Who Was This Mamby-Pamby Mediocrity?

When I first heard Saint­-Saens Carnival of Animals as a child (Ogden Nash's verses and all), I dismissed the whole enterprise with a derogatory sniffle as “children's music.” Later I stumbled onto his Danse Macabre. Compared with Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, Saint-Saens sounded far too civilized and not at all macabre enough. Who was this mamby-pamby mediocrity! ... I asked. Next to the heaven-storming fire-breathing Berlioz, he sounded like treacle, and watered-down treacle besides.

Even then I realized that Saint­ Saens music was expertly composed and handsomely orchestrated, but to me, that wasn't what music was all about. “Facility,” in my mind, was equated with “facile.” Beethoven waged war against the aristocracy, Mussorgsky and Shostakovich took us into the darker realms of our own psyches, Debussy (a composer whom Saint-Saens detested), created a virtually new musical language. This guy Saint-Saens merely continued to grind out his politely backward ­looking and unimaginative stuff until his death in 1921 at the age of 86 (the revolutionary Debussy had already been dead for three years!). Like the long-lived Glazunov, he seemed (to my youthfully radical way of thinking) indeed a pathetic figure -- a dinosaur completely out of touch with the forward march of musical history.

As an overly serious student of the violin, I eventually encountered his hypnotic Havanaise. It was a beguilingly sexy piece, full of Latin exoticism, unforgettable melody, and perfectly idiomatic for the violin. It led me to his incomparable opera Samson et Dalila. My own hormonal development enabled me to see a hitherto unknown facet of Saint­-Saens' music, and his magnificent Third Symphony finally hooked me for good.

Four decades later, after I have plumbed the tranquil art of both Haydn and Mozart, Saint-Saens seems pretty fine indeed -- a purveyor of highly civilized and elegantly wrought music that both entertains and enchants. After listening to this lovely recital of solo piano pieces played by Anton Nel, a Naumburg winner who made his auspicious debut with a brilliantly played collection of Haydn sonatas I'm once again struck by how full of gracious equanimity, and therefore all the more subtle and pungently flavorful, the music of this French master really is.