For years he has been writing
music apparently logical, clear, well-formed. His opus-numbers mount
well toward two hundred. He has written symphonies, concertos for piano
and violin, operas, cantatas, symphonic poems, suites, ballades,
fantasies, caprices. He has written large numbers of each. He has
written "impressions" of Naples, of Algiers, of the Canary Islands, of
every portion of the globe he has visited. But despite all this apparent
activity, M. Saint-Saens has really succeeded in effecting nothing at
all. His compositions are pretty well outside the picture of musical
art. To-day they are already older than Mendelssohn's, of which pale art
they seem an even paler reflection. Mendelssohn, too, was a person
inwardly at war with himself, and perhaps Saint-Saens may be another
example of the same conflict. Still, the latter has achieved a sort of
waxy coldness from which the amiable Felix was after all saved. Elegant,
finished, smooth, classicizing, the music of M. Camille Saint-Saens
leaves us in the completest of objectivity. We are touched and moved not
at all by it. Something, we vaguely perceive, is supposed to be taking
place beneath our eyes. Faint frosty lights pass across the orchestra.
This, we guess, is supposed to be an inward and musing passage.
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