Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) is one of the strangest cases of posthumous reputation in classical music. He was, in his lifetime, considered one of the finest musical minds in France — a child prodigy who reportedly offered at his debut to play any of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas from memory as an encore, a composer of five piano concertos, three symphonies, thirteen operas, and the Organ Symphony. By any reasonable measure, he was on track to be remembered alongside Beethoven and Brahms — a name in the permanent canon, a bust in the conservatory hallway.
Then he dashed off the Carnival of the Animals in a week for a private party, refused to publish it because he did not want to be remembered as a comedian, and died in 1921. The Carnival came out in 1922. And his name has lived next to a swan, an aquarium, and a donkey ever since. He wasn’t wrong to worry.
The Piano Concerto No. 2 is the better measure of who he actually was. Composed in seventeen days in 1868 — with Anton Rubinstein conducting the premiere and Saint-Saëns himself as soloist — it opens with a solo cadenza that sounds lifted from Bach’s keyboard works, then pivots into a glittering Allegro scherzando and a headlong Presto finale. Someone once said it begins like Bach and ends like Offenbach. That’s not entirely wrong. Saint-Saëns was formally impeccable, always in control, and constitutionally unable to be dull — which, in the end, may be why no one took him quite seriously enough.