Sonata for oboe and piano in D major op. 166

“Mr. Bas came to try out my Sonata and it worked like a charm. He seemed so happy that I offered him the dedication of the piece (or rather of the three pieces that make up the whole).” It was indeed to Louis Bas, “First Oboe Solo of the Société des concerts du Conservatoire and the Opéra”, that Saint-Saëns dedicated his Sonata for oboe and piano in D major, op. 166, as announced in these few words addressed to his publisher Durand on 21 June 1921. Saint-Saëns had just completed a series of three sonatas for wind instruments consisting, in addition to this work for oboe and piano, of a Sonata for clarinet and piano (op. 167) and one for bassoon and piano (op. 168). The series was 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. The Oboe Sonata reveals, in each of its three movements — an Andantino in 3/4 time, an Allegretto in 9/8 and a Molto allegro finale in 2/4 — the full tonal and technical potential of the oboe, in turn delicate, mysterious and virtuosic.