Les cloches de las Palmas from Six Etudes Op.111 (1899)

Etude en forme de valse from Six Etudes Op.52 (1877)

Anyone new to Les cloches de las Palmas (The Bells of Las Palmas) and knowing nothing of its provenance would surely not attribute it to Saint-Saëns, the alleged enemy of impressionism. While it is post-Liszt rather than pre-Ravel or pre-Debussy,    it is scarcely less poetic and scarcely less impressionistic than Ravel’s Vallée des cloches or Debussy’s Cloches à travers les feuilles. The atmospheric quality is not just a consequence of imitating bell sounds, as comparison with earlier Saint-Saëns piano pieces like Carillon and Les Cloches du Soir, would confirm. In this work the persistent use of the sustaining pedal, which the composer normally uses so sparingly but which he uses here to blur the repeated three-note figuration in the right hand, the rustling in the upper register, the detailed nuances in dynamics, the frequent changes of tempo, all these features combine in a remarkably prescient piano texture.

There is also a Lisztian element in the Etude en forme de valse in D flat from an earlier set of piano studies. But it is also Saint-Saëns throwing off all inhibition in a work of extraordinary exuberance, demonic exaltation, harmonic liberation and, in the delightful modulation to E major in the middle, irresistible wit. A descendant of the Mephisto waltzes perhaps, it is unique in French piano music. Among composers working France at the time only Chabrier was capable of creating music of such physical abandon.