Saens and sensibilite.(Book Review)

Jean-Michel Nectoux, editor The Correspondence of Camille Saint-Saens & Gabriel Faure: Sixty Years of Friendship, translated by J. Barrie Jones. Ashgate, 153 pages, $94.95

Sixty years of friendship: can any heading in English more quickly reduce the Fourth Estate to total narcolepsy, other than perhaps "Worthwhile Canadian initiative" or "Small earthquake in Chile, not many dead"? Let us hope a few journalists do control their yawn-reflexes at such a subtitle, because this slim, beautifully rendered book justifies its hefty asking price. (A single solecism mars it: not a translator's flaw, but a crude typo, wherein on Plate 12 "photograph" mysteriously turns into "photogrpah".) Two leading composers from France's Third Republic--neither famous for bare-chested self-exposure--chronicle their mutual regard via 138 letters. Born a decade apart, SaintSaens and Faure considered themselves blood-brothers from the beginning. In 1862 Faure, then seventeen, first became the twenty-seven-year-old Saint-Saens's pupil at Paris' second music college, the Ecole Niedermeyer.

From these letters emerges a Faure already familiar from previous portrayals: urbane without fail, blandly affectionate in a feline style, an exceptionally assured creator even in his teens, but--unlike SaintSaens--never a child prodigy. Such is Faure's habitual reticence that we gain no hint here (except from the indispensable editorial notes) of his private life. In fact he womanized with cold repetitiveness while keeping his behavior a secret from most colleagues.

The real oddity comes not with Faure's epistles but with Saint-Saens's. These repeatedly flaunt a youthful skittishness wholly alien to the figure which Saint-Saens cut during later life: that of a vituperative bully, desiccated and melancholic even in his rage--part Clemenceau, part Coriolanus. (In Cambridge to receive an honorary doctorate, he treated his hosts to a monumental snub: "Je ne parle pas anglais, sauf avec les cabmen et les waiters.") Who hitherto would have credited Saint-Saens with the high spirits of his missives to Faure? Here he addresses his student as "Wretched animal," "My fat cat," or "My fat wolf."

Once or twice--although debate still seethes about whether, or how often, SaintSaens practiced pederasty--a homoerotic note is sounded. In 1905 the seventy-year-old Saint-Saens pens a couplet suggesting outright desire: "Handsome Gabriel, one despairs/When one always lives in hope!" Then again, Faure, who harbored not the slightest tendencies towards same-sex attraction, could turn on the gush also: at one point he announces that his brother has asked him to give Saint-Saens "a kiss for your left eye."

Elsewhere Faure's esteem for his mentor finds an entirely dignified voice. On several occasions Faure helped out Saint-Saens in his liturgical functions; both men combined long tenure as church organists with complete religious unbelief, a mixture much harder to maintain than it sounds, and one representing a constant drain on nervous energy. When appointed the Paris Conservatoire's director in 1905, Faure tells SaintSaens: "My dear Camille, since it is ... to you that I owe what I am, it is entirely appropriate that the first words that I should have written on the directorial ...