Camille Saint-Saens

Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) was a French composer, organist, conductor and pianist of the Romantic era. His best-known works include Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (1863), the Second Piano Concerto (1868), the First Cello Concerto (1872), Danse macabre (1874), the opera Samson and Delilah (1877), the Third Violin Concerto (1880), the Third ("Organ") Symphony (1886) and The Carnival of the Animals (1886).

Saint-Saëns was a musical prodigy, making his concert debut at the age of ten. After studying at the Paris Conservatoire he followed a conventional career as a church organist, first at Saint-Merri, Paris and, from 1858, La Madeleine, the official church of the French Empire. After leaving the post twenty years later, he was a successful freelance pianist and composer, in demand in France, mainland Europe, Britain, and the Americas.

In 1904, the Aeolian Organ Company added bells to his beloved church Organ. It was a relatively new addition to the stoplist (it did not receive a Harp Stop until 1909). The chimes must have delighted Saëns. They were tubular bells, exactly like orchestral bells, struck by electric-actuated hammers. The opportunity to include chimes in an organ work would have been particularly irresistible to Saëns who had a positive mania for bells. He wrote two bell-inspired songs at age 17: "La Cloche" in 1855 and "Les Cloches de la Mer" in 1900.

The lyrics read (English):

Alone in your dark tower, with its crenulated pinnacles
from which your breath descends upon the shaken roofs,
o bell, hung amid the clouds,
so often disturbed by your vast rolling,
just now you are asleep in the shadow, and nothing shines
beneath your deep vault in which the sound sleeps.
Oh! whilst a spirit which leaps up to you
gazes on your silence, likewise silent,
do you by that instinct, vague and full of kindness
which reveals one sister to another, feel
that, at this hour when the dying evening falls asleep,
a soul is close to you, no less vibrant than you,
who very often also utters a solemn sound
and laments in love like yourself in the sky!

Source: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Saint-Sa%C3%ABns).

Although originally composed for Organ, I created this modern interpretation for Oboe, Strings (2 Violins, Viola & Cell) & optional Tubular Bells.