Piano Quartet in B flat major, Op.41

As Vice-President of the Société Nationale de Musique - which he had helped to get started in the aim of promoting French music after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 - Saint-Saëns was very conscious of how few of his compatriots were interested in writing chamber music. So, in an effort to adjust the balance in an area of the repertoire dominated by German composers, he presented his Piano Quartet in B flat major to the Société in 1875. With Pablo Sarasate leading the strings and the composer himself at the piano it was an immediate success. It was also a long-term success in that it encouraged several of his colleagues, Fauré and Chausson included, to create works for the same ensemble.

The first movement is particularly interesting for the way it avoids German influence and supplies something unselfconsciously different in its place. The main theme seems to grow spontaneously out of the opening exchanges of simple piano chords and answering phrases on violin and viola. It leads scarcely less naturally into a purposeful companion melody fervently scored for all three strings with an accompaniment of broken chords on the piano. The second subject is a more graceful inspiration, introduced by violin in fluent legato triplets over more piano arpeggios. There is nothing in the least ponderous or academic in the development section either. Rather than setting the two main themes in confrontation, it elegantly brings them into an ever closer association until the first subject is emphatically reintroduced, in its definitive form, at the beginning of the recapitulation. The coda lingers quietly on a first-subject phrase that will re-emerge later in the work.

As a baroque German rather than a classical or romantic German, Bach was evidently an acceptable model for a French composer. Certainly, Saint-Saëns conceals nothing of his admiration for Bach as the piano sets up the fantasia figuration that will run through the whole of the slow movement, as the strings in octaves set a defiant chorale melody against it, and as all four instruments get involved in an impressive fugal passage in the middle. Both the chorale and the fugue are recalled in the dramatically scored closing section of the movement.

If the scherzo seems to owe something to Mendelssohn, there is also a powerful demonic element it - in its jumpy main theme, its D minor harmonies, and its extraordinary construction on a rising tempo scheme. Beginning at a very moderate Allegro, it accelerates by way of a violin cadenza to Allegro, by way of a piano cadenza to Molto allegro and from Presto to Prestissimo at the end. Characteristic of the composer of the Danse macabre, which was also written in 1875, it would have horrified Mendelssohn.

It is true that there is no denying the influence of Schumann on the last movement, least of all in its sturdily syncopated opening theme. In the course of the development of that theme, however, there is a quiet reminder not only of the chorale from the slow movement but also of the lingering phrase from the end of the first movement - which is a gentle preparation for a direct recall, in the original tempo and the original scoring, of the two main themes of the first movement. Not even Schumann had ever been so bold. Saint-Saëns, on the other hand, set a cyclic pattern of construction that would serve French music for decades to come.

Gerald Larner©