Essay: Why has the world forgotten the works of Camille Saint- Saens?

War - and fashion - have sidelined him for most of the century. For him it's a shame. For us it's a loss. By Brian Rees

A sunken vessel, from which three or four masts protruded above the water line. This was the estimate of a recent French writer on the reputation of Camille Saint-Saens. Ten years earlier, a speaker at the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris had advertised a lecture on "Saint-Saens - an unknown great composer". Yet this was the musician who, in 1921, had been given a magnificent state funeral, where troops had to hold back the crowds along the boulevards and several carriages were needed to bear his medals and decorations. Presumably the "visible masts" recognisable by a modern generation were Le Carnaval des animaux, the Danse macabre, the aria Softly Awakes My Heart and the violin Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso.

Yet, as with the Titanic, divers have begun to go down to search for items in the wreckage. Enterprising musicians and groups, often young, have recovered chamber music, songs and organ works. Distinguished soloists and orchestras have recorded symphonies and concertos, which have been heard with greater frequency on radio, if not in the concert hall. For the recovery of major lost items, however, the heavy hydraulic machinery of the great recording companies will be required - to resurrect the Saint- Saens operas and those large scale official cantatas which marked events in French history.

"An unknown great composer". The wonder is that Saint-Saens never became a representative of his national culture in the sense that Elgar is regarded in England or Verdi in Italy. The orators at his funeral stressed especially the qualities of clarity, finesse and sense of style that were, they claimed, the hallmarks of French art. He came from the soil of France. His parents' families both came from generations of small farmers and labourers in the historic regions of Normandy and Champagne. He was fiercely patriotic. In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War he played the leading part in founding a National Society to further the cause of French music, too long enslaved to German and Italian models. As a young man he had won the competition for a cantata to celebrate the Paris Exhibition of 1867, which was intended to promote Paris as the capital of Europe. He figured prominently in the programme of the exhibition of 1878 and, in 1900, presided over a committee of all the principal living French composers to add a musical dimension to the Exhibition in Praise of Peace and Science. His music hymned the benefits of electricity at the dawn of the century and oceanographic research, for the Museum of Monte Carlo, a decade later. Huge choral and orchestral odes were commissioned to celebrate Victor Hugo and the tercentenary of Pierre Corneille.

In the world at large he was recognised as a musical ambassador for his country, particularly as France sought to build and strengthen the entente with Britain. It was arranged that he write a coronation march for King Edward VII. Lord Curzon, as Chancellor of the University of Oxford, conferred honourary degrees on both Saint-Saens and the sculptor, Rodin, with eloquent references to French civilisation. Saint-Saens festivals were quite frequent in London; one to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the first of his many appearances in the capital and another, in 1913, on the rather tenuous grounds of recognising the 70th anniversary of his first piano lesson. On this last occasion, a testimonial on behalf of all the great British musicians was presented to him. It included the signature of Winston Churchill, who could not, for all his many gifts, be described as a musical celebrity but knew something of the balance of power. In 1915, when the Western Front was being severely tested, Saint-Saens, aged 80, braved the perils of the Atlantic to conduct his massive cantata, Hail California, in San Francisco, carrying with him one strand of the French hopes that the US, with its many musicians of German origin, would cast its lot in with the Allies.

Furthermore, Saint-Saens shared with Elgar and Verdi a range of expression from the deeply serious to a facility to touch the hearts of the multitude, a gift other prominent French composers have lacked. It is to be found in his marches: the Marche Heroique symbolising resistance during the 1870-71 siege of Paris, the salute to the colonising forces which concludes the Algerian Suite and at the end of his life, Cypres et Lauriers, signalling the armistice of 1918, its martial passages remarkably vigorous for a composer of 84. But military gestures are not the only signs of virility. In pieces such as his (neglected) Third Piano Concerto and the Fourth there is a vigour and solidity of structure which one seeks, but seldom finds, in the music of Massenet, Debussy, Faure and even Cesar Franck. Some critics have considered that the Fourth Piano Concerto represents a musical impression - with its final folk-song echoes - of sympathy with the idea of a France regenerated by a sturdy agricultural population, set out by Ernest Renan and other intellectuals of the 1870s. Certainly in practice Saint-Saens carried out this message when, in 1898, he personally rehearsed hundreds of amateur singers and players from the vineyards and farms around the city of Beziers to perform his score for the verse-drama Dejanire, which was cheered by crowds, the size of which many a modern football club would envy. As for the giants of French music, he championed Berlioz, and recovered and edited the scores of Rameau year upon year.

How, then, did the vast proportion of his output fall so rapidly into oblivion during the mid-20th century? It was partly because he refused to recognise "schools" of composition: Wagnerian, Franckist or Modernist. He could be irascible in his comments. Although he was highly humorous and often self-deprecating. ("I am ashamed at the inconvenience I am causing you with my vile music" he wrote to the violinist Ysaye, who was to try out his First Quartet), his declared hostility to Debussy, Stravinsky and their followers alienated opinion in critical circles. As a result he was thought of by many as an old curmudgeon, hopelessly conservative in outlook. While in reality he was open to experiment and novelty he was regarded as a late relic of the traditional exponents of the old Germanic classical forms and patterns. He had always been able to achieve his effects with the simplest musical means, and he reacted against the huge orchestras and strident cacophonies required by younger composers to make an impact.

More significantly, the familiarity of his most popular pieces in the programmes which accompanied the silent cinema, and were heard in cafes and restaurants, sometimes as much as 20 to 25 per cent of the music played, turned away the connoisseurs, who liked to think that their appreciation of the arts elevated them above the majority.

Finally, although he had been interested at the start of the century in the newly invented gramophone, and even made some recordings, the Second World War stringently limited the scope of the recording companies to the basic repertoire and there were few rarities. By the time that situation changed, his name was less familiar and there was competition from the champions of medieval music and more exotic discoveries.

As a young man he had once written to an unknown female admirer that he hoped to become the greatest of French composers. It was an aim he pursued amid a whirl of concert tours as a renowned French organists. He had a full share of the monumental industry that the 19th century bestowed upon genius. Musical reputations tend to rise and fall as do currency exchange rates. If the balance of Franco-German culture is to be kept in equipoise, this is perhaps a good moment for advocates of Saint-Saens to support him in the Euro-musical currency market.

`Saint-Saens' by Brian Rees is published by Chatto & Windus next month, pounds 30