Si vous n’avez rien à me dire

Saint-Saens success as a romantic composer was not in any way matched by success in his actual romantic life. In part this was because he was a pretty terrible misogynist with a waspish tongue, and, when he finally did get married, he treated his young wife appallingly (as we will eventually come to). So let’s just say he was not really an attractive proposition as a bachelor (rather like Erik Satie, whose preference for collecting hundreds umbrellas suggests he was more interested in parasols than paramours).

Saint-Saens’ sexuality was the source of considerable speculation, even in his lifetime. Stephen Studd in his biography of Saint-Saens devotes a fair amount of discussion to it. The principle supposition is that he was homosexual: his disdain for female musicians but fondness for young male pupils, several of whom, including the French parlour song master Reynaldo Hahn, himself a deeply closeted homosexual who was outwardly homophobic, was taken as one piece of evidence. His regular trips to North Africa where he enjoyed going ‘native’ with the young local Arab boys (the gossips suggested), is suggestive; and, supposedly a give-away he did have an unhealthily close relationship with his mother¹

Madame Saint-Saens –  subject of a stock photo

But, in my view all this evidence is circumstantial. There is plenty of evidence that he pined over unattainable women in his younger years and rather lusted after them in a creepy fashion in his later years. John Philip Sousa, the famous American band composer of the Liberty Bell March and Stars and Stripes Forever, describes feeling uncomfortable at the number of remarks along the lines of ‘check out the rack on her’ or ‘wow what an ass’ he directed at passing women as they took a stroll one day (and, on the same trip to the United States, there was whispered talk of ‘professional’ women being requested at his hotel apartment).

So all of these salacious crumbs² provide an interesting perspective on the song Si vous n’avez rien à me dire (If you have nothing to say to me), that discusses a clear case of yearning unrequited love. The words, a setting of a Victor Hugo poem, outline the singer fretting “if you have nothing to say to me, why are you still hanging around and tormenting me”. One perspective, suggested in the liner notes to the Hyperion recording of this song, is that the poem is about forbidden love, by which I assume it to means homosexual love. But given the dedication to a viscountess³, I’m inclined that this is just another of Saint-Saens cycle of unrequited love songs.

The song itself has been compared to the songs of Reynaldo Hahn, and it does have a lovely intimate feel with gentle rippling accompaniment with gentle chord modulations, over which our singer has a very sedate and simple melodic line. It’s only about three minutes long, but is another example of the best of Saint-Saens song writing. It feels, rather like to does with a couple of the Mélodies Persanes, of time standing still: as if to break the spell will see the subject of the song disappear, and shatter the illusion of possibilities.

Si vous n’avez rien à me dire

Why you might want to listen to it: It’s a gentle wistful song, that makes you think back on those times when you wished that girl/boy you fancied would talk to you

Why you might want to avoid it: If you’re that kind of person who would just say ‘oh just snap out of it’. You heartless anti-romantic you.

¹ Writing to Saint-Saens in 1870, his mother calls him “a girl of degenerative stock’.

² Not to be confused with Salacious Crumb, the name of the curious little laughing muppet that sits in the snuggly confines of Jabba the Hutt’s corpulent tail in Return of the Jedi.

³ Curiously the dedicatee has a very similar birth name, Marie de Reiset, as the Countess de Grandval (née Marie Reiset) – a previous dedicatee of other equally mooning songs like Le Sommeil Des Fleurs – but as far as I can tell is NOT the same woman, which is a bit mysterious (someone with better knowledge of French aristocracy in 19^th century might be able to resolve this puzzle).