SAINT-SAENS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 814, 4 March 1955, Page 5

SAINT-SAENS

Sir-Owen Jensen’s article about the above composer, in your issue of February 11, calls for immediate comment, on several grounds. There is, first, the vexed question of pronunciation. Since only French people and first-rate lin-

guists can give the correct inflection to "Saint-Saens," why should the name not be Anglicised into "Sant-Sains"? Surely this is no worse than the grotesque attempts at correct pronunciation heard over the air and elsewhere. Second, Mr. Jensen shows poor taste in echoing the feeble efforts of musical pygmies to disparage and belittle a composer of indubitable genius. Saint-Saens was, and remains, a great composer, by any standards. To assert, as your contributor does, that "there ~was something missing in his musical make-up," is a generalisation as foolish as it groundless. Third, Mr. Jensen refers to the G Minor Concerto of Saint-Saens as "a pianist’s concerto, it shows off the piano." Of course it does, because any concerto that did otherwise would not justify its title. The text-books inform us that "a concerto is an instrumental composition designed to show the skill of an executant," and nobody knew better than Saint-Saens how to exploit this maxim to the full. It was my rare privilege to have heard the composer as soloist in his Fifth Piano Concerto, when that work was given its premiére in Paris to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Saint-Saens’s concert debut. Many times since have I listened to other eminent pianists in the same work, but none has eclipsed that brilliant performance. With the sole exception of Mendelssohn, Saint-Saens stands unrivalled in history as virtuoso performer on both piano and organ-in fact, for versatility and general excellence of accomplishment he had no peer. His name and fame will endure when all trace of petty detraction has vanished.

L. D.

AUSTIN

(Wellington)_