In the last year of his life, at the age of 85, Camille
Saint-Saëns was still active as a composer and
conductor, traveling between Algiers and Paris. Besides
a final piano album leaf, his last completed works were
three sonatas, one each for oboe, clarinet, and
bassoon. He sensed that he did not have much time left;
he wrote to a friend, "I am using my last energies to
add to the repertoire for these otherwise neglected
instruments." He intended to write sonatas for another
three wind instrume...(+)
In the last year of his life, at the age of 85, Camille
Saint-Saëns was still active as a composer and
conductor, traveling between Algiers and Paris. Besides
a final piano album leaf, his last completed works were
three sonatas, one each for oboe, clarinet, and
bassoon. He sensed that he did not have much time left;
he wrote to a friend, "I am using my last energies to
add to the repertoire for these otherwise neglected
instruments." He intended to write sonatas for another
three wind instruments, but was never able to.
Saint-Saëns began the pieces early in the year while
in Algeria and completed them in April in Paris. He was
not alone in wanting to write for these instruments.
English composers, such as Holst and Bax, and other
French composers, such as Honegger and Milhaud, were
also starting to expand the literature for woodwind
instruments around the same time. In fact,
Saint-Saëns' sonatas have pastoral and humorous
moments that are similar to those others' works,
relying on simpler melodies and textures than are found
even his earlier chamber works, yet retaining Classical
forms for their structure. Although all three sonatas
were published before Saint-Saëns' death, they were
not premiered until later. This, the Sonata for
clarinet and piano in E flat major, Op. 167, is
cherished by many performers.
Saint-Saëns' Clarinet Sonata has four movements, and
thus might be said to reach back past the Romantic
sonata tradition, with its normal three-movement
vessel, to the Classical tradition that Saint-Saëns
loved so dearly. The opening melodic strains of the
Allegretto first movement float upon a sea of utterly
calm eighth note waves in the piano (bobbing up and
down in 12/8 meter); the composer is in no hurry to
reveal the secrets of the movement, but there is still
passion aplenty as we go along, even if the movement as
a whole is not especially long.
A scherzo movement comes next, taking up A flat major,
and then Saint-Saëns provides a Lento in the dark key
of E flat minor; its steady half notes and, in time,
quarter notes, are so persistent in their slow plodding
that we almost feel anguish at their inability to break
free from the dirge they create. Much happier, though,
is the Molto Allegro fourth movement that follows it
without pause. Here the clarinetist is given a chance
to whirl and spin to some very florid virtuoso stuff,
but at the end it is the quiet tone, and even in fact
the very music, of the first movement that the composer
uses to close.
PARTITION