121-534: Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns ( UK : / ˈ s æ̃ s ɒ̃ ( s )/ , US : / s æ̃ ˈ s ɒ̃ ( s )/ , French: [ʃaʁl kamij sɛ̃sɑ̃(s)] ; 9 October 1835 – 16 December 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),
242-576: A West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic settlers from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the northern Netherlands. The resident population at this time was generally speaking Common Brittonic —the insular variety of Continental Celtic , which was influenced by the Roman occupation. This group of languages ( Welsh , Cornish , Cumbric ) cohabited alongside English into
363-544: A backward step, being less deftly orchestrated, and "thick and heavy" in its effect. Ratner and Fallon praise the Second Symphony (1859) as a fine example of orchestral economy and structural cohesion, with passages that show the composer's mastery of fugal writing. The best known of the symphonies is the Third (1886) which, unusually, has prominent parts for piano and organ. It opens in C minor and ends in C major with
484-815: A brief exile in England. With the help of George Grove and others he supported himself in London, giving recitals. Returning to Paris in May, he found that anti-German sentiments had considerably enhanced support for the idea of a pro-French musical society. The Société Nationale de Musique , with its motto, "Ars Gallica" , had been established in February 1871, with Bussine as president, Saint-Saëns as vice-president and Henri Duparc , Fauré, Franck and Jules Massenet among its founder-members. As an admirer of Liszt's innovative symphonic poems , Saint-Saëns enthusiastically adopted
605-472: A career as a church organist was seen to offer more opportunities than that of a solo pianist. His organ professor was François Benoist , whom Saint-Saëns considered a mediocre organist but a first-rate teacher; his pupils included Adolphe Adam , César Franck , Charles Alkan , Louis Lefébure-Wély and Georges Bizet . In 1849 Saint-Saëns won the Conservatoire's second prize for organists, and in 1851
726-504: A century as Received Pronunciation (RP). However, due to language evolution and changing social trends, some linguists argue that RP is losing prestige or has been replaced by another accent, one that the linguist Geoff Lindsey for instance calls Standard Southern British English. Others suggest that more regionally-oriented standard accents are emerging in England. Even in Scotland and Northern Ireland, RP exerts little influence in
847-480: A comfortable income. The organ, the work of François-Henri Clicquot , had been badly damaged in the aftermath of the French Revolution and imperfectly restored. The instrument was adequate for church services but not for the ambitious recitals that many high-profile Parisian churches offered. With enough spare time to pursue his career as a pianist and composer, Saint-Saëns composed what became his opus 2,
968-561: A full-length opera staged. His four-act "drame lyricque", Le timbre d'argent ("The Silver Bell"), to Jules Barbier 's and Michel Carré 's libretto, reminiscent of the Faust legend, had been in rehearsal in 1870, but the outbreak of war halted the production. The work was eventually presented by the Théâtre Lyrique company of Paris; it ran for eighteen performances. The dedicatee of the opera, Albert Libon, died three months after
1089-508: A greater movement, normally [əʊ], [əʉ] or [əɨ]. Dropping a morphological grammatical number , in collective nouns , is stronger in British English than North American English. This is to treat them as plural when once grammatically singular, a perceived natural number prevails, especially when applying to institutional nouns and groups of people. The noun 'police', for example, undergoes this treatment: Police are investigating
1210-571: A hack coming down from Montmartre" rather than the galloping fiery horses of Greek legend that inspired the piece. The last of the four symphonic poems, La jeunesse d'Hercule ("Hercules's Youth", 1877) was the most ambitious of the four, which, Harding suggests, is why it is the least successful. In the judgment of the critic Roger Nichols these orchestral works, which combine striking melodies, strength of construction and memorable orchestration "set new standards for French music and were an inspiration to such young composers as Ravel". Saint-Saëns wrote
1331-406: A lesser class or social status and often discounted or considered of a low intelligence. Another contribution to the standardisation of British English was the introduction of the printing press to England in the mid-15th century. In doing so, William Caxton enabled a common language and spelling to be dispersed among the entirety of England at a much faster rate. Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of
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#17327730679711452-489: A lifelong love of the music of Bach , which was then little known in France. As a schoolboy Saint-Saëns was outstanding in many subjects. In addition to his musical prowess, he distinguished himself in the study of French literature, Latin and Greek, divinity, and mathematics. His interests included philosophy, archaeology and astronomy, of which, particularly the last, he remained a talented amateur in later life. In 1848, at
1573-401: A one-act ballet, Javot (1896), the score for the film L'assassinat du duc de Guise (1908), and incidental music to a dozen plays between 1850 and 1916. Three of these scores were for revivals of classics by Molière and Racine, for which Saint-Saëns's deep knowledge of French baroque scores was reflected in his scores, in which he incorporated music by Lully and Charpentier . Saint-Saëns
1694-454: A pianist and conductor. In New York on his second visit he premiered his "Praise ye the Lord" for double choir, orchestra and organ, which he composed for the occasion. Despite his growing reputation as a musical reactionary, Saint-Saëns was, according to Gallois, probably the only French musician who travelled to Munich to hear the premiere of Mahler 's Eighth Symphony in 1910. Nonetheless, by
1815-481: A piano soloist in other cities. After this he never played the organ professionally in a church service, and rarely played the instrument at all. He composed a Messe de Requiem in memory of his friend, which was performed at Saint-Sulpice to mark the first anniversary of Libon's death; Charles-Marie Widor played the organ and Saint-Saëns conducted. In December 1877, Saint-Saëns had a more solid operatic success with Samson et Dalila , his one opera to gain and keep
1936-458: A place in the international repertoire. Because of its biblical subject, the composer had met many obstacles to its presentation in France, and through Liszt's influence the premiere was given at Weimar in a German translation. Although the work eventually became an international success it was not staged at the Paris Opéra until 1892. Saint-Saëns was a keen traveller. From the 1870s until
2057-558: A pretty hash of British history", this piece was "not altogether contemptible as an opera story". The open-mindedness of the Société Nationale had hardened by the mid-1880s into a dogmatic adherence to Wagnerian methods favoured by Franck's pupils, led by Vincent d'Indy . They had begun to dominate the organisation and sought to abandon its "Ars Gallica" ethos of commitment to French works. Bussine and Saint-Saëns found this unacceptable, and resigned in 1886. Having long pressed
2178-606: A process called T-glottalisation . National media, being based in London, have seen the glottal stop spreading more widely than it once was in word endings, not being heard as "no [ʔ] " and bottle of water being heard as "bo [ʔ] le of wa [ʔ] er". It is still stigmatised when used at the beginning and central positions, such as later , while often has all but regained /t/ . Other consonants subject to this usage in Cockney English are p , as in pa [ʔ] er and k as in ba [ʔ] er. In most areas of England and Wales, outside
2299-520: A regional accent or dialect. However, about 2% of Britons speak with an accent called Received Pronunciation (also called "the King's English", "Oxford English" and " BBC English" ), that is essentially region-less. It derives from a mixture of the Midlands and Southern dialects spoken in London in the early modern period. It is frequently used as a model for teaching English to foreign learners. In
2420-416: A reputation for outspoken musical conservatism, in the 1850s Saint-Saëns supported and promoted the most modern music of the day, including that of Liszt, Robert Schumann and Richard Wagner . Unlike many French composers of his own and the next generation, Saint-Saëns, for all his enthusiasm for and knowledge of Wagner's operas, was not influenced by him in his own compositions. He commented, "I admire deeply
2541-497: A second time for the Prix de Rome. Many in musical circles were puzzled by his decision to enter the competition again, now that he was establishing a reputation as a soloist and composer. He was once more unsuccessful. Berlioz, one of the judges, wrote: We gave the Prix de Rome the other day to a young man who wasn't expecting to win it and who went almost mad with joy. We were all expecting the prize to go to Camille Saint-Saëns, who had
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#17327730679712662-674: A stately chorale tune. The four movements are clearly divided into two pairs, a practice Saint-Saëns used elsewhere, notably in the Fourth Piano Concerto (1875) and the First Violin Sonata (1885). The work is dedicated to the memory of Liszt, and uses a recurring motif treated in a Lisztian style of thematic transformation . Saint-Saëns's four symphonic poems follow the model of those by Liszt, though, in Sackville-West's and Shawe-Taylor's view, without
2783-450: A true Parisian. Less than two months after the christening, Victor Saint-Saëns died of consumption (tuberculosis) on the first anniversary of his marriage. The young Camille was taken to the country for the sake of his health, and for two years lived with a nurse at Corbeil , 29 kilometres (18 mi) to the south of Paris. When Saint-Saëns was brought back to Paris he lived with his mother and her widowed aunt, Charlotte Masson. Before he
2904-450: A woman. Rees comments that although there is no firm evidence, some biographers believe that Saint-Saëns was more attracted to his own sex than to women. After the death of his children and collapse of his marriage, Saint-Saëns increasingly found a surrogate family in Fauré and his wife, Marie, and their two sons, to whom he was a much-loved honorary uncle. Marie told him, "For us you are one of
3025-725: Is also due to London-centric influences. Examples of R-dropping are car and sugar , where the R is not pronounced. British dialects differ on the extent of diphthongisation of long vowels, with southern varieties extensively turning them into diphthongs, and with northern dialects normally preserving many of them. As a comparison, North American varieties could be said to be in-between. Long vowels /iː/ and /uː/ are usually preserved, and in several areas also /oː/ and /eː/, as in go and say (unlike other varieties of English, that change them to [oʊ] and [eɪ] respectively). Some areas go as far as not diphthongising medieval /iː/ and /uː/, that give rise to modern /aɪ/ and /aʊ/; that is, for example, in
3146-518: Is based on British English, but has more influence from American English , often grouped together due to their close proximity. British English, for example, is the closest English to Indian English, but Indian English has extra vocabulary and some English words are assigned different meanings. Harold C. Schonberg Too Many Requests If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include
3267-496: Is called, and they believe it, the development of taste . Holding such conservative views, Saint-Saëns was out of sympathy – and out of fashion – with the Parisian musical scene of the early 20th century, fascinated as it was with novelty. It is often said that he walked out, scandalised, from the premiere of Vaslav Nijinsky and Igor Stravinsky 's ballet The Rite of Spring in 1913. In fact, according to Stravinsky, Saint-Saëns
3388-576: Is in two movements, each comprising two identifiable sub-sections, and maintains a thematic unity not found in the composer's other piano concertos. According to some sources it was this piece that so impressed Gounod that he dubbed Saint-Saëns "the Beethoven of France" (other sources base that distinction on the Third Symphony). The Fifth and last piano concerto, in F major, was written in 1896, more than twenty years after its predecessor. The work
3509-795: Is included in style guides issued by various publishers including The Times newspaper, the Oxford University Press and the Cambridge University Press . The Oxford University Press guidelines were originally drafted as a single broadsheet page by Horace Henry Hart, and were at the time (1893) the first guide of their type in English; they were gradually expanded and eventually published, first as Hart's Rules , and in 2002 as part of The Oxford Manual of Style . Comparable in authority and stature to The Chicago Manual of Style for published American English ,
3630-575: Is known as the "Egyptian" concerto; it was written while the composer was wintering in Luxor , and incorporates a tune he heard Nile boatmen singing. British English British English (abbreviations: BrE , en-GB , and BE ) is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland . More narrowly, it can refer specifically to
3751-547: The Chambers Dictionary , and the Collins Dictionary record actual usage rather than attempting to prescribe it. In addition, vocabulary and usage change with time; words are freely borrowed from other languages and other varieties of English, and neologisms are frequent. For historical reasons dating back to the rise of London in the ninth century, the form of language spoken in London and
Camille Saint-Saëns - Misplaced Pages Continue
3872-502: The Auvergnat spa town of La Bourboule for a holiday. On 28 July he disappeared from their hotel, and a few days later his wife received a letter from him to say that he would not be returning. They never saw each other again. Marie Saint-Saëns returned to her family, and lived until 1950, dying near Bordeaux at the age of ninety-five. Saint-Saëns did not divorce his wife and remarry, nor did he form any later intimate relationship with
3993-658: The East Midlands became standard English within the Court, and ultimately became the basis for generally accepted use in the law, government, literature and education in Britain. The standardisation of British English is thought to be from both dialect levelling and a thought of social superiority. Speaking in the Standard dialect created class distinctions; those who did not speak the standard English would be considered of
4114-522: The English language in England , or, more broadly, to the collective dialects of English throughout the British Isles taken as a single umbrella variety, for instance additionally incorporating Scottish English , Welsh English , and Northern Irish English . Tom McArthur in the Oxford Guide to World English acknowledges that British English shares "all the ambiguities and tensions [with]
4235-731: 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; he made 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 ,
4356-493: The Royal Spanish Academy with Spanish. Standard British English differs notably in certain vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation features from standard American English and certain other standard English varieties around the world. British and American spelling also differ in minor ways. The accent, or pronunciation system, of standard British English, based in southeastern England, has been known for over
4477-490: The Scots language or Scottish Gaelic ). Each group includes a range of dialects, some markedly different from others. The various British dialects also differ in the words that they have borrowed from other languages. Around the middle of the 15th century, there were points where within the 5 major dialects there were almost 500 ways to spell the word though . Following its last major survey of English Dialects (1949–1950),
4598-573: The University of Leeds has started work on a new project. In May 2007 the Arts and Humanities Research Council awarded a grant to Leeds to study British regional dialects. The team are sifting through a large collection of examples of regional slang words and phrases turned up by the "Voices project" run by the BBC , in which they invited the public to send in examples of English still spoken throughout
4719-610: The West Country and other near-by counties of the UK, the consonant R is not pronounced if not followed by a vowel, lengthening the preceding vowel instead. This phenomenon is known as non-rhoticity . In these same areas, a tendency exists to insert an R between a word ending in a vowel and a next word beginning with a vowel. This is called the intrusive R . It could be understood as a merger, in that words that once ended in an R and words that did not are no longer treated differently. This
4840-407: The "vulgar blatancy" to which the earlier composer was prone. The most popular of the four is Danse macabre (1874) depicting skeletons dancing at midnight. Saint-Saëns generally achieved his orchestral effects by deft harmonisation rather than exotic instrumentation, but in this piece he featured the xylophone prominently, representing the rattling bones of the dancers. Le Rouet d'Omphale (1871)
4961-524: The 1860s and early 1870s, Saint-Saëns had continued to live a bachelor existence, sharing a large fourth-floor flat in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré with his mother. In 1875, he surprised many by marrying. The groom was approaching forty and his bride was nineteen; she was Marie-Laure Truffot, the sister of one of the composer's pupils. The marriage was not a success. In the words of the biographer Sabina Teller Ratner, "Saint-Saëns's mother disapproved, and her son
Camille Saint-Saëns - Misplaced Pages Continue
5082-488: The 2001 edition of Grove's Dictionary , Ratner and Daniel Fallon, analysing Saint-Saëns's orchestral music rate the unnumbered Symphony in A ( c. 1850 ) as the most ambitious of the composer's juvenilia. Of the works of his maturity, the First Symphony (1853) is a serious and large-scale work, in which the influence of Schumann is detectable. The "Urbs Roma" Symphony (1856, unnumbered) in some ways represents
5203-535: The 20th century Saint-Saëns had lost much of his enthusiasm for modernism in music. Though he strove to conceal it from Fauré, he did not understand or like the latter's opera Pénélope (1913), of which he was the dedicatee. In 1917 Francis Poulenc , at the beginning of his career as a composer, was dismissive when Ravel praised Saint-Saëns as a genius. By this time, various strands of new music were emerging with which Saint-Saëns had little in common. His classical instincts for form put him at odds with what seemed to him
5324-629: The 21st century. RP, while long established as the standard English accent around the globe due to the spread of the British Empire , is distinct from the standard English pronunciation in some parts of the world; most prominently, RP notably contrasts with standard North American accents. In the 21st century, dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary , the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English ,
5445-704: The Conservatoire, discussed the founding of a society to promote new French music. Before they could take the proposal further the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Saint-Saëns served in the National Guard during the war. During the brief but bloody Paris Commune that followed in March to May 1871 his superior at the Madeleine, the Abbé Deguerry, was murdered by rebels; Saint-Saëns escaped to
5566-836: The English Language (1755) was a large step in the English-language spelling reform , where the purification of language focused on standardising both speech and spelling. By the early 20th century, British authors had produced numerous books intended as guides to English grammar and usage, a few of which achieved sufficient acclaim to have remained in print for long periods and to have been reissued in new editions after some decades. These include, most notably of all, Fowler's Modern English Usage and The Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers . Detailed guidance on many aspects of writing British English for publication
5687-571: The English are excellent choristers". His mutual regard for British choirs continued for the rest of his life, and one of his last large-scale works, the oratorio The Promised Land , was composed for the Three Choirs Festival of 1913. In 1900, after ten years without a permanent home in Paris, Saint-Saëns took a flat in the rue de Courcelles, not far from his old residence in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. This remained his home for
5808-666: The Germanic schwein ) is the animal in the field bred by the occupied Anglo-Saxons and pork (like the French porc ) is the animal at the table eaten by the occupying Normans. Another example is the Anglo-Saxon cu meaning cow, and the French bœuf meaning beef. Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian core of English;
5929-489: The Institut was successful, and caused bitter resentment from the younger composer's supporters. Saint-Saëns's response to the neoclassicism of Les Six was equally uncompromising: of Darius Milhaud 's polytonal symphonic suite Protée (1919) he commented, "fortunately, there are still lunatic asylums in France". Saint-Saëns gave what he intended to be his farewell concert as a pianist in Paris in 1913, but his retirement
6050-922: The Oxford Manual is a fairly exhaustive standard for published British English that writers can turn to in the absence of specific guidance from their publishing house. British English is the basis of, and very similar to, Commonwealth English . Commonwealth English is English as spoken and written in the Commonwealth countries , though often with some local variation. This includes English spoken in Australia , Malta , New Zealand , Nigeria , and South Africa . It also includes South Asian English used in South Asia, in English varieties in Southeast Asia , and in parts of Africa. Canadian English
6171-474: The Paris Opéra. Although the libretto was not of his choosing, Saint-Saëns, normally a fluent, even facile composer, worked at the score with unusual diligence to capture a convincing air of 16th-century England. The work was a success, and was frequently revived during the composer's lifetime. When it was produced at Covent Garden in 1898, The Era commented that though French librettists generally "make
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#17327730679716292-506: The Polonaise for two pianos). From his time at the Conservatoire he was a master of counterpoint; contrapuntal passages crop up, seemingly naturally, in many of his works. The authors of the 1955 The Record Guide , Edward Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor write that Saint-Saëns's brilliant musicianship was "instrumental in drawing the attention of French musicians to the fact that there are other forms of music besides opera." In
6413-712: The South East, there are significantly different accents; the Cockney accent spoken by some East Londoners is strikingly different from Received Pronunciation (RP). Cockney rhyming slang can be (and was initially intended to be) difficult for outsiders to understand, although the extent of its use is often somewhat exaggerated. Londoners speak with a mixture of accents, depending on ethnicity, neighbourhood, class, age, upbringing, and sundry other factors. Estuary English has been gaining prominence in recent decades: it has some features of RP and some of Cockney. Immigrants to
6534-591: The Symphony in E ♭ (1853). This work, with military fanfares and augmented brass and percussion sections, caught the mood of the times in the wake of the popular rise to power of Napoleon III and the restoration of the French Empire . The work brought the composer another first prize from the Société Sainte-Cécile. Among the musicians who were quick to spot Saint-Saëns's talent were
6655-550: The UK in recent decades have brought many more languages to the country and particularly to London. Surveys started in 1979 by the Inner London Education Authority discovered over 125 languages being spoken domestically by the families of the inner city's schoolchildren. Notably Multicultural London English , a sociolect that emerged in the late 20th century spoken mainly by young, working-class people in multicultural parts of London . Since
6776-640: The United Kingdom , as well as within the countries themselves. The major divisions are normally classified as English English (or English as spoken in England (which is itself broadly grouped into Southern English , West Country , East and West Midlands English and Northern English ), Northern Irish English (in Northern Ireland), Welsh English (not to be confused with the Welsh language ), and Scottish English (not to be confused with
6897-465: The West Scottish accent. Phonological features characteristic of British English revolve around the pronunciation of the letter R, as well as the dental plosive T and some diphthongs specific to this dialect. Once regarded as a Cockney feature, in a number of forms of spoken British English, /t/ has become commonly realised as a glottal stop [ʔ] when it is in the intervocalic position, in
7018-484: The academic regime by writing, and composing incidental music for, a one-act farce performed by the students (including André Messager ). He conceived what would eventually become his best-known piece, The Carnival of the Animals , with his students in mind, but did not finish composing it until 1886, more than twenty years after he left the Niedermeyer school. In 1864 Saint-Saëns caused some surprise by competing
7139-410: The adjective little is predominant elsewhere. Nevertheless, there is a meaningful degree of uniformity in written English within the United Kingdom, and this could be described by the term British English . The forms of spoken English, however, vary considerably more than in most other areas of the world where English is spoken and so a uniform concept of British English is more difficult to apply to
7260-481: The age of five, but it was not until he was ten that he made his official public debut, at the Salle Pleyel , in a programme that included Mozart 's Piano Concerto in B ♭ ( K 450), and Beethoven 's Third Piano Concerto . Through Stamaty's influence, Saint-Saëns was introduced to the composition professor Pierre Maleden and the organ teacher Alexandre Pierre François Boëly . From the latter he acquired
7381-407: The age of thirteen, Saint-Saëns was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire , France's foremost music academy. The director, Daniel Auber , had succeeded Luigi Cherubini in 1842, and brought a more relaxed regime than that of his martinet predecessor, though the curriculum remained conservative. Students, even outstanding pianists like Saint-Saëns, were encouraged to specialise in organ studies, because
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#17327730679717502-488: The award of the grant in 2007, Leeds University stated: that they were "very pleased"—and indeed, "well chuffed"—at receiving their generous grant. He could, of course, have been "bostin" if he had come from the Black Country , or if he was a Scouser he would have been well "made up" over so many spondoolicks, because as a Geordie might say, £460,000 is a "canny load of chink". Most people in Britain speak with
7623-419: The churches of France. Niedermeyer himself was professor of piano; when he died in March 1861, Saint-Saëns was appointed to take charge of piano studies. He scandalised some of his more austere colleagues by introducing his students to contemporary music, including that of Schumann, Liszt and Wagner. His best-known pupil, Gabriel Fauré , recalled in old age: After allowing the lessons to run over, he would go to
7744-468: The colourful orchestral music more widely identified with him. Grove observes that he makes his effects more by characterful harmony and rhythms than by extravagant scoring. In both of those areas of his craft he was normally content with the familiar. Rhythmically, he inclined to standard double, triple or compound metres (although Grove points to a 5/4 passage in the Piano Trio and another in 7/4 in
7865-465: The comedy Phryné (1893), and together with Paul Dukas helped to complete Frédégonde (1895) an opera left unfinished by Ernest Guiraud , who died in 1892. Phryné was well received, and prompted calls for more comic operas at the Opéra-Comique, which had latterly been favouring grand opera . His few choral and orchestral works from the 1890s are mostly short; the major concert pieces from
7986-499: The composer acknowledged as a mature work and gave an opus number was Trois Morceaux for harmonium (1852). On leaving the Conservatoire in 1853, Saint-Saëns accepted the post of organist at the ancient Parisian church of Saint-Merri near the Hôtel de Ville . The parish was substantial, with 26,000 parishioners; in a typical year there were more than two hundred weddings, the organist's fees from which, together with fees for funerals and his modest basic stipend, gave Saint-Saëns
8107-409: The composers Gioachino Rossini , Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt , and the influential singer Pauline Viardot , who all encouraged him in his career. In early 1858 Saint-Saëns moved from Saint-Merri to the high-profile post of organist of La Madeleine , the official church of the Empire; Liszt heard him playing there and declared him the greatest organist in the world. Although in later life he had
8228-407: The continuous stream of music popularised by Wagner, Saint-Saëns often favoured self-contained melodies. Though they are frequently, in Ratner's phrase, "supple and pliable", more often than not they are constructed in three- or four-bar sections, and the "phrase pattern AABB is characteristic". An occasional tendency to neoclassicism, influenced by his study of French baroque music, is in contrast with
8349-514: The country. The BBC Voices project also collected hundreds of news articles about how the British speak English from swearing through to items on language schools. This information will also be collated and analysed by Johnson's team both for content and for where it was reported. "Perhaps the most remarkable finding in the Voices study is that the English language is as diverse as ever, despite our increased mobility and constant exposure to other accents and dialects through TV and radio". When discussing
8470-505: The decade was one at Cambridge in June 1893, when he, Bruch and Tchaikovsky performed at an event presented by Charles Villiers Stanford for the Cambridge University Musical Society , marking the award of honorary degrees to all three visitors. Saint-Saëns greatly enjoyed the visit, and even spoke approvingly of the college chapel services: "The demands of English religion are not excessive. The services are very short, and consist chiefly of listening to good music extremely well sung, for
8591-422: The decade were the single movement fantasia Africa (1891) and his Fifth ("Egyptian") Piano Concerto , which he premiered at a concert in 1896 marking the fiftieth anniversary of his début at the Salle Pleyel in 1846. Before playing the concerto he read out a short poem he had written for the event, praising his mother's tutelage and his public's long support. Among the concerts that Saint-Saëns undertook during
8712-427: The double blow of their loss effectively destroyed the marriage. For a French composer of the 19th century, opera was seen as the most important type of music. Saint-Saëns's younger contemporary and rival, Massenet, was beginning to gain a reputation as an operatic composer, but Saint-Saëns, with only the short and unsuccessful La princesse jaune staged, had made no mark in that sphere. In February 1877, he finally had
8833-544: The end of his life he made 179 trips to 27 countries. His professional engagements took him most often to Germany and England; for holidays, and to avoid Parisian winters which affected his weak chest, he favoured Algiers and various places in Egypt. Saint-Saëns was elected to the Institut de France in 1881, at his second attempt, having to his chagrin been beaten by Massenet in 1878. In July of that year he and his wife went to
8954-434: The family, and we mention your name ceaselessly here." In the 1880s Saint-Saëns continued to seek success in the opera house, an undertaking made the more difficult by an entrenched belief among influential members of the musical establishment that it was unthinkable that a pianist, organist and symphonist could write a good opera. He had two operas staged during the decade, the first being Henry VIII (1883) commissioned by
9075-496: The first of his orchestral works to gain a permanent place in the repertoire, his Second Piano Concerto . Playing this and other works he became a noted figure in the musical life of Paris and other cities in France and abroad during the 1860s. In 1870, concerned at the dominance of German music and the lack of opportunity for young French composers to have their works played, Saint-Saëns and Romain Bussine , professor of singing at
9196-682: The form; his first "poème symphonique" was Le Rouet d'Omphale (1871), premiered at a concert of the Sociéte Nationale in January 1872. In the same year, after more than a decade of intermittent work on operatic scores, Saint-Saëns finally had one of his operas staged. La princesse jaune ("The Yellow Princess"), a one-act, light romantic piece, was given at the Opéra-Comique , Paris in June. It ran for five performances. Throughout
9317-450: The hands and fingers rather than the arms, which, Saint-Saëns later wrote, was good training. Clémence Saint-Saëns, well aware of her son's precocious talent, did not wish him to become famous too young. The music critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote of Saint-Saëns in 1969, "It is not generally realized that he was the most remarkable child prodigy in history, and that includes Mozart." The boy gave occasional performances for small audiences from
9438-458: The idea of two different morphemes, one that causes the double negation, and one that is used for the point or the verb. Standard English in the United Kingdom, as in other English-speaking nations, is widely enforced in schools and by social norms for formal contexts but not by any singular authority; for instance, there is no institution equivalent to the Académie française with French or
9559-523: The last southern Midlands accent to use the broad "a" in words like bath or grass (i.e. barth or grarss ). Conversely crass or plastic use a slender "a". A few miles northwest in Leicestershire the slender "a" becomes more widespread generally. In the town of Corby , five miles (8 km) north, one can find Corbyite which, unlike the Kettering accent, is largely influenced by
9680-518: The later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance branch of the European languages. This Norman influence entered English largely through the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a "borrowing" language of great flexibility and with a huge vocabulary . Dialects and accents vary amongst the four countries of
9801-457: The mass internal migration to Northamptonshire in the 1940s and given its position between several major accent regions, it has become a source of various accent developments. In Northampton the older accent has been influenced by overspill Londoners. There is an accent known locally as the Kettering accent, which is a transitional accent between the East Midlands and East Anglian . It is
9922-480: The merits of Wagner on a sometimes sceptical French public, Saint-Saëns was now becoming worried that the German's music was having an excessive impact on young French composers. His increasing caution towards Wagner developed in later years into stronger hostility, directed as much at Wagner's political nationalism as at his music. By the 1880s Saint-Saëns was an established favourite with audiences in England, where he
10043-455: The midst of tentative effort and error, and considered that Saint-Saëns had reached his summit of proficiency". The suggestion that Saint-Saëns was more proficient than inspired dogged his career and posthumous reputation. He himself wrote, "Art is intended to create beauty and character. Feeling only comes afterwards and art can very well do without it. In fact, it is very much better off when it does." The biographer Jessica Duchen writes that he
10164-463: The modern period, but due to their remoteness from the Germanic languages , influence on English was notably limited . However, the degree of influence remains debated, and it has recently been argued that its grammatical influence accounts for the substantial innovations noted between English and the other West Germanic languages. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting
10285-418: The musical scholar Jean Gallois , it was apropos of this episode that Berlioz made his well-known bon mot about Saint-Saëns, "He knows everything, but lacks inexperience" ("Il sait tout, mais il manque d'inexpérience"). The winner, Victor Sieg , had a career no more notable than that of the 1852 winner, but Saint-Saëns's biographer Brian Rees speculates that the judges may "have been seeking signs of genius in
10406-516: 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 Europe and the Americas. As a young man, Saint-Saëns was enthusiastic for the most modern music of the day, particularly that of Schumann , Liszt and Wagner , although his own compositions were generally within a conventional classical tradition. He
10527-452: The opening that the pianist Zygmunt Stojowski commented that the work "begins like Bach and ends like Offenbach". The Third Piano Concerto , in E ♭ (1869) has another high-spirited finale, but the earlier movements are more classical, the texture clear, with graceful melodic lines. The Fourth, in C minor (1875) is probably the composer's best-known piano concerto after the Second. It
10648-427: The piano and reveal to us those works of the masters from which the rigorous classical nature of our programme of study kept us at a distance and who, moreover, in those far-off years, were scarcely known. ... At the time I was 15 or 16, and from this time dates the almost filial attachment ... the immense admiration, the unceasing gratitude I [have] had for him, throughout my life. Saint-Saëns further enlivened
10769-503: The premiere, leaving Saint-Saëns a large legacy "To free him from the slavery of the organ of the Madeleine and to enable him to devote himself entirely to composition". Saint-Saëns, unaware of the imminent bequest, had resigned his position shortly before his friend died. He was not a conventional Christian, and found religious dogma increasingly irksome; he had become tired of the clerical authorities' interference and musical insensitivity; and he wanted to be free to accept more engagements as
10890-581: The rest of his life. He continued to travel abroad frequently, but increasingly often to give concerts rather than as a tourist. He revisited London, where he was always a welcome visitor, went to Berlin, where until the First World War, he was greeted with honour, and travelled in Italy, Spain, Monaco and provincial France. In 1906 and 1909 he made highly successful tours of the United States, as
11011-550: The shapelessness and structure of the musical impressionists, led by Debussy. Nor did Arnold Schönberg 's atonality commend itself to Saint-Saëns: There is no longer any question of adding to the old rules new principles which are the natural expression of time and experience, but simply of casting aside all rules and every restraint. "Everyone ought to make his own rules. Music is free and unlimited in its liberty of expression. There are no perfect chords, dissonant chords or false chords. All aggregations of notes are legitimate." That
11132-401: The spoken language. Globally, countries that are former British colonies or members of the Commonwealth tend to follow British English, as is the case for English used by European Union institutions. In China, both British English and American English are taught. The UK government actively teaches and promotes English around the world and operates in over 200 countries . English is
11253-486: The strange notion of competing. I confess I was sorry to vote against a man who is truly a great artist and one who is already well known, practically a celebrity. But the other man, who is still a student, has that inner fire, inspiration, he feels, he can do things that can't be learnt and the rest he'll learn more or less. So I voted for him, sighing at the thought of the unhappiness that this failure must cause Saint-Saëns. But, whatever else, one must be honest. According to
11374-463: The symphony in London was considerable, but was surpassed by the ecstatic welcome the work received at its Paris premiere early the following year. Later in 1887 Saint-Saëns's "drame lyrique" Proserpine opened at the Opéra-Comique. It was well received and seemed to be heading for a substantial run when the theatre burnt down within weeks of the premiere and the production was lost. In December 1888 Saint-Saëns's mother died. He felt her loss deeply, and
11495-436: The technical skill of the workman. His incomparable talent for orchestration enables him to give relief to ideas which would otherwise be crude and mediocre in themselves ... his works are on the one hand not frivolous enough to become popular in the widest sense, nor on the other do they take hold of the public by that sincerity and warmth of feeling which is so convincing. Although a keen modernist in his youth, Saint-Saëns
11616-603: The theft of work tools worth £500 from a van at the Sprucefield park and ride car park in Lisburn. A football team can be treated likewise: Arsenal have lost just one of 20 home Premier League matches against Manchester City. This tendency can be observed in texts produced already in the 19th century. For example, Jane Austen , a British author, writes in Chapter 4 of Pride and Prejudice , published in 1813: All
11737-422: The time of his death. Saint-Saëns held only one teaching post, at the École de Musique Classique et Religieuse in Paris, and remained there for less than five years. It was nevertheless important in the development of French music: his students included Gabriel Fauré , among whose own later pupils was Maurice Ravel . Both of them were strongly influenced by Saint-Saëns, whom they revered as a genius. Saint-Saëns
11858-470: The top prize; in the same year he began formal composition studies. His professor was a protégé of Cherubini, Fromental Halévy , whose pupils included Charles Gounod and Bizet. Saint-Saëns's student compositions included a symphony in A major (1850) and a choral piece, Les Djinns (1850), after an eponymous poem by Victor Hugo . He competed for France's premier musical award, the Prix de Rome , in 1852 but
11979-403: The traditional accent of Newcastle upon Tyne , 'out' will sound as 'oot', and in parts of Scotland and North-West England, 'my' will be pronounced as 'me'. Long vowels /iː/ and /uː/ are diphthongised to [ɪi] and [ʊu] respectively (or, more technically, [ʏʉ], with a raised tongue), so that ee and oo in feed and food are pronounced with a movement. The diphthong [oʊ] is also pronounced with
12100-750: The varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon , eventually came to dominate. The original Old English was then influenced by two waves of invasion: the first was by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family, who settled in parts of Britain in the eighth and ninth centuries; the second was the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman . These two invasions caused English to become "mixed" to some degree (though it
12221-402: The word 'British' and as a result can be used and interpreted in two ways, more broadly or more narrowly, within a range of blurring and ambiguity". Variations exist in formal (both written and spoken) English in the United Kingdom. For example, the adjective wee is almost exclusively used in parts of Scotland, north-east England, Northern Ireland, Ireland, and occasionally Yorkshire , whereas
12342-482: The works of Richard Wagner in spite of their bizarre character. They are superior and powerful, and that is sufficient for me. But I am not, I have never been, and I shall never be of the Wagnerian religion." In 1861 Saint-Saëns accepted his only post as a teacher, at the École de Musique Classique et Religieuse, Paris, which Louis Niedermeyer had established in 1853 to train first-rate organists and choirmasters for
12463-568: The world are good and agreeable in your eyes. However, in Chapter 16, the grammatical number is used. The world is blinded by his fortune and consequence. Some dialects of British English use negative concords, also known as double negatives . Rather than changing a word or using a positive, words like nobody, not, nothing, and never would be used in the same sentence. While this does not occur in Standard English, it does occur in non-standard dialects. The double negation follows
12584-463: Was "a troubled man who preferred not to betray the darker side of his soul". The critic and composer Jeremy Nicholas observes that this reticence has led many to underrate the music; he quotes such slighting remarks as "Saint-Saëns is the only great composer who wasn't a genius", and "Bad music well written". While teaching at the Niedermeyer school Saint-Saëns put less of his energy into composing and performing, although an overture entitled Spartacus
12705-410: Was a scholar of musical history, and remained committed to the structures worked out by earlier French composers. This brought him into conflict in his later years with composers of the impressionist and expressionist schools of music; although there were neoclassical elements in his music, foreshadowing works by Stravinsky and Les Six , he was often regarded as a reactionary in the decades around
12826-447: Was admirable for a man of eighty-six. He left Paris a month later for Algiers, with the intention of wintering there, as he had long been accustomed to do. While there he died of a heart attack on 16 December 1921. His body was taken back to Paris, and after a state funeral at the Madeleine he was buried at the cimetière du Montparnasse . Heavily veiled, in an inconspicuous place among the mourners from France's political and artistic élite,
12947-472: Was always deeply aware of the great masters of the past. In a profile of him written to mark his eightieth birthday, the critic D C Parker wrote, "That Saint-Saëns knows Rameau ... Bach and Handel , Haydn and Mozart, must be manifest to all who are familiar with his writings. His love for the classical giants and his sympathy with them form, so to speak, the foundation of his art." Less attracted than some of his French contemporaries to
13068-592: Was born in Paris, the only child of Jacques-Joseph-Victor Saint-Saëns (1798–1835), an official in the French Ministry of the Interior, and Françoise-Clémence, née Collin. Victor Saint-Saëns was of Norman ancestry, and his wife was from an Haute-Marne family; their son, born in the Rue du Jardinet in the 6th arrondissement of Paris , and baptised at the nearby church of Saint-Sulpice , always considered himself
13189-470: Was composed soon after the horrors of the Commune, but its lightness and delicate orchestration give no hint of recent tragedies. Rees rates Phaëton (1873) as the finest of the symphonic poems, belying the composer's professed indifference to melody, and inspired in its depiction of the mythical hero and his fate. A critic at the time of the premiere took a different view, hearing in the piece "the noise of
13310-591: Was crowned at a competition instituted in 1863 by the Société Sainte Cécile of Bordeaux . But after he left the school in 1865 he pursued both aspects of his career with vigour. In 1867 his cantata Les noces de Prométhée beat more than a hundred other entries to win the composition prize of the Grande Fête Internationale in Paris, for which the jury included Auber, Berlioz, Gounod, Rossini and Giuseppe Verdi . In 1868 he premiered
13431-611: Was difficult to live with". Saint-Saëns and his wife moved to the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince , in the Latin Quarter ; his mother moved with them. The couple had two sons, both of whom died in infancy. In 1878, the elder, André, aged two, fell from a window of the flat and was killed; the younger, Jean-François, died of pneumonia six weeks later, aged six months. Saint-Saëns and Marie-Laure continued to live together for three years, but he blamed her for André's accident;
13552-460: Was his widow, Marie-Laure, whom he had last seen in 1881. In the early years of the 20th century, the anonymous author of the article on Saint-Saëns in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians wrote: Saint-Saëns is a consummate master of composition, and no one possesses a more profound knowledge than he does of the secrets and resources of the art; but the creative faculty does not keep pace with
13673-419: Was in danger of looking foolish with his excess of patriotism, and his growing tendency to denounce in public the works of rising young composers, as in his condemnation of Debussy's En blanc et noir (1915): "We must at all costs bar the door of the Institut against a man capable of such atrocities; they should be put next to the cubist pictures." His determination to block Debussy's candidacy for election to
13794-422: Was never a truly mixed language in the strictest sense of the word; mixed languages arise from the cohabitation of speakers of different languages, who develop a hybrid tongue for basic communication). The more idiomatic, concrete and descriptive English is, the more it is from Anglo-Saxon origins. The more intellectual and abstract English is, the more it contains Latin and French influences, e.g. swine (like
13915-468: Was not present on that occasion, but at the first concert performance of the piece the following year he expressed the firm view that Stravinsky was insane. When a group of French musicians led by Saint-Saëns tried to organise a boycott of German music during the First World War, Fauré and Messager dissociated themselves from the idea, though the disagreement did not affect their friendship with their old teacher. They were privately concerned that their friend
14036-517: Was plunged into depression and insomnia, even contemplating suicide. He left Paris and stayed in Algiers, where he recuperated until May 1889, walking and reading but unable to compose. During the 1890s Saint-Saëns spent much time on holiday, travelling overseas, composing less and performing more infrequently than before. A planned visit to perform in Chicago fell through in 1893. He wrote one opera,
14157-477: Was soon in abeyance as a result of the war, during which he gave many performances in France and elsewhere, raising money for war charities. These activities took him across the Atlantic, despite the danger from German submarines. In November 1921, Saint-Saëns gave a recital at the Institut for a large invited audience; it was remarked that his playing was as vivid and precise as ever, and that his personal bearing
14278-460: Was the first major French composer to write piano concertos. His First , in D (1858), in conventional three-movement form, is not well known, but the Second, in G minor (1868) is one of his most popular works. The composer experimented with form in this piece, replacing the customary sonata form first movement with a more discursive structure, opening with a solemn cadenza . The scherzo second movement and presto finale are in such contrast with
14399-405: Was three years old he displayed perfect pitch and enjoyed picking out tunes on the piano. His great-aunt taught him the basics of pianism, and when he was seven he became a pupil of Camille-Marie Stamaty , a former pupil of Friedrich Kalkbrenner . Stamaty required his students to play while resting their forearms on a bar situated in front of the keyboard, so that all the pianist's power came from
14520-423: Was unsuccessful. Auber believed that the prize should have gone to Saint-Saëns, considering him to have more promise than the winner, Léonce Cohen , who made little mark during the rest of his career. In the same year Saint-Saëns had greater success in a competition organised by the Société Sainte-Cécile, Paris, with his Ode à Sainte-Cécile , for which the judges unanimously voted him the first prize. The first piece
14641-482: Was widely regarded as the greatest living French composer. In 1886 the Philharmonic Society of London commissioned what became one of his most popular and respected works, the Third ("Organ") Symphony . It was premiered in London at a concert in which Saint-Saëns appeared as conductor of the symphony and as soloist in Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto , conducted by Sir Arthur Sullivan . The success of
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