Saint-Saëns, Camille

Preface

Camille Saint-Saëns – Morceau de Concert for horn and orchestra op. 94

(b. Paris, 9. Oct. 1835 – d. Algiers, 16. Dec. 1921)

Preface
Sometime before 1866 Saint-Saëns composed a Suite for cello and piano in five movements, and although he was an unfailingly prolific composer, he made dozens of arrangements of his music for other instruments. In this case he took the third movement of the Suite and made it into a Romance for horn and orchestra. Perhaps he had a particular player in mind, but it seems not to have been performed at that time. When it was published, in 1885, the Romance was dedicated to a recent graduate of the Paris Conservatoire, Henri Chaussier (1854-1914).

Chaussier was a virtuoso who played the chromatic horn at a time when French composers were still writing for the old ‘natural’ horn alongside the newer chromatic horn, which did not require the player to carry a box of crooks everywhere he went. Saint-Saëns subsequently composed a new piece for Chaussier, the Morceau de Concert in F minor, completed in November 1887. The first performance was given by Chaussier in the Salle Pleyel, Paris, on 7 February 1891, when it was billed as a ‘Fantasia for the new omnitonic horn – système Chaussier’. In fact the chromatic horn had been in use for sixty years, yet the debate continued.

As if to evade the issue of the horn’s key, Saint-Saëns notated the horn part an octave above its actual pitch, as if it were a horn in C.

Some of Saint-Saëns’s concertos are single-movement works in a form favoured by Weber, Liszt and others, with a slow section between two faster sections. The Morceau de concert is a work of this type. The first section resembles a set of variations with increasingly busy work for the soloist. The Adagio follows, and this leads into a final section in F major, which gives the soloist some opportunities to show off his skill, with easier alternatives for the weak spirited.

It is surprising that in such a short work Saint-Saëns offers an optional cut between figures 3 and 4 of the first section.

Hugh Macdonald, 2024

For performance material please contact Durand, Paris.