Camill Saint-saëns
Year: 1922
Type: article
Abstract: f | ^HE ultimate glimpse I had of Saint-SaBns was on November I 5, 1921, at one of the five o'clock musicales given by the "*" "Master" Widor, Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts, in the paeilion Deeaen, at the Institute of France.There Widor had installed his organ, and it was upon this organ that Camille Saint-SaBns played-if not in public, at any rate ' before a numerous assemblage of academicians, artists and music-, lovers, accompanying several instrumental numbers of his own composition; with the exception of the Beethoven C major Quartet, the little concert was entirely devoted to his works.The Master, who had just celebrated his eighty-sixth birthday, left one month later for Algiers, with the intention of there taking '» up his winter quarters, as had been his custom in preceding years, , at the Hotel de 1'Oasis.There was not a sign, either in his playing, as vivid and precise as ever, or in his personal bearing, that might have led one to anticipate that death, which so long had spared him, was soon to carry off, almost furtively, the composer of the Dante macabre on an Algerian night.' Charies-Camille Saint-Satos was born October 9, 1835, not , far from the dome of the Institute-which as a Parisian child he soon came to regard as a landmark-in a little street in the quarter of the £cole de m^dedne, one which, despite a century of ± modernization, still preserves an air of the Paris of former days, the rue du Jardinet.By a strange coincidence, his teacher and " friend, Charles Gounod, was a child of the same quarter, coming •.into the world some seventeen years before Saint-Satas, a few hundred feet away, in the square of Saint-Andr6-des-Arcs.
Source: The Musical Quarterly
Author: J.-G. PROD'HOMME
Institution: University of California, Santa Barbara
Language: English
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W90412936