Hymne à Victor Hugo op. 69

“It was, so to speak, a dazzling display of fireworks, a riot of sonorities which were further surpassed by the tremendous ovation for the poet who had been invited.” This is how Saint-Saëns described the first performance of his Hymne à Victor Hugo,which took place in the Salle des Fêtes at the Trocadéro on 15 May 1884. Although Hugo did not have any great feeling for music, he was  honoured by the work and, that very evening, invited Saint-Saëns to dine with him. The composition of this Hymne dates from 1881 when, for the inauguration of a statue of Hugo, Saint-Saëns decided to write a work in homage to the poet who, he wrote later, “appeared to him like a demi-god”. The celebrations were however cancelled and three years passed before Saint-Saëns decided to go back to his Hymne as part of the Concerts de Printemps at the Trocadéro, recently organised by Louis Bruneau. Wanting his Hymne to contain “something peculiar to Victor Hugo, which could not be attributed to anyone else”, Saint-Saëns had the idea of using a melody supposedly by Beethoven, which the poet liked and used as the setting for his poem Patria. This  simple, delicate, almost carefree melodic motif runs through the work, and is treated to a wide range of contrapuntal techniques and orchestral textures, which render it cheerful, melancholy and majestic by turns. The impressive size of the orchestra – for the premiere, Saint-Saëns specified “a vast orchestra, the magnificent organ, eight harps, eight trumpets playing fanfares in the organ loft” – is supplemented, in the final part of the score, by a chorus which, with all the solemnity demanded by a homage of this nature, intones: “Glory to genius! Glory to the master! Glory to immortality!”