Symphony No. 3, Organ Symphony
Camille Saint-Saëns was born in Paris, France, on October 9, 1835, and died in Algiers on December 16, 1921. He composed his Symphony No. 3 in Paris and in Germany early in 1886, conducting the first performance on May 19, 1886, in St. James’s Hall, London, in a concert of the Royal Philharmonic Society. He led the first Paris performance on January 9, 1887, at a concert of the Société des Concerts.
Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 3 is scored for 3 flutes (third doubling piccolo), 2 oboes and English horn, 2 clarinets and bass clarinet, 2 bassoons and contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals, bass drum, organ, piano four-hands, and strings.
Although widely known as Saint-Saëns’s “Organ Symphony,” and although the composer sometimes played the organ part himself, he did not in the least intend the work to be an organ concerto. The organ is in any case silent during the greater part of the work; it is merely a bold addition to what in 1886 would have been regarded as a large symphony orchestra, like the occasional appearance of the piano in the second movement, adding an extra—and always startling—color to the orchestral palette.
Equally bold is Saint-Saëns’s division of the symphony into two movements rather than the traditional four, even though the outlines of slow movement and scherzo are easily recognized in their proper place. This unusual layout is shared with the composer’s Fourth Piano Concerto, which he composed shortly before, and he was sufficiently taken with the plan to adopt it on a grand symphonic scale too. The early critics were puzzled by this, and also by the unusual orchestration. Yet no one today regards the symphony as a particularly puzzling work; indeed it is (or at least has been) one of the most frequently recorded and performed of all symphonies.
In the age of Haydn and Beethoven there were relatively few French symphonies composed; in the following period Berlioz’s symphonies are sui generis, beyond imitation or the notion of a “school.” But in the 1850s the younger French composers—Gounod, Saint-Saëns, Bizet—all wrote symphonies of striking freshness, and after 1870, when the political humiliation of Prussian victory spurred the French to take up arms in a new cultural conflict, the French strove magnificently to build a strong non-operatic repertoire, ironically by looking to German models, above all Beethoven, for inspiration. One composer after another set his hand to the task of writing symphonies: Bizet in 1871, Messager in 1877, Debussy in 1880, Fauré in 1884, Lalo in 1885, d’Indy in 1886, Franck in 1887. Saint-Saëns was the most energetic of all the French composers calling for cultural renewal, so it was not surprising that he should compose a symphony in 1886 as part of this national effort. He had been writing prodigious quantities of music in every genre for the previous thirty years, and although he had already written five symphonies, the last one dated back to 1859. Only two of those five were acknowledged, which gives the present symphony its number “3.”
It was commissioned by Francesco Berger, secretary of the Royal Philharmonic Society, when Saint-Saëns was on a visit to London toward the end of 1885. He then went on tour in Germany and faced a fifteen-gun broadside of hostility everywhere he went because of his views on Wagner. Those views seem eminently reasonable today, but at the time, with Wagner recently dead and Germany in the grip of pan-Germanic fever combined with Wagnermania, Saint-Saëns represented an unacceptable heresy—thinking that Wagner’s music was good up to a certain point, but was not a good model for younger composers: it diminished the great tradition of German music from Bach to Mendelssohn. For Saint-Saëns the supreme model was always Mozart. These views had appeared in a recent book, Harmonie et mélodie, mercilessly attacked in the German press to the point where many cities refused to welcome him.
Saint-Saëns himself took a light view of the situation, expressing his undying faith in the natural musicality of the Germans, and composing, of all things, the frivolous spoof, the Carnival of the Animals, today one of his best-known works. The symphony also took shape on this tour, with its unmistakable homage to the giants of the German symphony, Beethoven and Schubert. On his return to Paris he played it through to Franz Liszt, who had done more than anyone to further Saint-Saëns’s career in its early stages and had mounted the composer’s opera Samson et Dalila in Weimar when no one in Paris would consider it. Liszt, alas, was very weak and had only a few months to live, so that the symphony’s dedication, when it was published, was not “à Franz Liszt,” as Saint-Saëns had intended, but “à la mémoire de Franz Liszt.”
The first performance took place in London that May (1886). In the first half of the concert Saint-Saëns played Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto with Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert & Sullivan fame) conducting. When the symphony was heard in Paris a few months later, Gounod emerged from the concert saying “Voilà le Beethoven français!”
The Adagio introduction could be from a tone poem by Liszt, with its broken phrases and plaintive sighs from oboe, English horn, and bassoon. But the Allegro arrives immediately, strongly suggestive of Schubert’s Unfinished and giving gradual shape to the broken woodwind phrases. The strings’ restless accompanying figure, (a), is in fact an important theme that will recur in many guises:
The second of these acts as a subsidiary theme in a sonata process that is shorter than usual since the slow “movement” has been folded into the first movement. The organ is heard for the first time, laying down soft chords in D-flat major as background to a rich cantabile (that is, “singing”) theme in the strings. The second statement of this theme calls on the unlikely grouping of clarinet, two horns, and two trombones spread across three octaves. The double basses, pizzicato, throw in a memory of (b) before a reprise of the main tune and a warm, serene close.
The second movement begins with a scherzo, now back in C minor, and still dark in color. Example (c) soon appears as a subsidiary idea. The equivalent of a Trio section is a brilliant Presto in the major key to which the piano contributes an extraordinary series of both-hand scales, as if Saint-Saëns were still thinking of the scale-plagued pianists in his Carnival of the Animals. This eventually gives way to the finale proper (Maestoso), heralded by a huge C major chord on the organ and a new version of the main theme now taking on the character of a chorale, (d). The pianist is joined by a partner, the duet tinkling in the upper register with a sonority Saint-Saëns learned from Berlioz’s Lélio. He had written the piano reduction of this work when he was 19 and absorbed several ideas from it.
The splendid close leaves the impression of a grandiose and triumphant symphony, although many of the earlier pages suggest a more questioning and searching character. Saint-Saëns knew that most of his numberless compositions had little future to look forward to, but this was a work he had put his heart into, and which he deeply loved. “I have given it all that I had to give. What I have done I shall never do again.”
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 was general editor of the 26-volume New Berlioz Edition. His Saint-Saëns and the Stage was published by Cambridge University Press.
The first American performance of Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 3 was led by Theodore Thomas on February 19, 1887, about five weeks after the Paris premiere, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.
The first Boston Symphony Orchestra performances of Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 3 (which were also the first in Boston) were led by Wilhelm Gericke on February 15 and 16, 1901 (with a further performance that February 23 in New York).
