As a composer, Saint-Saëns impresses the student first of all by his excessive, his almost inordinate, cleverness. It is not seemly for a human being to be so clever; there is something necromantic about it. Look at the opening of the G-minor Piano Concerto and see a modern Frenchman writing like the great Bach. See, in the «Danse Macabre,» Berlioz and Johann Strauss amalgamated. Listen to the rich effects of tone in the 'Cello Sonata in C minor. Study the thematic transformations and the contrapuntal style of the Symphony in the same key. Admire the lightness, the cobweb iridescence, of the «Rouet d'Omphale.» The author of these works is obviously a man of great intellectual skill and versatility.
Looking more closely, one observes a duality of style, for the moment puzzling, which properly understood only emphasizes the peculiarity of his artistic impulse. His compositions are of two well-marked varieties which at first seem to have little in common. To begin with, all those cast in the conventional symphonic mold--the three symphonies, the eight concertos, three for violin and five for piano, and most of the chamber-music--are severely, at times almost aridly, classical in conception and execution. They are «absolute music» of the most unequivocal sort. They depend for their effect on clear form, well-calculated symmetry, traditional though interesting melodic and harmonic treatment; their themes are of the family of Haydn and Mozart; their structure is that perfected by Beethoven; their orchestration is skillful but unobtrusive, a transparent medium rather than a rich material garment. In a word, they are very pure examples in music of a type of art--the French classic or pseudo-classic type--which gains little from richness of material or variety of suggestion, which depends for its appeal on clarity and symmetry of form and on clean workmanship in style. But, in addition to these conventional works, Saint-Saëns has produced a whole museum of exotics, in which his aim is to delineate passions, peoples, and places. There are the four Symphonic Poems, for example, the «Rouet d'Omphale,» «Phaéton,» the «Danse Macabre,» and «La Jeunesse d'Hercule,» in which he assumes the rôle of story-teller. In the «Nuit à Lisbonne,» the «Jota Aragonese,» and the «Rapsodie d'Auvergne,» he makes a tour in southern Europe; in the «Suite Algerienne» he portrays the deserts about Algiers, and in his opus 89 he gives us a fantasy of odd rhythms and outlandish tonalities supposed to introduce us to Africa. Nothing could seem, at the first blush, more diametrically opposite to the pseudo-classic works than these exotics, which among their academic brothers recall the King of Bahonagar at Cambridge. Yet both kinds, after all, when one looks more closely, are products of the widely questing intelligence, whose interests are dramatic rather than personal. They have this in common, that neither is of primarily emotional origin, that both are expressions of a mind objective and alertly observant. The difference between them is that in the one case this observation takes for object the purely musical world of tones, and in the other nature's world of persons, nations, races, and climates. But whether he is seeking a piquant rhythm or a curious turn of harmony, or sketching his impression of Spain or Egypt, Saint-Saëns is always the onlooker, the man of the world, never the mystic who contemplates in his own heart the forces that underlie the universe.