A Breath of Modernity ! Camille Saint-Saëns and Wind Instruments
Résumé
Camille Saint-Saëns’ long artistic career corresponds to one of the most inventive
periods in the history of music instruments making: flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons,
horns, and trumpets gradually adopted the modern form that we know today and the
new families of saxophones, saxhorns or sarrusophones, born from the intuition of genius makers, enriched the sound palette of the orchestra.
Curious by nature, a tireless explorer, always in search of new associations of timbres, passionate about acoustic and technical inventions, Saint-Saëns mingles with this
breath of modernity. From the Tarentelle for flute and clarinet, Op. 6 (1857) until the Sonata for bassoon and piano, Op. 168 (1921), he composed some fifty works dedicated to wind instruments and surrounded himself with the best performers. By exploiting all the technical possibilities of the winds and their expressive richness, Saint-Saëns thus opens the way to a renewal of the repertoire.
It was primarily in the Normandy town of La Couture-Boussey and its neighbouring villages—where famous dynasties of instrument makers such as Buffet, Godfroy, Julliot, Martin, Noblet and Thibouville practised their art—that most of these woodwind instruments innovations emerged and new instruments were mass-produced, initially using traditional methods and later on an industrial scale. It therefore seemed a logical progression to discuss Saint-Saëns’ intense period of creativity in the context of these developments in wind instrument making. This has provided a glimpse of the areas of convergence between composers, distinguished performers and master craftsmen in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the advancement
of new instruments and the creation of a distinctive repertoire.
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