Symphony No. 1 in E flat major, Op. 2

In his biography of Saint Saens, Stephen Studd makes a strong case that Saint-Saens’ career never quite took place at the right time. In his early years, Studd argues, Saint-Saens was an iconoclast, writing music that was disparaged by the establishment because of its daring, avant-garde style. And then, all of a sudden (probably sometime around 2.15pm on October 17^th 1871), he became sniggeringly passé, writing old-fashioned classicly minded ‘symphonies’ (hah!) and ‘concertos’ (pah!).

Whilst there is at least reasonable evidence for the latter (Saint-Saens and Debussy’s mutual antipathy, for example, is well known), I have to say I really struggle, on the evidence of my listening so far, to believe the former.

Take the Symphony No. 1 in E flat Op. 2 (we’re finally back in the land of opus numbers after our terrifying wanderings through the hinterland of unpublished curios). This is the work that after the disappointment of failing to win the Prix De Rome in 1852, really began to mark Saint-Saens’ name down as a composer to watch. It’s easy to see why, it is the first really mature work that he produced, far more sophisticated than the early Symphony in A major. But, one thing it is not is wildly revolutionary, and it is difficult to see that, even in 1853, that it would have had corseted ladies fainting or crusty conservatoire curmudgeons fearing that they had lost body parts*. When you consider that the symphony comes almost 25 years after Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, it really is impossible to think that 1850s audience would have batted an eyelid, except perhaps when suppressing yawns in the final movement. **

The symphony is a pretty conventional four-movement mid-romantic symphony with pretty strong nods to Beethoven and Mendelssohn. All four movements are major keys, with a slightly odd progression of keys (E flat – G – E – E flat). What’s most curious, though, is how, as Saint-Saens tries to up-the-ante throughout the symphony, the listening experience becomes duller and duller.

The first movement is conventionally scored for a small romantic orchestra. There is a quiet eight-bar slow introduction (repeated loudly midway through the movement) which basically slows down the main theme of the movement, (imagine someone playing the first two lines of A Hard Days Night very slowly then starting the song properly and you get the drift). The main theme is one of those gentle and pensive themes that builds up slowly, eventually giving way to a series of trumpet fanfares (no, they don’t really add much, but since they only last for about 4 bars they’re tolerable) – before a second gentle theme, comes in. The whole movement, apart from the occasional ear-blasting fanfare, is really rather excellent because it doesn’t try too hard to be ‘look at me’ ish. Further, I’m a sucker for a bit of plaintive adagio horn solo, and chuck in a few ethereal strings underneath… and well I’m anybody’s.

As an oboist, I also like that the second movement, a jaunty march that sounds rather like Saint-Saens has cribbed a French folk-song (probably highly likely, he did that kind of thing a lot), allows a nice long solo for my erstwhile instrument above oom-pah-pah strings. The rest of the movement meanders along in a kind of way that you might expect to hear on the drive-time show of an unthreatening classic FM radio network whilst you sit behind your steering wheel thinking ‘hmm this is quite nice I wonder what it is?’ – although probably not ‘wow, I’m in floods of tears here, I must buy this’. Saint-Saens throws in a rather superfluous harp in this movement, the first sign of an unnecessary augmentation of orchestral forces…

The third movement gives that old harp a bit more of an arpeggio work-out whilst accompanying an unmemorable 9/8 tune bandied around between the clarinet and strings. There’s a curious bit of stop-start accompaniment at one point in the strings which actually sounds more like the kind of thing you’d hear when members of an amateur orchestra lose their way in the music and sort of pretend to play once in a while in the hope that they might miraculously suddenly slip back into the right place in the music (I used to do this a lot). Superfluous instrument: the cor anglais rears it’s head, absolutely pointlessly because it receives no solo lines or even fragments at all and essentially sounds indistinguishable from an oboe.

For the final movement Saint-Saens throws in the kitchen sink, unfortunately not generating the sought-for ‘Wow! You’re throwing a kitchen sink Saint-Saens! Please let me caress your amazingly oiled biceps’, but instead ‘Ow! Why the bloody hell are your throwing a kitchen sink? That really bloody hurts!”. So we have four (!) harps (all just playing the same thing), and to cap it all a veritable brass band of saxhorns, flugelhorns, cornets, trombones and tuba – all of which seem to play the ENTIRE movement fff. The effect I’m sure Saint-Saens intends is one of Berlioz Requiem style awesome-ness, but the whole thing just sounds like one those dreadful patriotic Stalin-worshipping Soviet anthems that Shostakovich would occasionally produce. The two themes are so four-square they give a bad name to tetrahedral geometry, and when Saint-Saens decides to submit the second of these to a long and thoroughly dull fugue (still played fff, naturally), well the time comes to seek the time countdown information on iTunes.

In short, this is a symphony that I started off thinking was a travesty that it does not get played more often, but then realized that if you are going to employ four harpists and half the Grimethorpe Colliery then the music better be good.

Why you might want to listen to it: the first two movements are really good – serene – an oasis of calm

Why you might want to avoid it: “that last movement sucks big time” (Norman Lebrecht)

* A reference to Berlioz’s teacher LeSueur, who was some flustered after hearing Beethoven’s fifth symphony for the first time that he claimed he couldn’t find his head. True story – if Berlioz’s memoirs are to be believed. Mind you, in the same memoirs he also talks about dressing up as a maid and travelling from Nice to Paris to murder his ex-lover, so perhaps there might be elements of fanciful luridity

** Berlioz actually hailed Saint-Saens, after hearing this symphony, as a composer who ‘lacks only inexperience’ – sort of one of those comments that sounds clever at first but then a bit wanky