Sonata for bassoon and piano in G major op. 168

The Sonata for bassoon and piano is one of a series of three sonatas for wind instruments consisting, besides this op. 168, of a Sonata for oboe and piano (op. 166) and one for clarinet and piano (op. 167). These three works were completed in the spring of 1921, just a few months before Saint-Saëns’s death in Algiers on 16 December. They were published by Durand in November 1921, but no account of public performances of these works during Saint-Saëns’s lifetime have survived. The composer’s initial ambition was in fact to write a work for every wind instrument: “At the moment I am devoting my remaining strength to giving instruments that are less fortunate in this respect the means to be heard,” he wrote in April 1921. This ambitious project was never completed, but it led to the creation of these three sonatas, op. 166-168, whose respective qualities make them important (yet little documented) works in the nineteenth-century French repertoire for wind instruments. With its three movements, the Sonata for bassoon and piano shows the tonal and technical possibilities of the bassoon, an instrument rarely celebrated by the composers of his time, and which Saint-Saëns himself thought should be “used with caution”. The work was dedicated to Clément-Léon Letellier, first bassoon of the Paris Opera and the Société des concerts du Conservatoire, and namesake of a cousin of Saint-Saëns’s, librarian at the Dieppe Municipal Library, who, on reading the dedication, wrote: “Quite amusing that the bassoonist should have the same name [as mine]!”