It is thanks to Yves Gérard that a musical treasure was unearthed in the Médiathèque Jean Renoir in Dieppe in France: during his many years of research, he came across an unknown and unpublished manuscript penned by Camille Saint-Saëns.
The top four instrumental parts make this manuscript something of a sensation. Placed under each other are “Saxophone Soprano en Si b”, “Saxophone Alto en Mi b”, “Saxophone Ténor en Si b” and “Saxophone Baryton en Mi b”, strings, soprano solo with chorus and organ. Musical history has hitherto credited Jean-Baptiste Singelée (1812–1875) with having written the first saxophone quartet, his opus 53, which he completed in 1857. This historiography clearly has to be revised now, for under the first page of the Dieppe treasure, which is pasted over and also even stitched, the date 1854 is to be found. Saint-Saëns’ work was thus written three years earlier than that of Singelée’s.
In contrast to Singelée, Saint-Saëns does not have the wind instruments taking solo parts but rather uses their tonal colour to depict textual moods and nuances. On the one hand the saxophones accompany the choral parts (certainly singable by amateurs) and support the human voices in fugal passages. On the other hand they take the melody in the purely orchestral passages.
Saint-Saëns wrote the motet in the period when he had taken up his first permanent appointment as organist at the Church of Saint-Merri in Paris. He revised the work over a period of several decades on numerous occasions, changing the motifs at the beginning, correcting obvious mistakes, reworking the ending, eventually changing the instrumentation several times too and even – probably in the final stage – replacing the Latin text with an English one. Today, we have thus been handed down three-and-a-half versions, one of them stopping after just a few pages. Detailed detective work has in the meantime enabled the compositional steps to be reconstructed, however. Furthermore, the first saxophone version (BA 11305) and the last English piano version (BA 11309) have been edited to produce a scholarly-critical edition.