A Concerto Which Spans the Emotional Universe

The work I have been listening to with as much pleasure as ever the last few days is one of the most surprising victims of an egregious double standard in the world of music.

This double standard decrees that the Great Composers are always great, even on their off days, while the Not-So-Great Composers are never great, even at their finest full stretch.

Utter hogwash.  Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert -- to name only three Great Composers -- all set pen to paper for numerous little potboilers and money spinners, and lavished little or none of their greatest gifts on such things as contradances, minuets, and folk song settings.  I'm sure they'd all kill themselves laughing at the holy reverence with which such chips from the workbench are often played and discussed in our times.

On the opposite side of the great divide, Mendelssohn and Saint-Saens are but two examples of composers whose art is often spoken of with an upturned, sneering nose by snobbish commentators.  Yet both composers achieved truly moving results in some of their finest works.

Camille Saint-Saens published five piano concertos in all.  They've never achieved much more than to hover on the periphery of the repertoire (at least in my lifetime), with the Fourth receiving rather more performances in recent years than any of the others.  I may be called on this, but I strongly suspect that these works have been slowly dropping off the radar in recent years -- even to the extent that there may be fewer recordings of them available now than was the case when I first heard them as a teenager.  

I submit that the time has come for a fair reappraisal of the Second Concerto, in G Minor, Op. 22.  It was composed in 1868 when Saint-Saens was 33 years old, and had already developed a strong musical personality all his own.  In many ways, I think this concerto is the perfect introduction to the wide-ranging art of this complex musical personality.

Saint-Saens was a composer who, much like his very different contemporary Brahms, lived with one foot firmly planted in the musical past.  Living and working in the height of the Romantic era, both men remained by temperament classicists, although taking much advantage of the harmonic and instrumental innovations of their times.

Nothing speaks to this classical pedigree quite so much as the fact that each of the three movements of this concerto -- wildly diverse in mood as they are -- is built on the classic sonata-form structure of first theme group, second theme group, development section, and recapitulation of themes.

This concerto opens in as classical a mood as you could possibly imagine: arising from a thunderous octave deep in the bass, the piano soloist plays a winding, majestic, almost improvisational cadenza, which owes a strong debt of style to Bach's organ fantasias -- particularly the famous G Minor fantasia (note the same key).  Nor is this surprising when we recall that Saint-Saens was one of the most notable French organist-composers of the late 1800s and early 1900s.  A brief eruption of the orchestra with a grand cadence is succeeded by a transition to the first actual main theme of the movement, a slow, mournful melody for piano which is then joined by orchestra.  

Although the original andante sostenuto tempo is in due course modified by more rapid passages in the development, with virtuoso fingerwork for the soloist, the mournful mood is never truly laid aside -- nor is the majestic aura which gives this music something of the flavour and dignity of a state or royal funeral.  The recapitulation brings the saddest, most world-weary sounds as the orchestra reprises that main theme and its sequels, slowly growing quieter and quieter until the music eventually dies away to a gentle recapitulation of the opening cadenza, this time played by piano accompanied by soft sustained notes in the orchestra.  Then, fortissimo, the grand cadence figure brings the movement to an abrupt but timely end.

The stylistic diversity of this concerto prompted Polish composer Zygmunt Stojowski to quip that it "begins with Bach and ends with Offenbach."  Actually, it's the second movement, a  lively, jolly scherzo, which brings the style of Offenbach ("the Mozart of the Boulevards") to mind.  Indeed, the piano part in this delightful confection is marked leggieramente (lightly).  Saint-Saens certainly had a fun-loving side to his personality, seen of course in the famous Carnival of the Animals but also apparent in such works as the Septet for trumpet, piano, and strings.  This triple-time firework set piece is in fact a miniature but well-organized sonata form movement, with a contrasting theme in the form of a lolloping march doing duty for a second subject while still appearing to be (at first blush) the trio of a scherzo-and-trio form.  As so often with this composer, apparent simplicity conceals considerable structural and musical skill and subtlety.  At any rate, the second movement in its light-hearted E-flat major jollity, forms a perfect foil to the darker solemnity of the first movement.

The finale, again a sonata form in G minor, holds to similar dimensions as the second movement, so that the second and third together match in weight and duration the first.  Inattentive listeners are apt to dismiss this finale as another lightweight faux pas, but this furious tarantella is every bit as apt to its place as significant predecessors like the finales of Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony or Schubert's C minor piano sonata, D.958.  As with both of those distinguished forerunners, this finale remains firmly grounded in its minor key right to the finish line.

The immense propulsive energy of this music is best served by a pianist and conductor who understand that it is propulsive, and not a mere cream puff.  When the finale is played with that object in mind, it gains much more weight and strength -- and, by no means incidentally, shows off the immense skill of Saint-Saens the virtuoso.  The closing pages seize upon that motoric energy and use it to drive the piano through furious cascades of notes leading to the staccato final chords in G minor.