Saint Saëns: The Swan, from The Carnival of the Animals

When the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns was a baby just two months old, his father, an official in the Ministry of the Interior, died of consumption on the first anniversary of his marriage. This led the family to fear that Camille could have inherited the disease. It was not the case, though, over much of his lifetime, Camille endured a frail health and carried a weak physical constitution.

Quite the contrary, the author, born in 1835 –five years before Tchaikowski–, outlived the Russian maestro and other musicians of his time a number of years. He even reached to live in the first decades of the 20th century, dying in Algiers in 1921. He seems to us, therefore, an author of our times.

The Carnival of the Animals
Alongside this is the fact that some of his most famous works did not have a good reception at their premieres, and the audiences surrendered to their charms only in dates much later than their composition.
This is the case of the orchestral suite "The Carnival of the Animals", a sort of private joke that Saint-Saens wrote in 1886, in Vienna, on the return of an unfortunate tour that occurred to him to carry out in Germany right after he had spoken nasty things about Wagner and German music.

Written in order to forget the troubles of the tour, it is a kind of "zoological fantasy" divided into fourteen movements. Discouraged by the poor reception of the work, Saint-Saens forbade it to be performed while he was alive (with the exception of  "The Swan"), and it was not until 1922, a year after his death, that it was heard in its entirety by a larger and more numerous audience, reaching a celebrity that has not diminished since then.

The Swan
The fourteen movements make comic allusions to a large part of the music written by other composers of the time, including himself. The quotations are to Rossini, Berlioz, Offenbach, Mendelssohn and others, and the comedy comes fundamentally from both the unusual tempos the pieces are performed with or the instruments chosen for it. The movement entitled The Swan is the most serious and calm of the work, also, the most "romantic".

A staple of the cello repertoire, this is one of the most well-known movements of the suite, usually in the version for cello with solo piano which was the only publication of this work in Saint-Saëns's lifetime. More than twenty other arrangements of this movement have also been published, with solo instruments ranging from flute to alto saxophone.

The rendition is by the prominent cellist Yo-Yo Ma, born in France to Chinese parents.

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