SubmittedFriday, 03 May 2019
discernment and undeniable ability
He has been able to take up all sorts of things, I will not say with equal skill, but with discernment and undeniable ability. He shows a type of mind rare among artists and, above all, among musicians. The two principles that he enunciates and himself follows out are: «Keep free from all exaggeration» and «Preserve the soundness of your mind’s health.»[127] They are certainly not the principles of a Beethoven or a Wagner, and it would be rather difficult to find a noted musician of the last century who had applied them. They tell us, without need of comment, what is distinctive about M. Saint-Saëns, and what is defective in him. He is not troubled by any sort of passion. Nothing disturbs the clearness of his reason. «He has no prejudices; he takes no side»[128]–one might add, not even his own, since he is not afraid to change his views–«he does not pose as a reformer of anything»; he is altogether independent, perhaps almost too much so. He seems sometimes as if he did not know what to do with his liberty. Goethe would have said, I think, that he needed a little more of the devil in him.
[Footnote 127: Harmonie et Mélodie.]
[Footnote 128: Charles Gounod, Mémoires d’un Artiste.]
His most characteristic mental trait seems to be a languid melancholy, which has its source in a rather bitter feeling of the futility of life;[129] and this is accompanied by fits of weariness which are not altogether healthy, followed by capricious moods and nervous gaiety, and a freakish liking for burlesque and mimicry. It is his eager, restless spirit that makes him rush about the world writing Breton and Auvergnian rhapsodies, Persian songs, Algerian suites, Portuguese barcarolles, Danish, Russian, or Arabian caprices, souvenirs of Italy, African fantasias, and Egyptian concertos; and, in the same way, he roams through the ages, writing Greek tragedies, dance music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and preludes and fugues of the eighteenth. But in all these exotic and archaic reflections of times and countries through which his fancy wanders, one recognises the gay, intelligent countenance of a Frenchman on his travels, who idly follows his inclinations, and does not trouble to enter very deeply into the spirit of the people he meets, but gleans all he can, and then reproduces it with a French complexion–after the manner of Montaigne in Italy, who compared Verona to Poitiers, and Padua to Bordeaux, and who, when he was in Florence, paid much less attention to Michelangelo than to «a very strangely shaped sheep, and an animal the size of a large mastiff, shaped like a cat and striped with black and white, which they called a tiger.»
[Footnote 129: Les Heures; Mors; Modestie (Rimes familières).]
From a purely musical point of view there is some resemblance between M. Saint-Saëns and Mendelssohn. In both of them we find the same intellectual restraint, the same balance preserved among the heterogeneous elements of their work. These elements are not common to both of them, because the time, the country, and the surroundings in which they lived are not the same; and there is also a great difference in their characters. Mendelssohn is more ingenuous and religious; M. Saint-Saëns is more of a dilettante and more sensuous. They are not so much kindred spirits by their science as good company by a common purity of taste, a sense of rhythm, and a genius for method, which gave all they wrote a neo-classic character.
As for the things that directly influenced M. Saint-Saëns, they are so numerous that it would be difficult and rather bold of me to pretend to be able to pick them out. His remarkable capacity for assimilation has often moved him to write in the style of Wagner or Berlioz, of Händel or Rameau, of Lulli or Charpentier, or even of some English harpsichord or clavichord player of the sixteenth century, like William Byrd–whose airs are introduced quite naturally in the music of Henry VIII; but we must remember that these are deliberate imitations, the amusements of a virtuoso, about which M. Saint-Saëns never deceives himself. His memory serves him as he pleases, but he is never troubled by it.
As far as one can judge, M. Saint-Saëns’ musical ideas are infused with the spirit of the great classics belonging to the end of the eighteenth century–far more, whatever people may say, with the spirit of Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart, than with the spirit of Bach. Schumann’s seductiveness also left its mark upon him, and he has felt the influence of Gounod, Bizet, and Wagner. But a stronger influence was that of Berlioz, his friend and master,[130] and, above all, that of Liszt. We must stop at this last name.
[Footnote 130: «Thanks to Berlioz, all my generation has been shaped, and well shaped» (Portraits et Souvenirs).]
this was: Discernment And Undeniable Ability
go to next chapter: Liszt was also a lover of freedom
