Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)
Havanaise for violin and orchestra Op. 83

Camille Saint-Saens is a fascinating figure. Great virtuoso of the piano and celebrated organist, cofounder of the Nationale de Musique, professor of music paying for students’ trips to the Wagner Festivals in Bayreuth and Liszt enthusiast, he was almost a Classicist in his composition and a genius of form.
He wrote many slick, almost redundant pieces, yet even these were always elegant. Of his operas, Samson et Dalila has retained its place in the repertoire. His famous Carnival of the Animals presents him as a sophisticated yet playful aesthete. He treasured virtuosity and gave it much leeway in his music. Equally inspired by the chorale and the street song, the music of Bach and Mauritanian motives, the French chanson and Latino rhythms, he still was not really eclectic. In his best works, such as Symphony No. 3 “Organ,” almost all of his piano concertos, Violin Concerto No. 3 in B minor or Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor, he showed himself to be an artist original to the point of loneliness, looking at the world with perception and reserve yet always ready to admire its sensuous beauty.
Paris, the focus of impulses coming in from an extensive colonial empire, the centre to which artists from all over the world were drawn to perform and to study, where the audience was always hungry for any form of exoticism, was a natural place for an oeuvre combining elements of various cultures. Havanaise and Introduction et rondo capriccioso are part of this strand in Saint-Saëns, together with his pieces for piano and orchestra: Rhapsodie d`Auvergne Op. 73, Wedding-Cake Op. 76, Caprice andalou Op. 122 or Caprice sur des airs danois et russes Op. 79 for piano, flute, oboe and clarinet (1887), and his organ works, Fantaisie (1857) or Trois rhapsodies sur des cantiques bretons (1866). Echoes of Saint-Saëns’s many voyages to Africa and the two Americas resound in Nuit persane, Suite algerienne, the fantasia Africa, in Piano Concerto No. 5 and Souvenir d`Ismaïla. The composer did not return from his last trip to Algiers.
Havanaise in E major, written in 1887, is maintained in a free, rondo-like form. It main idea is permeated with a syncopated rhythm of a Cuban dance (habañera), above which flows a calm yet enticing (lusinghiero) melody in the violin. It is sharply contrasted by a very rapid virtuoso episode that again and again recedes before the rhythm of the habañera and its new melody. The main idea returns in the violin’s top register and opens a new chain of episodes, once lyrical, once virtuoso.
Introduction et rondo capriccioso in A minor is a work of 1863. Contrarily to the somewhat drawing-room Havanaise, it is pure virtuosity, a true concert piece. Saint-Saëns dedicated it to Pablo Sarasate. Display already begins in the short and reflexive Introduction (Andante). The extensive refrain of Rondo (Allegro non troppo) contains two ideas: one feisty and syncopated and one light, dancing, with accented trills. An energetic tutti precedes a lyrical melody of the violin, then repeated in thirds and supported by a piquant accompaniment. A new accompaniment is also there for a return of the refrain, and then another tutti ushers in yet another and somewhat operatic melody. Soon the dancing refrain episode is back in the last appearance of its main idea, this time in the orchestra over a virtuoso accompaniment of the soloist. The whole ends in an impressive coda (Più allegro). This brilliant composition, for years a must in any violinist’s repertoire, presages the great finale of another piece dedicated by Saint-Saëns to Sarasate, Violin Concerto No. 3.

Wiesława Berny-Negrey