Pupils of camille st saens music
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Saint-Saëns also famously composed Danse Macabre, a haunting piece with a spooky background, and the opera Samson and Delilah.
His father, a government clerk, died three months after his birth. His first public concert appearance occurred when he was five years old, when he accompanied a Beethovenviolin sonata. His playing was marked by extraordinarily even scales and passagework, great speed, and aristocratic refinement. In the same year, he co-founded with Romain Bussine the Société Nationale de Musique in order to promote a new and specifically French music.
In fact, since its posthumous publication, this work's imagination and musical brilliance have impressed listeners and critics.
Saint-Saëns also wrote six preludes and fugues for organ, three in Op. 99 and three in Op. 109, of which Op. 99, no. His most successful students at the Niedermeyer were André Messager and Gabriel Fauré, who was Saint-Saëns's favourite pupil and soon his closest friend.
Saint-Saëns was a multi-faceted intellectual.
That same year, however, Vincent d'Indy and his allies had Saint-Saëns removed from the Société Nationale de Musique. For this week’s composer, we have another tragic story—the life of Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns.
Saint-Saëns was born in Paris, France, in 1835. The confident Maestoso fourth movement perhaps reflects the confidence of Europe in its technology, its science, its "age of reason".
At about this time, age two, Saint-Saëns was found to possess perfect pitch. In music he seems to have admired everything he touched, from J.S. Bach to Mozart, and from Beethoven to Robert Schumann and early Richard Wagner. He composed no fewer than three concertos in rapid succession: two for violin (the C major in 1858 and the A major in 1859) and his first Piano Concerto, in D major (1858).
The score was rediscovered by a researcher in 2007 and was performed for the first time in the soprano's home city (Melbourne) during January 2008.[4]
One of Saint-Saëns's symphonic poems, Le rouet d'Omphale, Op. 31, became famous to a new generation of listeners beginning in 1937 through its use of the ominous middle section of it as the theme to the long-running radio program, The Shadow.
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Controversies
Saint-Saëns was thought to have ethnically Jewish traits,[5] especially in his youth.[6] For this reason, some contemporaries and historians believed he was of Jewish descent.
The later chamber music pieces, such as the second violin sonata, the second cello sonata, and the second piano trio, are less accessible to a listener than earlier pieces in the same form. Carnival was written as a musical jest, and Saint-Saëns believed it would damage his reputation as a serious composer.
In 1886, Saint-Saëns was punished for some particularly harsh and anti-German comments on the Paris production of Lohengrin by losing engagements and receiving negative reviews throughout Germany. He wrote his first symphony at 16, and when he was 18, he was appointed as the principal organist at the Madeleine, a church in Paris—an exceptionally prestigious position.
His concertos and many of his chamber music works are both technically difficult and transparent, requiring the skills of a virtuoso.