On the Execution of Music, and Principally of Ancient Music

Camille Saint-Saëns was no mere theorist scribbling in an ivory tower. He was a working composer who had premiered works by Liszt, befriended Berlioz, and lived the entire history of Western music firsthand. So when he turns his attention to how we perform the music of the past, we should listen. This treatise, written in the early 20th century, is essentially a passionate argument for historically informed performance decades before the term existed. Saint-Saëns laments that contemporary musicians had turned the lean, precise music of Palestrina, Bach, and Mozart into something bloated and unrecognizable, buried under generations of heavy-handed interpretation. He traces the evolution of musical notation itself, explaining how the shift from medieval scrawl to standardized notation changed not just how we read music, but how we understand its rhythm, accent, and spirit. With the authority of a master composer and the urgency of someone watching a tradition die, he argues that to truly perform ancient music, one must first resurrect the listening habits of those who first heard it.