Saint saens a critical biography stephen

Saint-Saens: A Critical Biography. By Stephen Studd. London: Cygnus Arts, 1999. [x, 356 p.

Saint saens a critical biography stephen king

ISBN 1-900541-65-3. $49.50.]

Camille Saint-Saens was arguably the most famous and influential composer in France at the turn of the last century, a fact that might surprise many who know little of his music and even less about his life and work.

Like his near contemporaries Gabriel Faure and Vincent d'Indy, Saint-Saens suffered. profound neglect for most of the twentieth century, his achievements and stature diminished as a result of the fierce polemical debates that dominated French musical life during the decades immediately before and after the First World War.

The dust cast up by these rhetorical battles has seriously distorted our image of late-nineteenth-century French music history, and it is only in recent years that scholars have begun to take a fresh look at the personalities, institutions, and event