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Camille Saint-Saens.

Article Excerpt
Camille Saint-Saens. By Jean Gallois. (Collection Musique/Musicologie.) Sprimont: Mardaga, 2004. [382 p. ISBN 2-87009-851-0. [euro]36.] Index.

After decades of relative neglect, French music and musical life of the late nineteenth century has in recent years become the subject of renewed interest. Scholars have begun to reexamine the rather simplistic generalizations about the music, institutions, and major figures of this period that had been codified during the first decades of the twentieth century and then passed down without question for several generations. Our understanding of one of the most important and interesting periods in French musical history has, as a result, grown substantially.

One of the most important manifestations of this scholarly interest has been the recent publication of major new biographies devoted to composers such as Cesar Franck, Gabriel Faure, Vincent d'Indy, and Ernest Chausson, each of which has contributed much to our increasingly more realistic and nuanced view of French music and musical life of the later nineteenth century. Arguably, the most important French musician of this time was Charles-Camille Saint-Saens; it is thus not surprising that he has been the subject of no fewer than three books over the past decade, two English-language biographies (by Brian Rees and Stephen Studd) issued in 1999, and now a new work by Jean Gallois, a prolific French writer whose earlier subjects range from Lully through Schumann and Wagner to Franck and Chausson. (Gallois's 1994 biography of Chausson was awarded the Grand Prix Bernier of the French Academie des Beaux-Arts.)...