Camille Saint-Saëns
Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso
Camille Saint-Saëns began composing music at the precocious age of three and at 11 debuted as a concert pianist, offering as an encore to play any Beethoven sonata the audience could name. The brilliant child grew into a virtuoso pianist and internationally acclaimed organist who poured out elegant, perfectly-proportioned works as naturally, he said, as “an apple tree producing apples.” Considered relatively modern in his youth–he championed the music of Schumann and Wagner, and was friends with Berlioz and Lizst–he lived to become something of a reactionary, protesting works by Debussy and outraged by Stravinsky. Though today Saint-Saëns is known for a relatively few works (his so-called “organ” Symphony No. 3, 1886; the opera Samson and Delilah, 1877, and the ever-popular Carnival of the Animals, 1886), he published nearly 300 compositions in his 86 years.
In the 1850s, Saint-Saëns became acquainted with a fellow musical prodigy, the Spanish violinist Pablo Sarasate (1844-1908). A native of Pamplona, the young Sarasate made his concert debut at eight and began studying at the Paris Conservatoire when he was 12, winning that institution’s annual first prize in 1861. Saint-Saëns wrote his Violin Concerto in A major (1859) for Sarasate when the young violinist was only 15 years old. Sarasate was 19 when Saint-Saëns wrote the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso for him in 1863, and the technical challenges of the work attest to the violinist’s prowess. Saint-Saëns did not publish the piece until 1870, but Sarasate frequently programmed it in his concert engagements throughout Europe and the United States, making it popular enough that both Georges Bizet and Claude Debussy made arrangements of it (for violin and piano, and for four-hand piano, respectively.
The slow introduction, marked Andante malinconico (“melancholy”), becomes gradually more animated and ends in a mini-cadenza that opens the rondo, Allegro ma non troppo. The syncopated theme stated by the violin has a distinct Spanish flavor, and features huge leaps and brilliant arpeggios. The orchestra opens the bridge to a contrasting lyrical theme, con morbidezza (“with tenderness”), played in 2/4 by the soloist over the 6/8 time of the orchestral accompaniment. Even the rondo theme reappears in a more introspective mood, before the orchestra bursts once more into the bridge passage. A solo oboe makes the final statement of the rondo and the violin moves from a short cadenza of triple-stopping to a brilliant coda, undoubtedly written as a showcase for Sarasate’s virtuosity.