Camille Saint-Saëns on the nature of music

    The Utah Symphony’s performance this May of Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony thrilled us, which led to Sauntering in the library and discovering Saint-Saëns’ remark:

Music is one of the most delicate products of the human spirit. In the recesses of his intelligence, mankind possesses a particularly intimate sense, the aesthetic sense, by means of which he perceives art: music is one of the means of setting this sense in vibration. Behind the sense of hearing, with its marvellous capacity to analyse sounds, to distinguish the differences in their intensities, timbres and qualities, there lies, inside the complexities of the brain, a mysterious sense that responds to something quite different.
    You know the Pastoral Symphony. You’ve heard that peasants’ round dance, which gradually gains pace to the point of giddiness, of madness. At the climactic point everything suddenly stops and, without a transition of any kind, the double basses play pianissimo a note outside the prevailing key. This note, almost inaudible, is like the sudden spreading of a black veil; it is the shadow of implacable fate appearing in the midst of the festivities, an indescribable anguish that no one can escape. From the point of view of the ear and its “physical pleasure”, or even of cold reason, this note is absurd because it destroys the tonality and logical development of the movement. And yet it is sublime.
    It appeals therefore neither to the ear that wishes to be caressed, nor to that short-sighted reason that battens on to phrases which are as regular as a geometrical figure. There must then be something in the art of sound that passes through the ear like a porch and through reason like an entrance hall, and that goes on further. All music that lacks this something is to be despised.

    (Quoted from page 19 Camille Saint-Saëns: On Music and Musicians, edited by Roger Nichols. Oxford University Press, 2008.)
    For a brief biography of Camille Saint-Saëns, click here. For some images of or relating to Camille Saint-Saëns, click here. For Roger Nichols home page, click here.