Saint-Saëns, Camille

Saint-Saëns, Camille – Ouverture de Fête Op. 133 for orchestra

(b. Paris, 9. October 1835 – d. Algiers, 16. December 1921)

Preface
Saint-Saëns had a horror of cold weather and liked to spend the winter in the warm climates of north Africa or the Canary Islands. In the winter of 1909-1910 he went to Cairo. Mohammed Ali Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt’s brother, had earlier lent him his villa on an island in the middle of the city where he liked to work “surrounded by the waters of the sacred river Nile, dreaming beneath the gilded ceiling of an immense salon, all decorated in the style of the Alhambra in Granada, with palm trees, fig trees and thousands of roses for neighbours.”

In 1909 he returned there in order to compose his last opera, Déjanire, adapted from an outdoor pageant he had written for the arena at Béziers in 1898. This was intended for the opera house at Monte Carlo where two of his operas had already been staged, and where he enjoyed the unflagging support of Prince Albert I of Monaco and his American wife. With the brilliant Raoul Gunsbourg in charge of the opera house, Monte Carlo was one of Europe’s leading centres of opera in those years.

The Prince’s other passion, besides opera, was oceanography. In Monte Carlo he established an Oceanographic Museum, and for its inauguration he asked Saint-Saëns for a new orchestral work. So on 10th January 1910 the composer set Déjanire aside and spent the next two weeks writing it. “It’s not a march or an overture, nor a symphonic poem. It’s a bit of all three. In it I have put the calm and the storm, even deep-sea fishing for creatures that sparkle like stars when they are brought to the surface.”

Its title was harder to find than the notes themselves. Saint-Saëns wrote to his publisher: “In German Festouvertüre would be fine. Ouverture de fête in French is boring. Ouverture triomphale would be too ambitious and that’s not its character. Ouverture pour l’inauguration du Musée Océanographique de Monaco would be the true title, but imagine that on a concert programme! We can’t have Ouverture océanographique.” …

Full preface / Komplettes Vorwort > HERE