Saint-Saëns and the Stage: Operas, Plays, Pageants, a Ballet and a Film by Hugh Macdonald (review)

Hugh Macdonald's mammoth tome Saint-Saëns and the Stage, published first in hardback in 2019 before the 2021 paperback version to coincide with the Saint-Saëns centenary year, is Herculean in every sense. He begins by stating the obvious: that Saint-Saëns's extensive dramatic works are seriously in need of critical re-examination, which he goes on to do with heaps of insightful detail, gleaned from many sources but, in particular, through close and erudite examination of librettos and scores. This is one of those 'life and works' books that mentions the other outputs of Saint-Saëns's career alongside detailing his weekly (and sometimes daily) movements (which in Saint-Saëns's case were many), before focusing on in-depth examinations of the staged works, whether opera, ballet, incidental music, or the music for open air pageants. I take my hat off to the scholars who can immerse themselves in the daily work routines of historical figures to the extent that Macdonald has achieved here.

Each chapter, proceeding chronologically, is dedicated to a work or works and each employs a similar formula:

1. 1. Historical and contextual description on the genesis of the work

2. 2. An erudite 'listening guide' that takes readers through the whole work

3. 3. An overview of the various cuts, revisions, and editions that the score went through

4. 4. Observations on staged revivals and recordings, where they exist.

The first section is generally elegantly accomplished, providing details of Saint-Saëns's life, career, and other compositions around the time of the dramatic work under study; the second would work excellently as a 'listening guide' if, as Macdonald points out himself, it were not for the paucity of recordings of most of Saint-Saëns's operas. The third section betrays the preoccupations of the former general editor of the New Berlioz Edition and is informative but quite dry, if brief; the fourth section highlights that Saint-Saëns's operas are definitely in need of some sort of a revival to which the Palazzetto Bru Zane–Centre de musique romantique française is making a valuable contribution.

Macdonald is well-known for undervaluing contemporary press reports from any other than composer critics and unashamedly makes this point upfront (in the preface and chapter 1). I can only follow him so far down this path, before noting that while he manages to decipher some press comments, he does not seem to comprehend the range of 'code words' or 'shorthand' used by the Parisian press to denote very specific musical practices that critics were often (pace Macdonald) unable to describe in more musically literate terms. Macdonald recognises that an accusation of a score containing 'no melody' comes from a hankering after the 'good tunes' with four-square periodic structure of the opéra-comique of a former generation by Adam and Boiëldieu (p. 89). But other criticisms that actually pertain to musical forms, internal musical coherence, and the general crisis of confidence, both artistic and political, when faced with Wagnerian models in the 1870s and 1880s are swept under the carpet as 'bizarre prejudices' (p. 80). But then, as will be become apparent, these concerns are not really those of Macdonald anyway.

The 'listening guides', peppered with musical examples, are both informative and frustrating. Despite his disdain for the nineteenth-century Parisian musical press, Macdonald's choice of chapter structure nevertheless echoes that of the opera review he describes at the outset, whereby the second half is dedicated to an analysis of the best musical numbers. His versions are, of course, more exhaustive and the musical detail more persuasive, but for me (and this links to Macdonald's lack of engagement with the contemporary press), they omit contextual detail of musical and dramatic forms and the ways they were...