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).

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Rhapsodie d'Auvergne, Op. 73 (1884) for piano and orchestra
Dedication: Louis Diémer (1843-1919)

Philippe Entremont, piano and the Toulouse Capitole Orchestra conducted by Michel Plasson.
1977

Exhausted by the work involved in mounting his opera Henry VIII in Paris in March 1883, Saint-Saëns took a break from composing for the rest of the year. In 1884 he resumed creative work, and one of the first works to come from his pen was the Rhapsodie d’Auvergne, which he composed in Toulouse in March and April 1884 while supervising the production of Henry VIII there. The melody of the slow 3/4 section he had heard sung by washerwomen in the mountains of Auvergne, and the opening phrase, played by the piano is a ranz de vaches, a herdsman’s call from mountainous regions. The form of the work, with introduction, then slow section, then Allegretto, then Allegro molto, with a return to the Andantino section before the end, is derived from Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies which Saint-Saëns much admired. The taste for rhapsodies and fantasies on regional melodies was shared by a number of French composers at that time. Lalo’s Rapsodie norvégienne (1878) and Massenet’s Scènes alsaciennes (1882), not to mention Saint-Saëns’s own Rapsodie sur des cantiques bretons (1866), all precede the Rhapsodie d’Auvergne.

The first performance was given by Saint-Saëns himself as soloist in a concert in Marseille in December 1884. The work was dedicated to Louis Diémer, who gave the first performance in Paris on 27 December 1884 at a concert of the Société Nationale de Musique. Later in life Saint-Saëns played it many times, especially abroad. He included it in the last concert he ever gave, in Dieppe on 6 August 1921.

Saint-Saëns also published the Rhapsodie as a piano solo and as a piano duet. He recorded an abbreviated version of the piano solo arrangement on 26 June 1904.

Hugh Macdonald, 2016

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