It is perhaps surprising to note that the lion's share of Camille Saint-Saëns's works has gone largely unexamined in musicological studies, save perhaps for select works – the opera Samson et Dalila and the Third Symphony (‘Organ’) immediately come to mind. Vastly more interesting to recent scholars has been the task of contextualizing the composer's life and work within the rich texture of late-nineteenth century France. Saint-Saëns's seemingly Janus-faced career left even contemporary critics and composers grasping for a label that would best fit the composer's changing faces. Known equally as a virtuoso and composer, his reputation was far-reaching. He was a hero of the Third Republic, whose musical triumphs at home were mirrored by those abroad, as demands for his prodigious pianism and performances of his compositions took him across Europe, to northern Africa, parts of Asia and to the United States. Catholic in his early life, he took a four-year stint teaching at the École Niedermeyer, the country's premiere institution dedicated to raising the standards of church music, though soon after he embraced the Republican trend toward anticlericalism as he struggled with the country's loss to the Prussians in 1871. He co-founded the Société Nationale de Musique under the banner of ‘Ars Gallica’ in an effort to encourage the composition and performance of music by living French composers – yet he was also an aficionado of German music.Footnote ¹ During the 1870s, he introduced Franz Liszt's tone poems to Parisian audiences and continued to perform works by other German composers, especially Robert Schumann, despite the grumbling of numerous peers and critics. More significantly, he was an early supporter of Richard Wagner, publicly defending such works as Lohengrin and Tannhäuser against vehement Parisian criticism (though his taste for Wagner and Wagnerism waned during the 1890s and early 1900s).

Despite his widespread renown, Saint-Saëns's music quickly fell out of favour following his death in 1921; in the age of interwar identity formation, it was considered eclectic and outdated, and to some critics, it appeared as ‘un-French’ by virtue of its composer's perceived dependence on German forms and styles. Although interest in his music has increased in recent years, studies devoted to his operas, ballets, plays and incidental scores are still lacking. Scholars with varying interests – France, opera, music and drama, criticism, etc. – have largely overlooked Saint-Saëns's works for the stage as a viable or even worthy object of musicological study.Footnote ²

Hugh Macdonald searches for an explanation for this lack of interest in Saint-Saëns and the Stage. Biographers and critics have focused their attention elsewhere, likely due to the relative obscurity in which Saint-Saëns's operas hide, for as Macdonald writes, ‘there is no living tradition to judge them by’ (p. xi). Performances of his operas (other than Samson et Dalila) have hardly registered a blip on the operatic radar in the past 20 years; performances of his incidental music, plays, and other such works have not fared any better (p. 392). Saint-Saëns and the Stage is Macdonald's attempt to bring these works to scholarly attention by providing a ‘historical and critical account of each work with a record of its performance history’ (p. xiii).

The volume opens with a Walter Benjamin-inspired portrait of Paris as the nexus of European cultural and musical life during the nineteenth century. Macdonald then devotes one chapter to each of the 30 works in question; shorter works (two one-act operas and incidental music for six plays) are often grouped together. The chapters proceed chronologically through Saint-Saëns's career, with the study of each work comprised of two main parts: first, a sort of biographical-hermeneutical history of the work assembled through studies of archival documents, correspondence and, less frequently, periodicals and other printed sources; and second, detailed synopses and brief musical analyses. And indeed, one of the great strengths of the volume is precisely the richly documented recounting of the genesis and evolution of these works, many of which have never been the subject of such extensive archival study. We learn, for example, that the Andante section of the overture of an untitled opéra-comique (titled Le Duc de Parme by Macdonald) became a ballet in Henry VIII (p. 16); that Ascanio had once been earmarked as the Paris Opéra's new work for the 1889 Exposition Universelle de Paris (p. 192); and that the 1893 premiere of the opéra-comique Phryné featured the hurling of carrots, onions, cauliflower and a ‘live and bewildered’ rabbit onto the stage by an audience angered at the fact that the star soprano Sybil Sanderson had been replaced at the last minute by Jane Harding, a ‘good’ soprano but not Sanderson's equal (p. 241). We also learn that Saint-Saëns's talent extended far beyond the bounds of musical composition into the realms of playwriting and poetry, including the one-act play La Crampe des écrivains, the four-act comedy Le Roi Apépi, the libretto and score of Hélene, a poème lyrique, and the score to the 1908 film L'Assassinat du Duc de Guise. In addition, Macdonald's volume includes multiple points of reference that will prove invaluable to scholars. Each chapter features a graphic that lists pertinent information about the work in question: librettist, date and location of premiere, a listing of the dramatis personae, where applicable, and a detailed description of the orchestration.Footnote ³ As part of each work's bibliographic entry, Macdonald lists the location and call number of the autograph score (the majority are held at the Bibliothèque nationale de Paris), publication details for both full and vocal scores, information regarding the publication of the libretto, and the approximate duration of the work's performance. An exhaustive discography follows; here the reader can see which of the stage works have been recorded in full, where excerpts from longer works have been recorded, and listings of performers, ensembles and conductors.

While I greatly appreciate the attention given to historical and biographical details throughout the volume, I could have done with less of the subjective judgments of value that – though likely made in jest – highlight the author's obvious partisanship for Saint-Saëns and, at times, read as unprofessional. The ‘most ravishing moment’ in Samson et Dalila, for example, is – at least for Macdonald – the chorus of Philistine women who sing of spring, flowers and birds in Act I, Scene 6 (p. 62). The third act of Les Barbares likewise features an air de ballet that is, in Macdonald's words, ‘so effortlessly melodious, so perfectly shaped and executed that if an orchestra were ever to play this as a three minute concert encore, any audience would be astonished that they had never heard it before and beg to know who could have composed it’ (p. 305). Other composers who figure into the narrative fare noticeably worse. For instance, an instrumental interlude in Les Barbares that might have featured Fiona intertwined in Marcomir's arms ‘would never be to Saint-Saëns’ taste’– a slight but nonetheless noticeable jab at Massenet, Saint-Saëns's perennial frenemy, whose musical representation of physical passion in his operas was a common topic of discussion in the press for critics and supporters alike (p. 304). When Ernest Guiraud died in May 1892, it fell to Saint-Saëns to complete his friend's unfinished project, the opera Frédégonde. The finished product was thus a hybrid of two different compositional styles – ‘half horse, half cow’, as Macdonald describes it (p. 251). Though Guiraud's contribution was that of a ‘thoroughly professional composer’, in Macdonald's estimation, it was merely ‘good enough at least for Saint-Saëns to attach his name to it’ (p. 254). Gounod, too, is not immune: whereas he ‘mistakenly’ portrayed the Christians with ‘sanctimonious, churchy music’ in Polyeucte, Saint-Saëns knew better when composing Samson et Dalila (p. 68). And as far as Verdi is concerned, ‘Étienne Marcel is a better opera, too, than Les Vêpres siciliennes and Simon Boccanegra, even if Verdians would be loath to admit it’ (p. 118). This is not to say that Macdonald's hermeneutic interpretations lack nuance on the whole – his analysis of the inverted fugue subject in Samson et Dalila, ‘full of manly vigor’, as the opposite of the crowd's ‘dismal instincts’ is convincing (p. 60) – but the frequent dependence on subjective value judgments made in the service of deciphering ‘whether these works have been neglected because of inherent failures in the libretto and music’ neglects the important critical process of determining which qualities render a work an ‘inherent failure’ and which cultural actors have the agency to make such pronouncements (p. xiii).

Critics often wielded such power, but Macdonald finds them inadequately equipped for the job: within the opening pages of the first chapter, he outlines the ‘appalling inadequacy of what then passed for music criticism’ (p. 5) with a list of high-profile critics who ‘did more harm than good’ (p. 6). Such critics, including Henri Blaze de Bury, Arthur Pougin, Oscar Comettant, Adolphe Jullien and Henry Gauthier-Villars, are castigated for their supposed incompetence. For their negative response to Ascanio, Macdonald indicts them as contemptible; their ‘bad grace was once again evident in their reviews’ (p. 195). Indeed, the failures of works like Ascanio were, according to Macdonald, the result of the ‘poverty of professional critics’ (p. 320). Throughout the volume, Saint-Saëns's compositional failures are explained by the fact that symphonic composers were not thought by critics to be adequately equipped to write operas and similar stage works; critics, in Macdonald's view, had predisposed Saint-Saëns's stage works to failure.

It is in fact the case that many composers of opera in nineteenth-century France faced an uphill battle when working to have their newest works premiered. They were, as the text acknowledges, faced with the double task of soliciting the support of theatre directors who were often motivated by external factors (or, at times, state mandates) while also winning the support of the press and the public at large. Numerous composers, Saint-Saëns included, were forced to look outside of Paris, either to provincial houses or beyond French borders, for venues and directorial staff who were willing to take the financial and critical risks that were involved with staging new productions.Footnote ⁴

The success of Proserpine, as the author notes, was due in large part to critics who judged the opera as equal to Carmen (Destranges; p. 187), who singled out the work as one of Saint-Saëns's best (Charles Koechlin; p. 187), and who described it as a ‘perfect masterpiece’ (Reynaldo Hahn; p. 187). Hahn's favourable review of Ascanio is quoted as another rare instance of critical competence (p. 221). Saint-Saëns himself was a critic; Macdonald frequently uses the composer's own words to bolster his claims that Saint-Saëns was the victim of unjust critical bias.

It is true that the words of critics were, in fact, frequently tainted by the aesthetic agendas of the journals that published them, by personal motivations, or by other equally ulterior motives. But it seems questionable to discount the press summarily. Utilizing the press as an archive of historiography is a way to read beyond chronicles of surface-level evaluations of musical works and events. Studying a work's reception can expose how critical responses – tempered as they were by politically-affiliated editors and paid puff pieces – sparked questions of value, not simply in musical terms, but in broader cultural arenas. Put another way: contemporaneous reviews are not merely uninformed surveys of musical sounds. The musical press is most useful when considered as an act of writing history, as a valuable repository of insight into the complex entanglements of music, history, politics and other cultural fields, regardless of whether or not we as scholars share the critics’ opinions. The dismissal of critical reaction writ large simply because it does not support one's opinion, or worse yet, deploying the words of critics exclusively in the service of one's argument without considering a multitude of contrasting reactions, could possibly be viewed as a detriment to the stated goal of the volume, to present a ‘historical and critical account’ of the stage works. If another aim was to re-establish value to these overlooked works, a more effective line of inquiry might have been to place them into a specific ‘canon’ that speaks directly to a particular historical moment in nineteenth-century French music.Footnote ⁵ Doing so might have restored the delicate balance between historical detail and critical contextualization.

In particular, the discussions as to how and why Saint-Saëns ‘always drew great inspiration from exotic music’ (p. 57) could have benefitted from a more critical contextualization. The thorny questions of Self vs Other that are inherent in discourses of exoticism are treated here with a light hand (e.g. ‘music with a Mediterranean or Middle Eastern flavor was now almost an obsession with French composers’, p. 223) that obscures the racist and colonialist motivations behind such obsessions. In La Princesse jaune, for example, the principal character, Kornélis, is too obsessed with a painting of Ming, a Japanese woman, to notice his cousin Léna's affection for him. In a drug-induced dream, he travels to an imagined Japan, where his wonder is eventually transformed into the realization that it is Léna and not Ming whom he loves. In his synopsis of the opera, Macdonald writes that ‘there is an element of satire in showing an individual so obsessed by an exotic culture that he loses all sense of reality’ (p. 89). Such an obsession, in fact, was not satirical at all in a culture that was so obsessed with a carefully constructed Oriental Other that was far from reality.Footnote ⁶ The act of reducing the exoticist nature of La Princesse jaune to a drug-induced alternate reality runs the risk of increasing the distance between the Western Self and the exotic Other, or what Macdonald later calls ‘the real present’ and the ‘exotic elsewhere’ (p. 89).Footnote ⁷

Similarly, the discussion of the play La Foi could have been grounded in a more culturally sensitive context. It tells the story of Sima, a young man who questions the authority of the Egyptian gods; he is convinced that the gods are merely a tool used by the priests to maintain order and to suppress the people. For the score, Saint-Saëns was ‘attracted to the idea of recreating Egyptian music’ and claimed to have used ‘authentic’ Egyptian scales as a source of inspiration (p. 351). Though Saint-Saëns spent a considerable amount of time in Egypt and northern Africa, we might rightly question the validity of the term ‘authentic’. We might also question such statements as ‘Saint-Saëns doubtless knew that he could hardly write the entire score in a pseudo-Egyptian idiom, so in other movements he combines ethnic percussion and harps with normal orchestral instruments’ (p. 352). Here the delineation between the Western Self (‘normal’) and the exotic Other (‘ethnic’) is made distressingly clear; it appears with nary a mention of the colonialist undercurrents that might have motivated such musical choices in early twentieth-century France. The examination of La Foi – a welcome treatment of a little-known work – might also have benefitted from a stronger contextualizing of the play's ultimate message (morality comes from the people rather than the clergy) within the fraught religious culture of the Third Republic.

A similar approach to other works could have deepened the exacting biographical and chronological detail of Macdonald's text, bringing out, for example, the Republican significance of the open-air performance of Déjanire in Béziers and its Hellenistic subject, or the implications of the nude female body fully staged in Phryné during the era of the newly modern woman in fin-de-siècle France.Footnote ⁸

Despite these criticisms, Saint-Saëns and the Stage is a welcome contribution to the relatively small corpus of musicological studies about the composer. The contents are informative, clearly presented, and accessible to a wide spectrum of readers with varied interests. Its publication aligns with many of the recent productions and recordings of these neglected works sponsored by the Palazetto Bru Zane (Venice); the writing of this volume likewise coincided with the foundation of the Société Camille Saint-Saëns (2017). Perhaps this is a sign that Saint-Saëns's operatic legacy is witnessing an expansion beyond Samson et Dalila. Catalyzed by Hugh MacDonald and Saint-Saëns and the Stage, a renewed interest in Saint-Saëns's forgotten operas, plays and incidental scores is not only possible – it is inevitable.