The anecdote, at the beginning of this new book dedicated to Camille Saint-Saëns, is too tasty not to tell it. In Brittany, at the start of the 20th century, a mother no longer knows which way to turn to obtain the healing of her seriously ill child. One day, her doctor finds her reassured. The child is doing better by the grace of a new saint whose existence she accidentally discovered and whom she prayed with all the strength of her unshakeable faith. And the brave woman to show the portrait of Saint-Saëns found in a chocolate bar.
This is to say the fame of the composer, as evidenced by no less than 78 caricatures collected and commented in dispersed order by Stéphane Leteuré, already author of two works on Camille Saint-Saëns: Camille Saint-Saëns and the politician from 1870 to 1921 (Vrin, 2014) ; Camille Saint-Saëns, the globe-trotting composer (Actes Sud / Palazzetto Bru Zane, 2017).
The satirical gaze on one of the official musicians of the 3rd Republic does not say as much as one might imagine about his personality and the way his art was perceived. As such the most eloquent of caricatures, signed Alfred Le Petit in Le Charivari of April 3, 1883, presents Saint-Saëns as a chef easily identifiable by his disproportionate nasal appendage, concocting his opera in a cauldron Henry VIII adding Verdi’s salt and Auber’s pepper to the steaming broth. To drive the critical point, a quatrain accompanies the drawing:
This famous Henry VIII, it was said, had to be
The music of the future.
In what we applaud, I thought I recognized
The music of remembrance.
You have to master your Saint-Saëns, or at least his biography, at the fingertips to place these often humorous representations of the musician in their proper context. Although detailed, the comments of Stéphane Leteuré are not always sufficient to enlighten the layman reader. Otherwise, we appreciate the variety of pencil strokes, whether they are simple, even childish, grotesque or realistic with a precision in the quasi-photographic line.
Their common point is most often the so-called “big head” process, namely the choice to represent the face – and the nose – disproportionate to the rest of the body. Their grouping, thematic rather than chronological – works, travel, politics … – allows a fragmented reading, a necessary condition not to give in to an impression of weariness, even if the puzzle turns out to be more difficult to piece together.
The caricatures after the death of Saint-Saëns take up the image of the composer as posterity has frozen him: old, the abundant white beard, the bald head, the dark circles, and always this enormous siskin, to make pale with envy Cyrano de Bergerac. In the collective imagination, this representation of the musician is similar to the robot portrait of illustrious men of the time: dominant white male over 50 years old, heterosexual (although for Saint-Saëns a doubt exists). Already…
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