Camille Saint-Saens is remembered as the composer of a number of those pieces to which the adjective "best-loved" tends to be applied, among them The Carnival of Animals, Danse Macabre, Samson and Delilah, and the so-called Organ Symphony. While his historical importance in no way approached that of Liszt, Wagner, or his younger compatriot Debussy (on whom he frowned majestically) his influence on the course of French music was considerable.
Saint-Saens (the name is unexpectedly of Irish origin, a certain Saint Sidonius having founded a monastery in the region of his father's ancestors) can be credited not alone with Gallicising the symphony and concerto forms, but also with reconciling the reactionary French musical establishment to the symphonic poem, a form then regarded as aberrant and alien. As a concert pianist and organist he was one of the giants of his day.
Saint-Saens's longevity (he lived to be 86) provides the biographer with a fundamental problem: once the subject has surmounted the regulation years of tribulation - always the most absorbing part of a vita - how is interest to be maintained during the remaining years of consolidation, particularly if there is no co-operative decline into obscurity or disgrace? In Saint-Saens's case, the rise to eminence was brisk and relatively painless, while the sojourn on the heights lasted for more than 60 years.
The endless list of achievements and honours can become wearisome for the impatient reader, eager for a little gossip and scandal. What there is of the latter is mainly provided by incidental details of historical background, which Rees fills in adroitly. There was, for example, the egregious General Boulanger, whose persistent opposition to the Republic provoked Prime Minister Floquet to challenge him to a duel. "Floquet was an elderly lawyer, but he had the better of the contest and for two days Boulanger was at death's door." However, the general recovered; triumphant in the Paris elections of January 1889, urged by his supporters to march on the Elysee Palace, he "was distracted by a love affair and, after days of indecision, fled across the frontier".
Saint-Saens's amorous distractions offer little such fodder to the prurient. Certainly he dedicated dreadful verses to the magnificent Augusta Holmes composer daughter (possibly adoptive) of an Irish ex-officer, and even proposed to her repeatedly in the 1860s - but then so did everyone else. He "conceived a passion for the soprano Christine Nilsson, but . . . when he heard her say that Mozart was `boring' he speedily disengaged himself."
None the less, rumours of his homosexuality are hard to dispel, and Rees is clearly a little uneasy on that score. The composer was in thrall to a particularly monstrous mother whose death when her son was 53 "marked the close of a childhood that had lasted long into middle age". His teacher-pupil relationship with the teenage Faure had a decidedly flirtatious cast. Rees scrupulously lists contemporary references suggestive of Saint-Saens's homosexual preferences, but comes to no conclusion either way; the obvious hypothesis of bisexuality goes bizarrely unmentioned.
IN any event, in 1875 Saint-Saens married the 19-year-old Marie-Laure-Emilie Truffot, by whom he had two sons. The sequel was the darkest event in the composer's life: in May 1878 the elder child fell to his death from a fourth-floor window, and six weeks later his baby brother succumbed to pneumonia. After this disaster the Saint-Saens's marriage quickly collapsed. While there is no doubt that the composer's grief was deep and lasting, it appears to have made not the slightest impact on his music: a testimony no doubt to Saint-Saens's classical stoicism, but also to certain limitations in his sensibility and creative achievement alike.
Saint-Saens's death was in many ways an enviable one. Old age, bronchitis and gammy legs had done nothing to diminish his energy, and he still practised the piano assiduously for several hours daily; aged 85, he gave his last concert tour; one month before his death he boasted that he had at last mastered the close-packed trills in Rameau's keyboard music. He died in his beloved Algiers, a few minutes after listening to the hotel orchestra from his balcony. The last notes of music he heard provoked the comment, "A foxtrot . . . what a pity."
Raymond Deane is a composer and writer