a concert of the Harvard Musical Association at the Music Hall in Boston; Benjamin J. Lang was soloist, with Carl Zerrahn conducting.

The first Boston Symphony performances of Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 2 took place on December 8 and 9, 1882, with pianist Otto Bendix and Georg Henschel conducting.