Camille Saint-Saëns
Symphony No. 3 in C minor, op. 78 “Organ Symphony”

In 1857, at the age of 22, Camille Saint-Saëns was appointed titular organist of the Église de la Madeleine in Paris – the most fashionable church in the French capital. Every Sunday, the city’s social elite would gather there for worship, but Saint-Saëns was less concerned with prestige than with the instrument he was allowed to play at the Madeleine: the grand organ by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, built in 1845. At this instrument, he felt completely in his element. Indeed, he would later recall that the twenty years he spent at the console of the Cavaillé-Coll organ were the happiest of his life. With his dazzling improvisations, Saint-Saëns drew the greats of the music world to Paris. Clara Schumann came to hear him; Pablo de Sarasate paid his respects. And Franz Liszt could hardly contain his enthusiasm: “Saint-Saëns is the greatest organist in the world,” he declared.

It is all the more curious, then, that Saint-Saëns composed relatively little for the organ. Perhaps it had to do with his passion for improvisation. “I love freedom passionately,” he once admitted. It may well have been this very love of freedom that finally led him to compose a work in which the organ is featured in an entirely unconventional light: the Symphony No. 3 in C minor, the so-called “Organ Symphony”, written in 1885/86 on commission from the Philharmonic Society in London. Incidentally, the epithet was not chosen by Saint-Saëns himself – and contrary to what one might expect, the organ does not assume a concertante role in the score. In fact, the piano – which also forms part of the orchestra and is played four-handed – comes to the fore with virtuosic passages more often. By contrast, Saint-Saëns uses the organ mostly for sustained chords, adding a rich foundation to the brilliant orchestration. A full ten minutes pass before the instrument is heard at all, and in the second of the work’s two movements, it only enters in the latter half – though at that point, it is the organ that takes up the striking final theme. Yet whenever it does resound, it lends the music an archaic and expansive aura.

Saint-Saëns’s dedication of the “Organ Symphony” to Franz Liszt reflected not only their mutual admiration. The structure of the work is closely modelled on Liszt’s epochal Piano Sonata in B minor. In both compositions, all thematic material grows from small motivic cells. In Saint-Saëns’s case, the Dies irae – the medieval hymn on the Day of Judgement – plays a key role. Though not quoted verbatim, its melodic contours inspired the central musical ideas, which then branch out and evolve throughout the work. As in Liszt’s single-movement sonata, which covertly encompasses the traditional four-movement structure, Saint-Saëns’s two large movements also conceal a four-part design. This is quite audible: each of the two internal sections is clearly separated by a general pause.

“Everything from one” – such is the principle. In his use of thematic interconnection, Saint-Saëns anticipated the concept of the thème cyclique, or cyclical theme, which the Belgian composer César Franck would present two years later in his Symphony in D minor. From a compositional standpoint, the “Organ Symphony” thus became a model – in terms of its orchestration, however, it long remained without peer. Saint-Saëns was proud of the work, knowing full well that he had given a decisive impulse to French symphonic music – a tradition that had otherwise played only a minor role in the 19th century.