Reviewed by: 3e Symphonie en ut mineur by Camille Saint-Saëns, and: Poèmes symphoniques by Camille Saint-Saëns James Brooks Kuykendall Camille Saint-Saëns. 3e Symphonie en ut mineur, op. 78. Edited by Michael Stegemann. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2016. (Œuvres instrumentales complètes, Sér. I, Vol. 3) [Front matter in Fr., Eng., and Ger.: foreword, p. vii–xii; preface, p. xiii–lxxxiv; documents, p. lxxxvi–cv; score p. 3–192; crit. rep. in Fr. p. 195–213. Cloth. ISMN 979-0-006-55950-3. €365 ($438).] Camille Saint-Saëns. Poèmes symphoniques [Le Rouet d'Omphale, op. 31; Phaéton, op. 39; Danse macabre, op. 40; La Jeunesse d'Hercule, op. 50]. Edited by Hugh Macdonald. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2019. (Œuvres instrumentales complètes, Sér. I, Vol. 4) [Front matter in Fr., Eng., and Ger.: foreword, p. vii–xii; preface., p. xiii–lviii; documents, p. lx–lxxiv; score p. 3–241; crit. rep. in Eng. p. 245–60. Cloth. ISMN 979-0-006-56115-5. €378 ($454).] Camille Saint-Saëns was involved in the first wave of monumental editions, serving as general editor of Œuvres complètes of Jean-Phillipe Rameau (published by Durand in eighteen volumes between 1894 and 1924, but never completed). Now, it seems, it is his turn. An astonishingly prolific composer, Saint-Saëns started early and stayed active to the end of his very long life (1835–1921). The sheer quantity of material poses a significant challenge to the publication of a complete edition of his works. The two volumes reviewed here are from a series aspiring to comprise only his instrumental works, but even so this entails a projected thirty-six volumes. It is an ambitious and even worthy endeavor, but it is off to a shaky start. Michael Stegemann points out in his series foreword that most of Saint-Saëns's instrumental works "have not been newly edited since their first publication (and are often full of errors, typical for this period)" (p. ix of both volumes). That may be true of the corpus as a whole, but it is not the case of the works under review here—each of which appeared in a second edition during the composer's lifetime, and the texts of these corrected second editions were actually very good—judging from a review of the original sources and these volume editors' decisions. Indeed, as Hugh Macdonald notes, for three of the symphonic poems—all but Le Rouet d'Omphale—"all the sources agree closely with one another" (pp. 252, 259). And there are a numerous sources to collate in this repertoire: autographs of the orchestral version as well as keyboard versions, two editions of the full score and the performing materials, sometimes sketches and marked proofs, plus derivative transcriptions. Even in the case of Le Rouet d'Omphale, the 1906 second edition of the full score presents an accurate text, correcting a number of errors in the first. The differences between the second edition and this new edition almost [End Page 319] entirely involve the regularization of articulations and dynamics. (The only error I spotted in the new edition of this work [m. 48, Vc and Cb] is obvious enough that any user can recognize it as such, and so does little harm.) The Poèmes symphoniques volume is fine, but it hardly makes a strong case for the need for a new edition of any of these works: we may not have had as complete a grasp of the textual situation until Macdonald had finished the project, but the texts presented here have negligible differences from what was already in the public domain. Is an œuvres complètes of his instrumental music necessary? I shall return to this issue below. The first volume of the new edition to be published was Symphony no. 3, one of the composer's best loved and most impressive works, and perhaps intended to serve as the flagship for the edition as a whole. The work is in a similar textual situation to the symphonic poems: Durand's 1907 second edition is actually very accurate. The problem—and it is a...
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