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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 June 2019
From the 1850s, Saint-Saëns regularly employed cyclic form: the practice of establishing large-scale relationships (especially in symphonies, chamber works, etc.) by reintroducing materials from earlier movements in later ones. Nonetheless, he became weary of such procedures following the Third Symphony (1886) for cultural-political reasons: Franck's most important cyclic works date from the 1880s, d'Indy declared la forme cyclique a historically determined canon, and period writers considered cyclic form a franckiste hallmark – all while Saint-Saëns's relationship with Franck's followers deteriorated.
In this essay, I argue that Saint-Saëns's First String Quartet (1899) ‘misreads’ his rivals’ approaches to cyclic form as exemplified by d'Indy's Second Quartet of 1897 (in which a four-note cell suffuses most themes) and Franck's Quartet (in which themes from previous movements climactically accumulate in the final coda). Saint-Saëns's themes abound with miniscule motivic connections, which catch listeners’ ears but seem too fleeting and insubstantial to register as binding elements comparable to d'Indy's pellucid cell. Such relationships straddle the threshold of apprehensibility, and they produce a distinctive affective quality: where d'Indy fosters perceptions of genetic relationships, Saint-Saëns elicits a sensation of déjà entendu. The final coda similarly teases by reintroducing fragments from the slow introduction, encouraging anticipation of a Franck-like apotheosis. What follows is a mirage of one: timbres and textures of previous movements return, but incipient citations of themes dissolve. Where Franck delivers a full-blooded synthesis, Saint-Saëns follows through with trompe l'oreille.
Saint-Saëns's misreadings of franckiste technique point to broader aesthetic conflicts. D'Indy enlisted cyclic form as a means to monumentality, which served the enseignement he esteemed as art's purpose. Déjà entendu and trompe l'oreille, on the other hand, register as classicising attributes which diverge from d'Indy's didactic objectives and which Saint-Saëns grouped under the rubric of ‘charm’, a conduit to what he considered an ideologically neutral ‘aesthetic sense’.
1 Pierre Lalo, ‘La Musique’, Le Temps, 18 January 1900. The quartet had received a private audition the previous September for Saint-Saëns, and another for his publisher Durand, by ensembles respectively led by the violin virtuosos Eugène Ysaÿe and Pablo Sarasate. See Charles Malherbe's programme note for a performance in the Salle Erard on 1 March 1911, in Concerts Durand consacrés à la musique française moderne 1910–1913: Programmes et notices analytiques (Paris: Durand, N.D.).
2 Neitzel, Otto, Camille Saint-Saëns (Berlin: Verlagsellschaft für Literatur und Kunst, 1899), 87Google Scholar.
3 Lalo, ‘La Musique’. Brian Rees, the composer's leading English-language biographer, recounts a similar anecdote: ‘A young musician, Fernand Le Borne, brought him a string quartet which had received a measure of praise from certain teachers. Saint-Saëns hurled the pages on the floor, saying it was crazy to attempt the most difficult form of music at the outset of one's career. He went out, slamming several doors, leaving his mother to console the tearful student.’ Rees, Brian, Camille Saint-Saëns: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999), 336Google Scholar.
4 On Saint-Saëns's renown as a performer, and its relationships with his fame as a composer, see Gooley, Dana, ‘Saint-Saëns and the Performer's Prestige’, in Camille Saint-Saëns and His World, ed. Pasler, Jann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 56–84Google Scholar.
5 Saint-Saëns to August Durand, 29 April 1899, quoted in Gallois, Jean, Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns (Sprimont: Mardaga, 2004), 311–12Google Scholar.
6 Gallois, Jean, ‘Les Quatuor à cordes de l’école de Franck’, in Le Quatuor à cordes en France de 1750 à nos jours (Paris: Association française pour le patrimoine musical, 1995), 121Google Scholar.
7 For a nuanced overview, see Jann Pasler, ‘Saint-Saëns and d'Indy in Dialogue’, in Camille Saint-Saëns and His World, 287–303. See also Gallois, Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns, 262–5.
8 Saint-Saëns, Camille, ‘Introduction’, in Harmonie et mélodie (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1885), i–xxxiGoogle Scholar. See also ‘L’École française de musique’, Le Voltaire, 6 March 1881, 1; and ‘L'Illusion wagnérienne’, La Revue de Paris, 1 April 1899, 449–58.
9 Saint-Saëns, Harmonie et mélodie, xxii–xxiii.
10 Michael Strasser, ‘Ars Gallica: The Société nationale de musique and its Role in French Musical Life, 1871–1891’ (PhD diss., University of Illinois, 1998), 369–443.
11 Saint-Saëns, Camille, Les Idées de M. Vincent d'Indy (Paris: Pierre Lafitte, 1919), 38–9Google Scholar.
12 The letter appeared in Le Monde musical, 30 August 1898, 154. The monument was inaugurated in 1905 and still stands in the small park facing the Saint-Clotilde Basilica, where Franck served as organist for nearly 40 years. In 1907, Saint-Saëns would witness the establishment his own monument, rare for a living composer. This statue fell victim to World War Two, melted down by German engineers to produce armaments. See Rees, Camille Saint-Saëns, 378–80.
13 Saint-Saëns to Durand, 12 January 1900 and 5 October 1900, in Ratner, Sabina Teller, Camille Saint-Saëns, 1835–1921: A Thematic Catalogue of His Complete Works, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 213Google Scholar.
14 Hugues Imbert, ‘Concerts Colonne’, Le Guide musicale, 31 December 1899.
15 Although Saint-Saëns boycotted the Société nationale after his resignation, the organization nonetheless continued to perform his music occasionally. See Michael Strasser, ‘Providing Direction for French Music: Saint-Saëns and the Société nationale’, in Camille Saint-Saëns and His World, 115–16.
16 E.T.H, ‘Correspondances: Buenos-Ayres’, Le Guide musicale, 2 September 1900; and ‘Correspondances: St. Petersburg’, Le Guide musicale, 17 November 1901.
17 Ratner, Camille Saint-Saëns, 211–12.
18 Baumann, Emile, Les Grandes formes de la musique: l'oeuvre de Camille Saint-Saëns (Paris: Société d’éditions littéraires et artistiques, 1905), 207Google Scholar.
19 See, for example, Chantavoine, Jean, Camille Saint-Saëns (Paris: Richard-Masse, 1947), 109Google Scholar; Rees, Camille Saint-Saëns, 336–7; Studd, Stephen, Saint-Saëns: A Critical Biography (London: Cygnus Arts, 1999), 221Google Scholar; and Gut, Serge and Pistone, Danièle, La Musique de chambre en France, 1870 à 1918 (Paris: H. Champion, 1985), 146Google Scholar.
20 See Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973)Google Scholar, and idem, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975)Google Scholar. According to these works, poetry in the modern era is inherently intertextual. The successful (or ‘strong’) poet, working in a belated historical position, ‘always proceeds by a misreading of [a] prior poem, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic influence, which is to say the main tradition of Western poetry since the Renaissance, is a history of … self-serving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism’ (The Anxiety of Influence, 30). In Bloom's classic analysis, a poet thereby enacts an Oedipal struggle with a looming forebear in order to claim canonic status. Nonetheless, the notion of a text confrontationally recasting another text (or other texts) in order to assert its priority symbolically seems equally applicable to competitive contexts among contemporaries.
21 For an overview of the breadth of formal procedures typically grouped under the rubric of cyclic form, see Taylor, Benedict, Mendelssohn, Time, and Memory: The Romantic Conception of Cyclic Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 9–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 For an account highlighting the unusual temporal properties of this theme's much belated tonic-key recapitulation – an expectation ‘finally fulfilled when almost forgotten’ – see Taylor, Benedict, The Melody of Time: Music and Temporality in the Romantic Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 217–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Quotation, 217.
23 For a fuller account, see Deruchie, Andrew, ‘Saint-Saëns's Cyclic Forms’, in Formal Functions in Perspective, ed. Moortele, Steven Vande, Deslauriers, Julie Pedneault and Martin, Nathan (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2015), 123–61Google Scholar. On Liszt's four-movements-in-one designs, see Moortele, Steven Vande, Two-Dimensional Sonata Form: Form and Cycle in Single-Movement Instrumental Works by Liszt, Strauss, Schoenberg, and Zemlinsky (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009), 23–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar and 35–57 (on the B-Minor Sonata), 59–71 (on Tasso), and 71–81 (Die Ideale).
24 Vincent d'Indy, ‘De Bach à Beethoven’, Revue musicale de Lyon, 13 November 1904, 37–9; 20 November 1904, 49–51; and 27 November 1904, 61–5; and d'Indy, César Franck (Paris: Alcan, 1906)Google Scholar. See also, by d'Indy's friend, colleague and eventual biographer Léon Vallas, ‘Le Quatuor en mi de G. M. Witkowski’, Revue musicale de Lyon, 2 March 1904, and ‘La Symphonie en ré mineur de G-M Witkowski’, Revue musicale de Lyon, 22 May 1904, 341–3.
25 Wheeldon, Marianne, ‘Debussy and La Sonate cyclique’, Journal of Musicology 22 (2005): 645–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Quotation, 658. In the introduction to a 1948 collection of essays on Grieg, Gerald Abraham persuasively argued that Debussy modelled other aspects of his quartet upon that of Grieg, also in G minor. Abraham, Gerald, ed., Grieg: A Symposium (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1948), 7–8Google Scholar. See also Strasser, Michael, ‘Grieg, the Société nationale, and the Origins of Debussy's String Quartet’, in Berlioz and Debussy: Sources, Contexts and Legacies, ed. Kelly, Barbara and Murphy, Kerry (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 103–16Google Scholar.
26 D'Indy lays out his precepts of cyclic form in the Cours de composition, vol. 2, bk. 1 (Paris: Durand, 1909), 375–87Google Scholar, and develops them in analyses of chamber works and symphonies throughout the two ‘books’ of the Cours’s second volume.
27 D'Indy, Cours de composition, vol. 2, bk. 1, 423–6; quotations, 423.
28 Deruchie, Andrew, The French Symphony at the Fin de Siècle: Style, Culture, and the Symphonic Tradition (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013), 156–64Google Scholar.
29 D'Indy, Cours de composition, vol. 2, bk. 2 (Paris: Durand, 1933), 267–8.
30 D'Indy, Cours de composition, vol. 2, bk. 2, 266–7.
31 Servières, Georges, Saint-Saëns (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1923), 115Google Scholar.
32 Dahlhaus, Carl, Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to His Music, trans. Whittall, Mary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)Google Scholar.
33 Taylor, Mendelssohn, Time, and Memory, and Puri, Michael, Ravel the Decadent: Memory, Sublimation, and Desire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1–51Google Scholar.
34 Brown, Alan S., The Déjà vu Experience (New York, Psychology Press, 2004), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ender, Evelyne, ‘“Déjà Vu” or Memory-Science Between Gerard de Nerval and Marcel Proust’, Science in Context 18 (2005): 584CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 Freud, Sigmund, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (London: Unwin, 1920), 320Google Scholar.
36 Brown, The Déjà vu Experience, 16.
37 Sno, Herman and Linszen, Don, ‘The Déjà vu Experience: Remembrance of Things Past?’, The American Journal of Psychiatry 147 (1990): 1587–95Google ScholarPubMed.
38 Humphrey, George, The Story of Man's Mind (Boston: Small, Maynard, & Co., 1923), 140Google Scholar.
39 D'Indy's Second Symphony offers an especially prominent example. The finale, like Franck's, opens with fragments from the three previous movements and progresses to a magnificent chorale in the coda featuring contrapuntal combinations of the two principal cyclic motives.
40 Saint-Saëns to Durand, 16 April 1899, Mediathèque Gustav Mahler, Fond Saint-Saëns. All subsequently cited letters from Saint-Saëns to his publisher are held in this collection.
41 The Département de la musique, Bibliothèque nationale de France holds both the fair copy (MS891) and the manuscript sent to Durand (MS737). The latter now includes the three pages containing the final presto, marked by Durand with indications to the engraver about how this music was to be soldered to the rest of the finale.
42 Saint-Saëns to Durand, 18 April 1899.
43 Few letters from Durand to Saint-Saëns in March and April 1899 have come to light, but in one note dated 27 April, the publisher outlined some of the remaining steps in the publication process, emphasizing the timeline: ‘Here is how we will proceed. We will extract each instrument [i.e. the parts] and give them, and the full score, to the engraver. Then we will correct the first proofs; when you return in late July all that will be ready for you to look over. At this point, despite the difficulties of the season (the holidays), we'll try to put this quartet together. Playing through it will probably reveal mistakes, for some always remain. And all that will be ready for the opening of the season in October’. The letter is reproduced in Elizabeth Harkins, ‘The Chamber Music of Camille Saint-Saëns’ (PhD diss., New York University, 1976), 191.
44 Saint-Saëns sent Durand at least eight letters about the quartet between 20 February and 7 April, including four after 30 March, an unusual volume even for this prolific correspondent. All seek to reassure the publisher of the work's immanent delivery, and some seem to make excuses for delays. On 30 March, for instance, he informed Durand he would have already finished the composition had it not been for ‘the damned flu’ and promised its prompt completion; on 4 April he averred that only ‘a few tiny touch-ups’ remained; on 7 April he claimed to have been re-copying the score, a task which should not have taken nine days. The letter of 16 April accompanying the manuscript asserts that while producing the copy he had made ‘numerous changes, work that has proven fruitful’. This final letter exaggerates: comparison of the fair copy to the dispatched manuscript reveals only a handful of superficial alterations.
45 d'Indy, Vincent, Cours de composition musicale, vol. 1 (Paris: Durand, 1903), 9Google Scholar.
46 See Steven Huebner's analysis of d'Indy's symphonic poem Istar, ‘“Striptease” as Ideology’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review 1/2 (2004): 3–25. For an account of how the Second Symphony articulates d'Indy's ideal of progress rooted in tradition, see Deruchie, The French Symphony, 185–213.
47 d'Indy, Cours de composition, vol. 2, bk. 1, 384–5. For d'Indy's leitmotivic interpretations of Wagner's operas, see Cours de composition, vol. 3 (Paris: Durand, 1950), 143–88Google Scholar.
48 Hart, Brian, ‘Wagner and the Franckiste “Message Symphony”’, in Von Wagner zum Wagnérisme: Musik, Literatur, Kunst, Politik, ed. Fauser, Annegret and Schwartz, Manuela (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1999), 315–38Google Scholar.
49 René de Castéra, ‘La Symphonie en si bémol de M. Vincent d'Indy’, L'Occident, April 1904, 172–8.
50 d'Indy, Cours de composition, vol. 2, bk. 1, 8–13.
51 d'Indy, Cours de composition, 378.
52 d'Indy, Cours de composition, 376.
53 d'Indy, Cours de composition, 377–8.
54 Rehding, Alexander, Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar and passim.
55 Pasler, Jann, ‘Cross Dressing in Saint-Saëns's Le Rouet d'Omphale: Ambiguities of Gender and Politics’, in Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, ed. Fuller, Sophie and Whitesell, Lloyd (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 191–15Google Scholar.
56 Camille Saint-Saëns, Les Idées de M. Vincent d'Indy, 6.
57 Saint-Saëns, , ‘L'Art pour l'art’, in École buissonière (Pierre Lafitte, 1913), 137Google Scholar.
58 Saint-Saëns, ‘L'Art pour l'art’, 140.
59 Saint-Saëns, ‘L'Art pour l'art’, 139.
60 Saint-Saëns, Camille, ‘Charles Gounod’, in Saint-Saëns: On Music and Musicians, ed. and trans. Nichols, Roger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 139Google Scholar.
61 Saint-Saëns, ‘Musical Trends’, in Saint-Saëns: On Music and Musicians, 44.
62 Saint-Saëns, ‘Charles Gounod’, 139.
63 Pasler, Jann, ‘Melisande's Charm and the Truth of Her Music’, in Rethinking Debussy, ed. Antokoletz, Elliot and Wheeldon, Marianne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 56Google Scholar. Also see Pasler, Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France (Oakland: University of California Press, 2009), 377–82Google Scholar.
64 Saint-Saëns, ‘Harmonie et mélody’, 13.
65 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, Music and The Ineffable, trans. Abbate, Carolyn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, quotations, 50 and 125.
66 Saint-Saëns, ‘L'Art pour l'art’, 137–8, and Harmonie et mélodie, 12.
67 Saint-Saëns, Les Idées de M. Vincent d'Indy, 39.
68 Saint-Saëns, Harmonie et mélodie, 14.
69 See, for example, Pasler, ‘Saint-Saëns and d'Indy in Dialogue’, and Gail Hilson Wuldo's Introduction to d'Indy, Vincent, Course in Musical Composition, vol. 1, trans. Wuldo, Gail Hilson (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 12–15Google Scholar.
70 Leon Botstein, ‘Beyond the Conceits of the Avant-Garde: Saint-Saëns, Romain Rolland, and the Musical Culture of the Nineteenth Century’, in Camille Saint-Saëns and His World, 373.
71 Saint-Saëns, Harmonie et mélodie, xxviii.