Cello Sonata No.1 in C minor Op.32 (1872)

When Saint-Saëns wrote his First Cello Sonata in 1872 it was an achievement all but unprecedented for a French composer. It might well be that, as vice-president of the recently formed Société Nationale de Musique, he felt he should make a start on filling a gap in the repertoire. The was a Cello Sonata in A minor handsomely written by Edouard Lalo 16 years earlier but Saint-Saëns seems to have set out with the higher ambition of compensating his country for having no Beethoven. At least that is the impression given by the challenge apparently issued to the Cello Sonata in D Op.102 No.2 in the opening bars.

As it turns out, however, the opening is not characteristic of the movement as a whole. Although the robust main theme, introduced in double-stopped C minor sonorities by the cello, suggests that this will not be the place for harmonic or textural subtlety, there are countless examples of both. The transition to the second subject, which transforms the peremptory opening gestures into a delicately balanced, harmonically wayward exchange of pianissimo phrases between the cello and the upper register of the piano, is particularly interesting. If the second subject itself is no more than a D flat-major variant of the first, it is offset by a poetically coloured closing theme with shifting piano harmonies hovering off the beat over a low ostinato on the cello. Although the main theme has no hesitation about re-asserting its robust personality in the development section, in the recapitulation it is recalled pianissimo on the C-string of the cello and denied the strident triumph it might have expected.

The outer sections of the Andante tranquillo sostenuto are based on an improvisation played by the composer at the organ of St Augustin in Paris the previous year. Clearly too good to waste, the improvisation takes the form here of an E flat major chorale over a jogging bass, the two elements passing democratically from one instrument to the other. The C minor middle section develops into an expressive aria for the cello, as seductive in its chromaticisms as Dalila’s “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix.”

The closing Allegro moderato owes its existence, it seems, to the composer’s much venerated mother, who is said to have been so disappointed by the finale he had originally written for the work that she told her son it was a complete failure. He duly obliged by providing another. A devastating example of scoring for cello and piano driven almost throughout by semiquaver triplets on the piano, it offers a wealth of thematic and harmonic variety, including a stormy coda, apparently without pausing to think.

When Saint-Saëns wrote his Cello Sonata in C minor in there was just one earlier work of its kind by a major French composer. Written in 1856, Edouard Lalo’s handsomely proportioned Cello Sonata in A minor achieved publication only in 1873, however. So it is unlikely that Saint-Saëns knew the work before what seems to have been a much-belated first performance at one of the first concerts of the Société Nationale de Musique in in January 1872. As a founder and vice-president of the Société, Saint-Saëns was presumably there to hear it. But what effect it had on him it is difficult to say. Certainly, his own First Cello Sonata was written two months later. This might, however, have been not so much a reaction to the Lalo as a renewed enthusiasm for the cello after Auguste Tolbecque, a musician he much admired, returned to Paris after six years as professor of cello at the Marseilles Conservatoire. The fact that he got to work on his First Cello Concerto at much the same time as the First Cello Sonata would seem to support that idea. The Sonata was dedicated to the Franchomme pupil Jules Lasserre, who was working in London at the time, and the Concerto to Tolbecque, who gave the first performance of both works.

If the Lalo Sonata in A minor had any influence on the Saint-Saëns Sonata in C minor it was evidently not as an inspiration but as an example of what to avoid. Strikingly well written though it is, the Lalo sonata is far from disciplined in construction. The dramatic opening of the Saint-Saëns – which cearly owes a little to that of Beethoven’s in D major – is an immediate indication of the classically orientated severity that prevails through much of the work. Nothing is wasted: the downward groups of semiquavers heard in the opening bars are as essential a part of the economy as the robust main theme, introduced in double-stopped sonority by the cello and echoed in massive C minor chords by the piano. They are heard again in the transition to the second subject which transforms the peremptory opening gestures into a delicately balanced, harmonically wayward exchange of pianissimo phrases between the cello and the upper register of the piano. The second subject itself, introduced by cello under piano tremolandos, is a variant of the first. Increasingly tense, it is offset by a poetically coloured closing theme that, with quietly dissonant piano chords avoiding the first beat of the bar over a cello ostinato, sounds like a disembodied waltz. Development and recapitulation are resourcefully combined. On its last recall the quasi-waltz precedes a remarkable passage of harmonic and rhythmic dislocation before a vigorous coda restores the C minor severity.

The outer sections of the Andante tranquillo sostenuto are based on an improvisation played by the composer at the organ of St Augustin in Paris the previous year. Clearly too good to waste, in its present manifestation it takes the form of an E flat major chorale over a jogging bass, the two elements passing democratically from one instrument to the other. The C minor middle section is an expressive aria for cello with a melodic line that flowers into surprisingly exotic inflections towards the end. A brief development of the opening section leads to its recall in enterprisingly new instrumental colouring. The notion that the chorale is based on “D’impie et de rebelle” from Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine, incidentally, does not bear serious examination. Nor does it derive directly from Berlioz or Mendelssohn.

The closing Allegro moderato owes its existence, it seems, to the composer’s much venerated mother, who is said to have been so disappointed by the finale he had originally written for the work that she told her son it was a complete failure. He duly obliged by providing another – for which, if the story is true, we owe Mme Saint-Saëns a debt of gratitude, since it is devastating piece of scoring for cello and piano. Driven almost throughout by semiquaver triplets on the piano, it offers the thematic and harmonic variety required by a sonata-form construction, including an ingeniously syncopated closing theme, apparently without pausing to think. The development is more a matter of dramatic spontaneity than formal convention. If it seems by the end of the recapitulation that a work that began so forcefully is now ready to go quietly, the stormy coda puts an end to that idea. Apparent allusions to the first movement are probably not deliberately made.