French!" In 1871, Saint-Saëns and Romain Bussine had founded the Société Nationale de Musique specifically to showcase French music by organising both orchestral and chamber music concerts featuring French composers. By 1885, however, Saint-Saëns found himself increasingly marginalised within the Société Nationale. Vincent d'Indy and Henri Duparc, both disciples of the Belgian composer, César Franck, and enthusiastic proponents of Wagnerism, took control and opened the Société Nationale's programming to non-French, and especially German music. In Saint-Saëns' view, they were a "Caesarean [i.e. César Franck] and Wagnerian coterie" who had turned the Société Nationale into a "closed salon, unrelated to the intentions of its founders." It has therefore been suggested that, for Saint-Saëns, the symphony, in its form, represented "an appropriate vehicle for a musical response" to growing Wagnerism in France "by pursuing ... the very genre that, according to Wagner and at least some of his French advocates, had mandated the music drama after exhausting itself with Beethoven." and that the symphony was an opportunity "to deliver a classical response to the concerns of Wagner and French Wagnerians." Saint-Saëns himself did not ascribe a motivation to his decision to pen a symphony, beyond the interest in the genre that might be inferred from his request to have his earlier A-minor symphony programmed. Composition Saint-Saëns likely started working on the symphony in the late summer of 1885, but was at the same time busy composing what would prove one of his most popular works, The Carnival of the Animals. In a correspondence from February 1886, he wrote to his publisher Durand: Original sketches for the symphony indicate that Saint-Saëns originally wrote the opening theme of the symphony in the key of B minor. An early draft of the second theme was scored in C major, with a subsequent revision to its final form and the measures following (mm 102-140) also scored in C major and C minor, ultimately the final key of the work. Thus, the sketches of the extended exposition suggest that Saint-Saëns remained in some doubt as to the final key of the symphony, a conflict which he revealed in a letter to Berger: "this devil of a symphony has risen a half-tone; it did not want to remain in B minor: it is now in C minor." The shift from B to C minor meant that the "new symphony, with its cyclic thematic design, triumphant major-mode finale, and