Carnival of the Animals
Our beast-by-beast guide to Saint-saëns’s magical musical menagerie
contained structures as if it’s the easiest thing in the world (though technically it’s anything but). There’s a boulevardier flair about him, an unfailing fount of melodic invention with a sleekly debonair exterior. All this seems to have had little to do with the composer’s inner self. ‘Art is intended to create beauty and character,’ he wrote. ‘Feeling only comes afterwards and art can very well do without it. In fact, it is very much better off when it does.’
When he was 26, Saint-saëns took up a teaching post at the École Niedermeyer, a Parisian institution that trained church musicians – the only such job he ever held. Here he soon found a star of a different kind: a pupil from the south of France, shy and underconfident, named Gabriel Fauré. Soon the lad was among a select handful of students who were sometimes invited chez Saint-saëns for home-cooked meals and rooftop stargazing; it was thanks to Saintsaëns’s encouragement that Fauré first ventured to put pen to manuscript paper.
Fauré left some touching reminiscences about Saint-saëns’s influence at school. The brilliant musician was paid as a professor of piano, not composition, but he encouraged the boys to compose in any case and, Fauré wrote, he read their work ‘with a curiosity and care that only masterpieces would have merited. Then he distributed praise and blame, and accompanied them with examples and advice which impressed us, filled us with wonder and courage.’
Saint-saëns was not yet the jaded, cantankerous character he later became. He encouraged not only serious pieces, but fripperies too, music for farces or for the popular parlour game of charades, at which he was notably adept himself. At the salon of Pauline Viardot, the great diva and composer, Saint-saëns took part in a scene in which he portrayed a corpse, wearing pink tights, while Viardot’s close friend, the novelist Ivan Turgenev, played a doctor preparing to dissect him.
Life at the École Niedermeyer probably needed light relief. Fauré recalled practising the piano in a room also containing many other students practising on other pianos; Saint-saëns’s inclusion of ‘Pianists’ in the animal kingdom could have been a natural spin-off. Some other pieces for Carnival of the Animals are thought to have begun fizzing into life here, intended for the young teacher’s adoring students.
It was years, however, before the music saw the light of day. Like many great comedians, Saint-saëns concealed behind his humour more than his fair share of tragedy. For a start, he was almost certainly homosexual, but tried for years to build a family. At 40 he married Marie Truffot, some 20 years his junior. Living with the composer’s domineering mother in a fourth-floor apartment, which can have been no picnic, they soon had two infant sons. But in 1878, the elder boy, two-yearold André, fell out of a window and was killed instantly. The grief-stricken Marie
became unable to feed the six-month-old baby, who also then died. Somehow the couple limped on together for three more years. Then one day, while on holiday, Saint-saëns simply went out and didn’t come back. He never saw Marie again.
He vanished a second time, not long after his mother’s death, in 1888. It was some while before he turned up living under an assumed name in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. Further travels took him to north Africa, inspiring such works as his fantasy for piano and orchestra Africa, and his Piano Concerto No. 5, the Egyptian. Perhaps this restless existence was a bid to escape the past, or the pursuit of a life in lands where he could
Parts of Carnival sprang naturally from explorations of French baroque
more easily and anonymously fulfil his personal predilections.
First, though, in 1885-86, Saint-saëns found himself caught up in a fierce controversy, a horribly convoluted business full of misunderstandings and senseless exaggeration, on the small matter of Wagner. Together with colleagues including the singing teacher Romain Bussine, Fauré, Duparc, Massenet and others, in the wake of the 1870-71 Francoprussian War, Saint-saëns had started a new Societé Nationale de Musique, aiming to provide a platform for new French work, especially chamber music, and develop a French school of composition strong enough to shake off German influences, especially Wagner’s.
Perhaps it was inevitable that Saint-saëns was therefore perceived in Germany as an antiwagnerian. It was truer to say that he admired Wagner without feeling the need to use his methods himself – but perhaps that was too nuanced for such a time. A tour he made to Berlin and Cassel went down like a lead balloon, sparking public and printed factionalism for and against him. After a better experience performing in Vienna and Prague, he slunk off to an Austrian village to get some rest and work on his Symphony No. 3. What he emerged with was something very different – The Carnival of the Animals.
Parts of the piece sprang naturally from the Societé Nationale de Musique’s explorations of the French baroque for inspiration. The era of the claveçinists was full of evocations of birdsong: Couperin’s Le coucou and Rameau’s Le rappel des oiseaux are just a few examples of the former. Still, this wasn’t purely a French pursuit. There are precedents everywhere, if nothing quite so concentrated as Saint-saëns’s effort. We can find barking dogs and spring-happy birds in Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, donkey sounds in Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a priceless Duetto buffo di due gatti (the ‘Cat Duet’) attributed to Rossini, bird-calls galore in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, and a wood-bird in Wagner’s Siegfried – to say nothing of the swan in Lohengrin. During the pro- and anti-wagner fuss, Saint-saëns had been protesting to Angelo Neumann, director of the opera house in Prague, that he had been one of the first advocates for Lohengrin. Soon he had a swan of his own.
‘The Swan’ was the first of the Carnival pieces to be written, and for a long time the only one published. It was a retirement gift for Saint-saëns’s cellist friend Charles Joseph Lebouc, who played it at the complete Carnival’s first private hearing in March 1886. The work was played for mid-lenten celebrations a few days later by the chamber music society La Trompette, and in April a performance was staged at Pauline Viardot’s salon in the presence of Liszt – a long-standing friend and supporter – who had expressed great interest in hearing it.
Sensing the buzz building up around the Carnival, Saint-saëns decided
against publishing it, fearing, probably correctly, that it would become too popular for his own good. Fortunately, in his will he permitted its posthumous publication. A printed version finally emerged in 1922, the year after his death. In 1949 Ogden Nash wrote a set of verses which can be read between the pieces; others have since followed suit, although the work stands perfectly well on its own.
Saint-saëns died aged 86 in December 1921. His favourite companion in his last years was his poodle, Dalila. Closing a life packed with incident, celebrity, controversy and tragedy, it seems the composer had decided he preferred animals to people. In his philosophical tract, Problèmes et Mystères, he wrote: ‘The joys which nature gives to us and does not withhold entirely from even the most abandoned among us – the discovery of new truths, the enjoyment of art, the spectacle of suffering eased and attempts to cure it as far as possible – all these are enough for the happiness of life. One is inclined to fear that everything else is madness and illusion.’
THE CARNIVAL: BEAST BY BEAST
The Carnival involves a bizarre instrumental line-up: two pianos (played at the premiere by Saint-saëns himself and Louis Diémer), string quartet, double bass, flute/ piccolo (Paul Taffanel its first performer), clarinet, glass harmonica and xylophone. Whatever made him choose this odd ensemble, it works wonders, furnishing him with a terrific palette of colours and facilitating the textural clarity he valued.
I. The Carnival opens, like any good circus, with a fanfare-like Introduction and parade. For March of the Lion, Saintsaëns specifies ‘style persan’ – Persian style – implicitly adding grandeur, swagger and drama to the music’s progress, interrupted by surges of chromatic roaring from the King of the Beasts. The two pianos are joined by what sounds deceptively like a conventional string quartet plus double bass.
II. Hens and Roosters are incarnated by the upper strings and clarinet, imitating crowing, clucking and pecking galore. Ultimately they are cut off by the pianos as if abruptly beheaded by a carving knife.
III. Hémiones. Trust Saint-saëns to include an animal that almost nobody else had heard of. These are Tibetan wild donkeys, also known as dziggetai, blessed with extraordinary fleetness of hoof. He conjures them by giving the pianists a workout that surpasses some of his own studies. Each pianist plays one line, but they are in unison throughout this fearsome sprint, and coordination must be… fun.
IV. This affectionate portrait of the supremely laid-back Tortoises finds the strings meandering along in the melody of the Galop (or Can-can) from Offenbach’s
Orphée aux enfers, but at a sleepy-sounding Andante maestoso, accompanied by Mozartian triplet pulsing on the pianos.
V. The musical references and send-ups have only just begun. Now along comes the Elephant, its second theme a nonetoo-subtle take-off of the ‘Dance of the Sylphs’ from Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust, transferred to the hefty double bass. There’s also a sideswipe at the scherzo from Mendelsohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a whiff of Meyerbeer’s ballet music Les patineurs (‘The skaters’). It all combines into a deliciously affectionate piece.
VI. We’ve been to Tibet; now we’re in Australia. The Kangaroos are a swift, light-hopping variety, darting around the piano keyboards in turn with a grace-noted figuration that bears some resemblance to Chopin’s Etude Op. 25 No. 5, before pausing to rest and graze.
VII. For the Aquarium, Saint-saëns brings in the glass harmonica, which is sometimes replaced by a glockenspiel or celeste: it is used to mirror the flute on the off beats and provide some watery glissandos. This aquarium is a flowing, mysterious waterscape, flute and string quartet providing the melodic lines, pianos and glass harmonica the ripples and bubbles.
VIII. Thought we’d had enough donkeys? We hadn’t heard them bray yet, and violins take the spotlight to do so in Personages with Long Ears. The expression was then in use to describe uncritical opera lovers of limited sophistication – one writer talked about ‘The possessors of long ears who admire [the operas] La Juive and Hamlet but regard the word “Symphony” disdainfully.’ There’s also the possibility, of course, that they are music critics…
IX. The Cuckoo in the Depths of the Woods is a moment of magic: the dark forest is conjured by deep chords on the pianos and a distant clarinet, which the composer said should be off-stage, sounding the bird’s call. It is sometimes played as a comedy number, which is rather a pity.
X. Now other birds have a turn in the Aviary: the music, mainly on strings and flute, with occasional chiming and trilling from the pianos, flutters and rustles, with tremolando and pizzicato evoking the lightness of creatures on the wing. The flute solo presented a chance for the great Paul Taffanel to display his formidable abilities.
XI. Saint-saëns, former teacher at École Niedermeyer where everyone practised in the same room, is getting his own back in Pianists. These finger exercises, scales and switches of key, aided and abetted by the strings, would leave infuriated neighbours concurring that a menagerie is exactly where they belong. The music gears up and leads straight into:
XII. Saint-saëns was an enthusiastic collector of these stony marvels and here relishes bringing them to life. He sends up his own tone poem Danse macabre, in which a virtuoso violin solo is played by the devil in hellish revelries eventually dissolved by dawn. The original was a waltz, but this time the fossils clank their xylophonic bones in up-tempo duple time. For contrast there are references to nighttime songs ‘Au clair de la lune’ and ‘Ah, vous direz-je, Maman’ (aka ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’), a Rossini aria from The Barber of Seville (perhaps Saint-saëns thought this the musical equivalent of a fossil) and a song called ‘J’ai du bon tabac’. Ogden Nash’s verse for this piece captured it perfectly, concluding: ‘It’s kind of fun to be extinct’.
XIII. The high-jinx of the past two numbers disappears and, in The Swan, the most beautiful melody in the work sings out on solo cello, sailing over the rippling waters of the two pianos. Transcribed for other instruments innumerable times, adapted for a solo ‘The Dying Swan’ by the choreographer Mikhail Fokine for the great Anna Pavlova in 1905, the piece has rarely been out of the spotlight – but the streamlined gorgeousness of the original takes a lot of beating.
XIV. And so to the Finale, for all the instruments. In balletic fashion, there’s a grand round-up of our furry, feathered, floaty or four-footed friends, with some of their musical characters enjoying brief reprises in the rondo episodes of this light-hoofed can-can. It opens by recalling the start of the whole piece and we catch galloping glimpses of the Tibetan donkeys, chickens, kangaroos and… the personages with long ears.
And so they gallop off into the sunset. Though perhaps curiously one creature is missing: Saintsaëns’s beloved dog. Saintsaëns’s The Carnival of the Animals is performed on Sunday 29 August