Cello Concerto 1

Charles Camille Saint-Saëns, born in Paris, was a poorly child brought up, after the early death of his father, by his mother and aunt. According to biographer Arthur Hervey, "The two women concentrated all their affection upon the little child whose tiny frame was already said to contain germs of the same dread disease which had carried off his father. Fresh country air having been prescribed, the baby was put to nurse at Corbeil for two years at the end of which he was brought back to Paris." Having discovered a liking for picking out notes on the piano when just two and a half years old, Saint-Saëns showed astonishing precocity in playing the piano part of a Beethoven violin sonata two years later. At seven, he began to study piano, harmony, Latin and geometry, making his formal debut as a pianist at the age of ten in the Salle Pleyel in Paris playing a difficult programme completely from memory. After this amazing feat, his guardians wisely withdrew him from the hothouse world of child prodigies, sending him to the Paris Conservatoire to study the organ. In 1852 he received his first appointment as organist at the church of St Merry, moving onwards and upwards to the Church of the Madeleine, Paris' most fashionable church, five years later.

Meanwhile he was writing music and finding, as most composers do, that becoming accepted was not easy. However, he was successful over a hundred other entrants in a competition sponsored by the Imperial Government to celebrate the International Exhibition of 1867. Berlioz, who was one of the panel of judges, wrote to a friend praising his young colleague Camille Saint-Saëns as "one of the greatest musicians of our epoch." A year later his first opera, produced at the National Lyrique Opera, achieved only moderate success yet, helped by the advocacy of Liszt, Samson and Delilah was presented in Weimar, eventually becoming his most famous opera. In the years following the Franco-Prussian war, Saint-Saëns produced a prodigious number of works including a Requiem finished in eight days and sadly prophetic of personal tragedy. Shortly afterwards his two-year-old elder son fell to his death from a window and his second son, a child of seven months, also died.

As confirmation of Saint-Saëns international recognition, he received an honorary degree from Cambridge University in 1873 at the same time as Bruch, Tchaikovsky and Grieg. Always a great traveller, he visited South America, the USA, Saigon and was present at a Jubilee Festival in his honour in London in 1913 before coming to rest in his beloved Algeria aged eighty-five. In 1871, just a few months after the siege of Paris was relieved, Saint-Saëns founded the Société Nationale de Musique with the particular aim of promoting new French music unburdened by the historical weight of Germanic influence.

Among the first of these new works was his own cello concerto cast in more of a serious vein than his earlier piano and violin concertos. The concerto was written in 1872 and given its first performance a year later by the dedicatee Auguste Tolbecque with the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra. The finely orchestrated score solves the problem of pitting a lower-toned instrument against a symphony orchestra; only rarely is the orchestra given full voice and that when the soloist is resting. The formal structure of the concerto is not so clear-cut as in many standard symphonic works with the music being laid out as one continous whole. Certainly there are distinct movements: they are linked by the thematic material established at the beginning of the piece ensuring a reassuring familiarity to the concerto. Contrast is given by the delightful minuet-like second section and the final pages of the music which conjure up a suitably triumphant conclusion.