Saint-Saëns - Un esprit libre

Description

Even today, the image of Camille Saint-Saëns as an academic composer, the author of "easy" music, to which his successors have sometimes confined him, remains. The life and work of the author of the famous Carnival of the Animals have nothing to do with these clichés: A child prodigy and an exceptionally long-lived artist, a formidable polemicist, a fabulous fantasist and a tireless globetrotter, Saint-Saëns, in a career spanning almost eighty years, successfully enriched all repertoires; he performed in the four corners of the world, from Moscow to New York, via the Canary Islands, Algeria and South America, thus contributing to the renewal of French classical music and to its influence abroad.
On the occasion of the centenary of the musician's death, this book, bringing together letters and autograph manuscripts, photographs, costume and set models, and other treasures from the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Paris Opera and the City of Dieppe, does justice to this unclassifiable genius, "king of the spirits of music and song who, as Marcel Proust wrote, possessed all the secrets".

Author : Collectif
Editor Bnf