Customer Reviews

Camille Saint-Saens: A Life

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As a professional in the opera world (I've been at it too long to call it a business), I had a very good reason to buy and read this biography...the only one widely available in English these days. (I could only wish that some of the earlier sources in Rees's bibliography had been available to me.)

I found Rees's style both disjunct and pedantic...an accomplishment of sorts. In the facts of The Life, presented prosaically, for a composer whose existence was anything BUT prosaic, Rees left us hungry for substantiation. (His footnoting was mostly just irritating.) Certain events and trends in The Life, about which we would gladly know more--the controversial, virtually sensational dissolution of the composer's marriage, for instance, were glossed over, swept under the carpet or conveniently ignored.

Rees's technique of analysis of each work as he encounters it was perfunctory at best; is this guy really a musician? The writing has a kind of amateurish fervor to it, which might have been charming in other hands; but based on this work alone, I would quite simply not delve further into this composer's life or works, were it not for the fact that I'm about to be involved in a production of SAMSON ET DALILA.

This was a major disappointment, and all of us interested in the voluminous output of this protean figure--hey folks, why HAVE only two of his operas been recorded professionally?--will simply have to wait for someone better at this task. Perhaps Rees didn't find all that much to admire about Saint-Saens; but it doesn't incline me to want to read his life of Edward German (now THERE'S a Minor Composer). Oh well...onward and upward into the future. Saint-Saens is ripe for rediscovery, but Brian Rees may have nipped it in the bud...for a while. Most opera enthusiasts I know, certainly in the professional echelons, are tired of Mr. and Mrs. Gheorghiu, Andrea Bocelli, Charlotte Church and the like. Enough of the endless BOHEME entries in Schwann (oh all right, I think it's a great piece too!); give us a chance to hear some Saint-Saens that set the musical world on fire...or at least kindled respectable bonfires...in its time.

Although I was truly interested in this subject, getting through all 485 pages of this book was pretty much drudgery. It's hard to believe the author has had much writing experience, particularly in the fields of music or biography. Saint-Saens never came alive for me, never became a person I could like or dislike, or even care about. Instead, the author provided an endless calendar of the composer's life -- on the order of Tuesday he went here, Wednesday he did this. We learn of his petty jealousies, but little else of the real person, whose life probably included many mysteries beyond the author's grasp.

And there is little or no critical evaluation of the vast majority of the works of this enormously prolific composer, nor any real discussion of his inspirations or working methods. Poor Saint-Saens comes across as a rather fuddy-duddy, petty workaholic.

In addition, the book is poorly written: the author evidently knows nothing of the rules of paragraphing, commonly including widely divergent topics in a single, unending paragraph. This is both confusing and irritating.

Finally, the omission of a list of the composer's works as a separate appendix is unforgiveable! True, the Index does list works, but only as they are mentioned in the text, with no assurance that this listing is accurate or complete. I'll look for a better and more complete biography!

The options for research on Saint-Saëns aren't much, so this book nearly soured me on the subject altogether. It's utterly unreadable. I recommend scouring libraries and used bookstores for James Harding's 1965 _Saint-Saëns and His Circle_, which, while hardly exhaustive, is at least readable and useful in getting a sense of the man.