It is a small music history sensation: Thanks to Yves Gérard an unknown and unpublished manuscript penned by Camille Saint-Saëns has been unearthed in the Médiathèque Jean Renoir in Dieppe in France.
It is the top four instrumental parts which 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. Now this historiography clearly has to be revised. The date 1854 has been found under the first page of the treasure from Dieppe, which is pasted over and also sewn, meaning that Saint-Saëns’ work was written three years earlier than that of Singelée.
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 several times over the decades, changing the motifs at the beginning, correcting obvious mistakes, reworking the ending, eventually changing the instrumentation several times and even – probably in the final stage – replacing the Latin text with an English one. Today, three-and-a-half versions have been handed down, one of them stopping after just a few pages. The compositional steps have been successfully reconstructed by means of detailed detective work. Furthermore, the first saxophone version (BA 11305) and the last English piano version (BA 11309) have been edited to produce a scholarly-critical edition.
The present edition of the English version for soprano solo, choir and piano (BA 11309) serves both as a full score and as a vocal score due to the instrumentation.