Don't consign Saint-Saëns's organ symphony to the orchestral glue-factory for knackered thoroughbreds. This was a cutting-edge - and gloriously tuneful - work.
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"I gave everything to it I was able to give. What I have here accomplished, I will never achieve again." Thus spake Camille Saint-Saëns about his C minor Symphony, "avec orgue" (with organ), the third and last of his symphonies, and one of the crowning glories of his prodigious life in music. This week, I make a plea that we take the Organ Symphony seriously as one of the late 19th century's most significant and technically sophisticated orchestral works. And also of course that we enjoy its remarkable concatenation of tunes, colours, and kaleidoscopic thematic invention that have made the symphony so popular ever since its premiere in London's St James's Hall in 1886, when Saint-Saëns himself conducted the orchestra of the Royal Philharmonic Society, who had commissioned the piece.
It's all too easy to think of the Organ Symphony as a perennial symphonic pot-boiler, one of those knackered ex-thoroughbred warhorses of the repertoire whose every appearance on concert programmes is another stage in its consignment to the orchestral glue-factory. It doesn't help that the Big Tune of the last movement is one of the most used and abused motifs of classical music history, in everything from Disney's Babe movies to it being adopted as the national anthem of the micro-nation of Atlantium, a postage-stamp-sized potential principality in Eastern Australia. Its over-familiarity means it's hard to recognise the real achievement of this symphony which fused what were genuinely cutting-edge innovations with Saint-Saëns's inherently classical, conventional (with a small "c") instincts. So forget what you might think you know about this symphony, and prepare to re-hear the rafinesse, joie de vivre, and technical coup-d'orchestre of arguably Saint-Saëns's greatest single composition.
First off, what we're dealing with here is something almost without precedent in 19th century symphonic practice: a piece cast in two movements. OK, the work also encloses the archetypes of a classic four-movement pattern within its two halves, but in the first half Saint-Saëns elides the end of the C minor Allegro moderato with the slow movement that follows, a Poco Adagio in a thrillingly unconventional D flat major, a startling semitonal shift away from the home key. And, in the second half, he changes gear from the scherzo-like music that opens this section to the massive, shocking intervention of the introduction to the chorale-like Big Tune itself at the start of the final movement.
Saint-Saëns further reconfigured the basic outlines of the 19th century's symphonic masterplan with his use of keyboards as part of the orchestral panoply. And he didn't just use an organ - which makes its quietly dramatic entrance at the start of the slow movement - but a piano as well, which needs two players to get to grips with the virtuosic figuration Saint-Saëns composed for it: listen to the glittering carillon of sound these four pianistic hands conjure around the main theme of the finale, one of the most satisfying moments in the whole symphony. But as well as the by turns gigantic and intimate soundworlds Saint-Saëns makes his orchestra produce (compare the organ's first entry to the thrilling, bombastic sonic coronation it gives to the symphony's final bars), you need to listen out for the way the whole piece prepares and prefigures that (in)famous melody, and what Saint-Saëns then does with it.
That's how the piece achieves its real ambition, which is to employ the progressive ideas of thematic transformation that Liszt had pioneered earlier in the century (the piece was subsequently dedicated to Liszt, who died a couple of months after the premiere), and makes them work not as part of a programmatic narrative, but as the engine of an abstract, symphonic discourse. The strings' tremulous and ominous figuration at the start of the allegro, after the symphony's short, mysterious introduction (itself full of symphonic premonitions, only realised much later in the piece), becomes a teasing ear-worm the first time you hear it. Expressively speaking, in terms of how Saint-Saëns dramatises and orchestrates them, they're at the opposite end of the expressive spectrum, and in different modalities too, but if you compare the outline of this tune to the Grande Mélodie, you can't fail to spot the connection.
There's more symbiosis between the scherzo's main melody and the crowning chorale. The scherzo section is a kind of gigantic upbeat to the finale - fragments of its melody are disguised, transformed, and finally revealed. The slow movement's Poco adagio does, crucially, introduce the gentle, lowering presence of the organ as a key character in the work's drama, and it also acts as a moment of visionary repose in the middle of the sounds and furies around it.
There's something else, too. In the finale's coda, after a showily effective fugue - Saint-Saëns manages to do something in the symphony that it would take Sibelius to top. He warps time and space - the Theme of Themes is sped up so much that time seems to slow down. Capped by the organ's thunderous bass-line - playing notes that the human ear can only just "hear", but which you should feel in the hall as more like primordial vibrations - the effect is both a masterstroke of time-melting symphonism, and an irresistibly joyous coda to the technical glories of this piece.
I have the image, at the end of the symphony, of the concert hall being miraculously lifted off the ground and held aloft by the combined efforts of all those pipes and all that air; all that counterpoint and all that time-stretching speeding up and slowing down; all that scraping and blowing, and all those keyboards. The whole work is a magnificent and fantastical symphonic machine that's an apotheosis of the orchestral technology of the late 19th century. In other words: the Organ Symphony is the definitive steampunk symphony.
*Five key recordings *
All stentorian yet sensual performances of Saint-Saëns's masterpiece; I've always had a soft spot for Myung-Whun Chung's elegantly earth-shaking performance, but find out which you prefer!
Orchestre de l'Opéra Bastille/Myung-Whun Chung
Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Daniel Barenboim
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/James Levine
Philadelphia Orchestra/Eugene Ormandy
Boston Symphony Orchestra/Charles Munch Reported by guardian.co.uk 8 hours ago.
• All articles in this series
"I gave everything to it I was able to give. What I have here accomplished, I will never achieve again." Thus spake Camille Saint-Saëns about his C minor Symphony, "avec orgue" (with organ), the third and last of his symphonies, and one of the crowning glories of his prodigious life in music. This week, I make a plea that we take the Organ Symphony seriously as one of the late 19th century's most significant and technically sophisticated orchestral works. And also of course that we enjoy its remarkable concatenation of tunes, colours, and kaleidoscopic thematic invention that have made the symphony so popular ever since its premiere in London's St James's Hall in 1886, when Saint-Saëns himself conducted the orchestra of the Royal Philharmonic Society, who had commissioned the piece.
It's all too easy to think of the Organ Symphony as a perennial symphonic pot-boiler, one of those knackered ex-thoroughbred warhorses of the repertoire whose every appearance on concert programmes is another stage in its consignment to the orchestral glue-factory. It doesn't help that the Big Tune of the last movement is one of the most used and abused motifs of classical music history, in everything from Disney's Babe movies to it being adopted as the national anthem of the micro-nation of Atlantium, a postage-stamp-sized potential principality in Eastern Australia. Its over-familiarity means it's hard to recognise the real achievement of this symphony which fused what were genuinely cutting-edge innovations with Saint-Saëns's inherently classical, conventional (with a small "c") instincts. So forget what you might think you know about this symphony, and prepare to re-hear the rafinesse, joie de vivre, and technical coup-d'orchestre of arguably Saint-Saëns's greatest single composition.
First off, what we're dealing with here is something almost without precedent in 19th century symphonic practice: a piece cast in two movements. OK, the work also encloses the archetypes of a classic four-movement pattern within its two halves, but in the first half Saint-Saëns elides the end of the C minor Allegro moderato with the slow movement that follows, a Poco Adagio in a thrillingly unconventional D flat major, a startling semitonal shift away from the home key. And, in the second half, he changes gear from the scherzo-like music that opens this section to the massive, shocking intervention of the introduction to the chorale-like Big Tune itself at the start of the final movement.
Saint-Saëns further reconfigured the basic outlines of the 19th century's symphonic masterplan with his use of keyboards as part of the orchestral panoply. And he didn't just use an organ - which makes its quietly dramatic entrance at the start of the slow movement - but a piano as well, which needs two players to get to grips with the virtuosic figuration Saint-Saëns composed for it: listen to the glittering carillon of sound these four pianistic hands conjure around the main theme of the finale, one of the most satisfying moments in the whole symphony. But as well as the by turns gigantic and intimate soundworlds Saint-Saëns makes his orchestra produce (compare the organ's first entry to the thrilling, bombastic sonic coronation it gives to the symphony's final bars), you need to listen out for the way the whole piece prepares and prefigures that (in)famous melody, and what Saint-Saëns then does with it.
That's how the piece achieves its real ambition, which is to employ the progressive ideas of thematic transformation that Liszt had pioneered earlier in the century (the piece was subsequently dedicated to Liszt, who died a couple of months after the premiere), and makes them work not as part of a programmatic narrative, but as the engine of an abstract, symphonic discourse. The strings' tremulous and ominous figuration at the start of the allegro, after the symphony's short, mysterious introduction (itself full of symphonic premonitions, only realised much later in the piece), becomes a teasing ear-worm the first time you hear it. Expressively speaking, in terms of how Saint-Saëns dramatises and orchestrates them, they're at the opposite end of the expressive spectrum, and in different modalities too, but if you compare the outline of this tune to the Grande Mélodie, you can't fail to spot the connection.
There's more symbiosis between the scherzo's main melody and the crowning chorale. The scherzo section is a kind of gigantic upbeat to the finale - fragments of its melody are disguised, transformed, and finally revealed. The slow movement's Poco adagio does, crucially, introduce the gentle, lowering presence of the organ as a key character in the work's drama, and it also acts as a moment of visionary repose in the middle of the sounds and furies around it.
There's something else, too. In the finale's coda, after a showily effective fugue - Saint-Saëns manages to do something in the symphony that it would take Sibelius to top. He warps time and space - the Theme of Themes is sped up so much that time seems to slow down. Capped by the organ's thunderous bass-line - playing notes that the human ear can only just "hear", but which you should feel in the hall as more like primordial vibrations - the effect is both a masterstroke of time-melting symphonism, and an irresistibly joyous coda to the technical glories of this piece.
I have the image, at the end of the symphony, of the concert hall being miraculously lifted off the ground and held aloft by the combined efforts of all those pipes and all that air; all that counterpoint and all that time-stretching speeding up and slowing down; all that scraping and blowing, and all those keyboards. The whole work is a magnificent and fantastical symphonic machine that's an apotheosis of the orchestral technology of the late 19th century. In other words: the Organ Symphony is the definitive steampunk symphony.
*Five key recordings *
All stentorian yet sensual performances of Saint-Saëns's masterpiece; I've always had a soft spot for Myung-Whun Chung's elegantly earth-shaking performance, but find out which you prefer!
Orchestre de l'Opéra Bastille/Myung-Whun Chung
Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Daniel Barenboim
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/James Levine
Philadelphia Orchestra/Eugene Ormandy
Boston Symphony Orchestra/Charles Munch Reported by guardian.co.uk 8 hours ago.