Camille Saint-Saëns – Valse canariote, Op.88 (1890)[Score]

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835 – 1921), Valse canariote, Op.88 for piano (1890), dedicated to Candelaria Navarro Sigala [Cigala] (1870-1945).

Cyprien Katsaris, piano.

Description taken from Palazzetto Bru Zane’s digital archive (A site to access a wide array of informational resources relating to France’s musical heritage of the 19th century. You’ll find articles on people, works and topics authored by musicologists and historians collaborating with Palazzetto Bru Zane):

Composed on La Palma in April 1890, the Valse canariote by Camille Saint-Saëns was dedicated to Mademoiselle Candelaria Navarro Sigala (1870-1945), a young pianist from one of the wealthiest families in the Canary Islands. Before introducing the actual waltz rhythm, the work begins with a solemn, slow introduction in common time above which the composer has noted “O Canaria! Gran Canaria!”.

This leads into the first waltz section marked vivace. With six melodic sections alternating in irregular sequences and a varied harmonic trajectory (Aminor, C major, A major, F major, E major, E flat major, B major, G major), this waltz is undoubtedly the composer’s most sophisticated work in this genre. According to Sabina Teller Ratner, Saint-Saëns’ melodic writing in this piece shows, as often in his work, a liking for symmetry and balance.

Four years after the composition of the Valse canariote, Camille Saint-Saëns wrote to his publisher, Durand: “I met up again with Señorita Candelaria Navarro who is married, extremely well married at that, and mother to a pretty little girl of two months; she played my waltz in an entirely satisfactory fashion, although it didn’t equal the marvellous performance by Madame de Guitaut; she has neglected her piano a great deal since she married, but she has started singing instead, and her voice is mellow and agreeable.” (10 January 1894).

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Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns (9 October 1835 – 16 December 1921) was a French composer, organist, conductor and pianist of the Romantic era. His best-known works include Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (1863), the Second Piano Concerto (1868), the First Cello Concerto (1872), Danse macabre (1874), the opera Samson and Delilah (1877), the Third Violin Concerto (1880), the Third ("Organ") Symphony (1886) and The Carnival of the Animals (1886).

Saint-Saëns was a musical prodigy; he made his concert debut at the age of ten. After studying at the Paris Conservatoire he followed a conventional career as a church organist, first at Saint-Merri, Paris and, from 1858, La Madeleine, the official church of the French Empire. After leaving the post twenty years later, he was a successful freelance pianist and composer, in demand in Europe and the Americas.

As a young man, Saint-Saëns was enthusiastic for the most modern music of the day, particularly that of Schumann, Liszt and Wagner, although his own compositions were generally within a conventional classical tradition. He was a scholar of musical history, and remained committed to the structures worked out by earlier French composers. This brought him into conflict in his later years with composers of the impressionist and expressionist schools of music; although there were neoclassical elements in his music, foreshadowing works by Stravinsky and Les Six, he was often regarded as a reactionary in the decades around the time of his death.

Saint-Saëns held only one teaching post, at the École de Musique Classique et Religieuse in Paris, and remained there for less than five years. It was nevertheless important in the development of French music: his students included Gabriel Fauré, among whose own later pupils was Maurice Ravel. Both of them were strongly influenced by Saint-Saëns, whom they revered as a genius.

(Wikipedia)

Original audio:    • Valse canariote in A Minor, Op. 88, R. 43:...  
Score: https://imslp.org/wiki/Valse_Canariote,_Op...)
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