Portraits Et Souvenirs

In the twilight of a magnificent career, Camille Saint-Saëns turned his formidable intellect to the ghosts of his musical past. Portraits et Souvenirs offers an extraordinary private gallery: the composers, virtuosos, and conductors who shaped the sound of the nineteenth century, rendered in Saint-Saëns's sharp, often devastating prose. Here is Berlioz, the brilliant orchestrator whom Saint-Saëns admired yet found persistently misunderstood by his contemporaries. Here is Liszt, that volcanic presence who transformed piano playing forever. With the confidence of a man who had outlived nearly all his rivals, Saint-Saëns paints these figures not as monuments but as complex, sometimes contradictory human beings. The book pulses with the author's fierce convictions about where music had been and where it was heading. Written in 1900, at the close of an era, these recollections carry the weight of final testimony, a composer's reckoning with the generation that came before him and the one now rising to supplant him. For anyone curious about the real personalities behind the scores, this is an indispensable, sometimes uncomfortable, always fascinating portrait gallery.