Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)
Fantasie for violin and harp, op. 107 (1907)
In the near-century since his death, it’s been somewhat fashionable to dismiss the enormous catalogue of Camille Saint-Saëns. Indeed, during the last decades of his long life, Saint-Saëns’ musical conservatism made him something of an anachronism, but to dismiss him out of hand is to take a rather careless attitude. Yes, his output is sprawling and uneven – Saint-Saëns, himself, was aware of this – but it’s filled with unduly neglected gems and, at its best, it’s very fine stuff, indeed.
One of these neglected works is the episodic Fantasie for violin and harp, written in 1907. It falls into seven sections, over the course of which both instruments alternate leading and accompanimental roles. For most of the piece, the character is lyrical, even as the violin opens with a fragmented melody; it’s not long before the flowing melodies (and virtuosic tricks) so familiar from the composer of Danse macabre and Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso assert themselves. Perhaps the most interesting sections of the Fantasie come over its second half. One is a long passage in 5/4 which is filled with flourishes for both instruments and includes the violin accompanying the harp underneath its bravura arpeggiations. The subsequent section offers a proto-Minimalist motive in the harp – a four-bar phrase that, in pitch content at least, never varies – underneath a wonderfully paced, virtuosic essay for the violin. And the end of the Fantasie again offers a striking balance between the two instruments, first passing off melodies and gestures, then exchanging arpeggios over the closing bars as the music fades away.
None of this, of course, is groundbreaking in the ways that new music by Ravel, Debussy, Schoenberg, Mahler, Stravinsky, Szymanowski, and other leading composers of the first decade of the 20th century were. But, at the end of the day, none of that really matters. Above all, Saint-Saëns was a craftsman, sometimes a highly inspired one. This Fantasie suggests just how fertile and active his then-seventy-two-year-old mind was. And in 1907, Saint-Saëns actually wasn’t done breaking new ground: the next year, he became the first major composer to pen a film score.
© Jonathan Blumhofer
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