July-September 2008 |
Volume
13, Number 3 |
|---|
Church
music by the unchurched: Saint-Saëns
This is the first article of a
series. R. J. Stove discusses eminent composers who spent most of their
lives outside orthodox Catholicism, but who made notable contributions to sacred music.
All created human beings, with one famous
exception – so the Church teaches us – suffer from Original Sin; but it is
astonishing how often various Catholics forget this fact when it comes to
sacred music. American columnist Joseph Sobran, after
having eulogised Mozart on the latter’s 250th birthday, endured ferocious
chastisement from “a stern Catholic reader who assured me ... that the ‘only
reason’ the media noted the occasion is that Mozart was a Mason. What’s more,
he is now ‘roasting in hell’.”1 Many Catholic musicians will have been
confronted with similar vengeful attitudes about Mozart, and not only about
him. It is as if great composers’ lives inspire in certain prigs a de facto Donatism, which (happily) would be prohibited in any other
field of church endeavour. To such Donatism, Adelaide
organist and pianist Mark Freer has surely formulated the definitive response:
“No thoughtful Catholic will have difficulty
distinguishing Mozart’s music from his Freemasonry, any more, for example, than
separating Bach’s work from his Lutheranism. If we were to dismiss every human
work that had been created by a sinner, there might not be much left standing.
I was once taken to task for leading a congregation in a ‘Protestant tune’, to
which I replied, ‘Which note was Protestant?’. Let us
move on.” 2
Complete musician
Especially
relevant in this connection are the cases of (Charles) Camille Saint-Saëns and
his pupil Gabriel (Urbain) Fauré.
Both men – close friends for most of their lives – belong with the most eminent
among French composers; both men were brought up in conventionally pious
households; neither continued to practise Catholicism
in adulthood; but the contributions of both men to the sacred repertoire are
too important, at their best, to be slighted. A survey of church music by the unchurched cannot afford to neglect either figure.
Fauré (the subject of a future essay) called Saint-Saëns,
with characteristic care in choosing his words, “the most complete musician whom we have ever had.”3 A child prodigy of Mozartian and Mendelssohnian
endowments, Saint-Saëns (born in Paris on 9 October 1835) began playing the
piano when only two years old, began composing when only three, and could
perform all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas from memory at the age of ten. Perhaps
so freakishly gifted a lad would inevitably experience sorrow as an adult.
Embittered he certainly was, with a lifelong sharpness of tongue, despite the
official honours heaped on him, including his own
statue. While he produced over 150 superbly crafted compositions in every
genre, he never succeeded in stilling accusations that he had squandered his
immense natural abilities. Those whom his plentiful
sarcasms had vexed, easily turned their wounded pride into aesthetic
disapproval. Part of the trouble lay in his terrifying mother, who, when her
son had already reached his thirties, fired off at him such epistolary
vociferations as the following:
“You make me ill with your fears. I used to
think you a man; you are merely a coward. I treat you with contempt. … I
believed I had brought up a man. I have raised up only
a girl of degenerative stock.”4
Clearly, not the sort of
matriarch who could be appeased with the occasional box of chocolates. It is significant that only after her death in 1888 did her son dare to
publish his expressions of religious heterodoxy.
Meanwhile he had liturgical functions to
carry out, which he did with unsurpassed efficiency. From 1857 to 1877, he
served as chief organist at Paris’ Madeleine church, with an annual salary of
three thousand francs. (The job being regarded as a source of patriotic morale,
it relieved him from the duties of military service.) Liszt greeted his
organ-playing gifts in the most appreciative terms, informing a friend:
“Saint-Saëns is not merely in the first rank but incomparable”.5
His musical strictness, an inspiration to many an organ-loft drudge, once antagonised a local
priest. The anecdote has been printed in various forms, but is unchanged in
essentials: this particular priest reproached him for his austere music-making,
telling him, “Our congregations at the Madeleine are made up chiefly of
well-to-do folk who often go to the Opéra-Comique. We
should respect the musical tastes they have formed there.” Saint-Saëns’ frigid retort: “Monsieur l’Abbé, when I hear sermons delivered from the pulpit in
the style of the dialogue at the Opéra-Comique, I
shall play music that is appropriate – but not before.”6 He did not regard his own shortage of
spiritual zeal as an excuse for the pagan clowning with which Richard Dawkins
and Christopher Hitchens have since made us drearily
familiar.
A positivist
Saint-Saëns
finally revealed his own beliefs via a book called Problèmes
et Mystères, which he
released in 1893, when mourning the death of his old ally Charles Gounod. His
doctrine owed much to Auguste Comte’s positivism, a
creed extremely popular among French intellectuals at the time, though no less
sincerely held by the composer on that account. He never settled into the
territory of outright atheism, if only through his fear of those whom he called
“anarchists”, and whom he upbraided for “hav[ing] no other law than the
satisfaction of the lowest appetites.”7 (In 1893, most writers used “anarchist” not as a specific ideological
descriptor but as an all-purpose swear-word, rather as “fascist” and “racist”
are employed these days.) Thus, he saw a distinct usefulness for revealed
religion in the area of crowd control, provided that nobody expected him to
subscribe to its dictates himself.
He told musicologist and novelist Romain Rolland in 1910: “This need to believe, which
torments so many people, seems to me idle. It has been replaced in me by a need
to know.”8 To a
clergyman four years later, Saint-Saëns insisted that his own bereavements (his
two small sons had died in dreadful circumstances within months of one another)
“did not destroy my faith, lost earlier. They might even have restored it, but
that was impossible.” And to another clergyman he wrote: “I am not a virtual
disbeliever. I am an utter disbeliever.”9 All of which suggests an element of sour
grapes on his part; and the frequency with which he declared his scepticism
evokes the self-proclaimed atheist described by Orwell, “who does not so much
disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.” A literary acquaintance who hoped
to bring Saint-Saëns back to the Church sent along one Père
Mugnier to this end, but Mugnier
had no hopes of withstanding the musician’s charm: the two got on so famously
that the priest never ventured to attempt proselytising.
Accounts of Saint-Saëns’ last hours – he died
in Algiers on 16 December 1921 – are slightly mysterious. He had requested a
non-religious funeral (which he received), but biographer James Harding refers
cryptically to “one of those whom a deathbed tempts as a corpse attracts a
vulture” having thrust, into the composer’s stiffening hands, a crucifix.10
Christmas Oratorio
Not remotely mysterious, in fact
indisputable, is Saint-Saëns’ musical legacy to French churches. Most of his
sacred production comes (as might have been predicted) from fairly early in his
career, during his Madeleine tenure. It includes a Christmas Oratorio, which is seldom sung complete today in either ecclesial or concert-hall milieux, but from which sections – notably the finale, “Tollite hostias” – have been
extracted to become firm choir-stall favourites. There exists also a
Saint-Saëns Ave Maria that is far less often heard than “Tollite hostias”, but that
deserves periodic revival as a palatable but dignified alternative to the
over-exposed Gounod and Schubert settings.
Once St Pius X issued his 1903 motu proprio,
Saint-Saëns assailed it in Le Figaro’s pages.11 Alas, he seems – like many others since, whether
within or outside the Church – to have been ignorant of the document’s details,
and to have regarded it as an attack on music per se. It is true that
this motu proprio reprehends the more theatrical gestures – such as the overuse of harp
figurations – that found their way into some of Saint-Saëns’ youthful religious
pieces; but in practice it leaves a good deal to bishops’ discretion, above all
in the choice of accompanying instruments. (Saint-Saëns appears to have shared
the widespread fallacy that it forbade, in all contexts, every instrument save
the organ.) Besides, we now know that far from exercising over French church
musicians the inquisitorial rule that Saint-Saëns feared, the motu proprio
remained a dead letter in numerous French parishes. Those parishes went right
on with their customary musical practices for the next sixty-odd years, until
Vatican II.12 In music, as in so many other areas of national life, Gallicanism died hard.
Regardless, support of the motu proprio is
perfectly compatible with an interest in reviving some of Saint-Saëns’ finest
liturgical work, which includes over a dozen organ solos exhibiting uniformly
high levels of craftsmanship and refinement. One of the shortest and earliest
items in this category, Élévation ou Communion – dating from around 1856 – is also one of
the most touching and (for the player) least demanding. Saint-Saëns himself
would have found it almost ludicrously easy to perform, but he was fond enough
of it to revise it a quarter of a century afterwards.13
Form above all
When all is said, Saint-Saëns’ church-related
output forms only a small part of his total achievement, and he himself would
not be surprised at the fact that his fame rests primarily on his contributions
to secular art: such as the Organ Symphony, the Danse Macabre, the Second Piano Concerto, and Carnival of the Animals.
Nevertheless, considering how much downright junk was being inflicted on
congregations in Saint-Saëns’ prime, by musicians with more showmanship than
taste (mid-nineteenth-century organist Louis Lefébure-Wély
being a particularly gruesome example of the breed), the contribution that
Saint-Saëns himself made stands out all the more. A man who writes, as he
wrote, “To me art is form above all else”,14 may be legitimately accused of a
constipated outlook; but such a dogma is a fairly good guarantee that he will
never perpetrate outright trash. Another comment of his – which displays a
healthy fear of coming to fall below his own lofty standards – deserves to be
cherished by everyone, everywhere, who must perform before an audience: “How
lucky”, he mused at the age of seventy-seven, “are those who never play well in
public, for, as the years go by, they only play less well and no one notices!”15
NOTES
1. Joseph Sobran,
“Cheney and Chappaquiddick”, Sobran’s, 14
February 2006, p. 11.
2. Mark
Freer, “Benedict XVI, Mozart and the quest for beauty”, AD2000, April
2006, p. 12-13.
3. Gabriel
Fauré, “Camille Saint-Saëns”, Revue Musicale,
February 1922, pp. 97-100, at p. 98.
4. Brian
Rees, Camille Saint-Saëns: A Life (Chatto
& Windus, London, 1999), p. 153.
5. Stephen
Studd, Saint-Saëns: A Critical Biography (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Cranbury, New Jersey,
1999), p. 36.
6. James
Harding, Saint-Saëns and His Circle (Chapman & Hall, London, 1965),
p. 63.
7. Studd, p. 198.
8. Studd, p. 199.
9. Rees,
p. 392.
10. Harding, p. 225.
11. Rees, p. 364.
12. Edward Higginbottom,
“Organ Music and the Liturgy”, in Nicholas Thistlethwaite
and Geoffrey Webber (eds.), The Cambridge
Companion to the Organ (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003), pp.
130-147, esp. p. 141.
13. Rollin Smith, Saint-Saëns and the Organ
(Pendragon Press, Stuyvesant, New York State, 1992),
pp. 82-83, 294.
14. Camille Saint-Saëns, Outspoken Essays on
Music, trans. Fred Rothwell (Kegan
Paul, London, 1922), p. 4.
15. Smith, p. 182.
A selective discography of sacred Saint-Saëns Considering how rarely Saint-Saëns' bigger choral compositions are heard in toto live, they have done rather well on CD, especially the Christmas Oratorio. Preferences as to recordings will depend largely on what other work, if any, you want coupled with it (some versions fob you off with the oratorio alone). The Christmas Oratorio version on the Capriccio label is coupled with liturgical music by Mendelssohn; and the version on the Laser-Light label comes, eccentrically enough, with a German-language performance of Britten's Ceremony of Carols. But Saint-Saëns makes most sense when fitted out with more Saint-Saëns. So the winner by default is the release from a little-known company called Cantate, with the Stuttgart Bach Choir and instrumental accompaniment, wheich supplements the oratorio with the same composer's very early (Opus 4) Mass setting. Choice is still richer when it comes to Saint-Saëns' organ music. Austria's Arts Nova firm has produced a four-CD set of reverything the composer wrote for the instrument, with Stefan Bleicher as organist. The less affluent or simply less enthusiastic listener can make do with single CDs from Naxos (played by Robert Delcamp), BIS (played by Hans Fagius), and, in more recent times, a Hyperion anthology played by Andrew John Smith which appeared in July 2008, just before this Oriens issue went to press. – RJS |
