title: Aravinda Sametha Veera Raghava

text: The shooting for the film began on 6 April 2018 with an action sequence in Ramoji Film City of Hyderabad. Filming also took place in Pollachi in June. The shoot was completed in September 2018. Hegde dubbed her voice in Telugu for the first time in this film.


title: Aravinda Sametha Veera Raghava

text: "Aravinda Sametha" is based on the factionalism present in the region of Rayalaseema, a theme which was dominant in Telugu cinema during late 1990s and early 2000s.


title: Aravinda Sametha Veera Raghava

text: The soundtrack album of "Aravinda Sametha Veera Raghava" features four songs composed by S. Thaman, with one song being added in the extended soundtrack of the film. The audio rights were of the film were purchased by Zee Music Company. Lyrics for the songs were written by Sirivennela Seetharama Sastry, Ramajogayya Sastry, and Penchal Das. Initially, the makers planned to release the full audio album directly into the market, without hosting any audio launch event for the film.


title: Aravinda Sametha Veera Raghava

text: The complete soundtrack album is scheduled to be unveiled on mid-September, without launching any singles from the film. However, the lyric video of the first single track titled "Anaganaganaga" was released on 15 September 2018, and the song was unveiled in all streaming platforms the same day. On 18 September 2018, the makers unveiled the second single track titled "Peniviti" sung by Kaala Bhairava, which was termed as an intense, raw, rustic number. The lyrical video of Yeda Poyinadu was released on 25 September 2018.


title: Aravinda Sametha Veera Raghava

text: The tracklist was unveiled on 19 September 2018, and the complete soundtrack album was unveiled the following day, on 20 September 2018. The makers released the lyric videos and the promos of the songs before the film's release.


title: Aravinda Sametha Veera Raghava

text: S. Thaman's work received praise from critics. Neetishta Nyayapati from "The Times of India", stated it as "Despite featuring only four numbers, the jukebox of "Aravindha Sametha" sets itself apart with its authenticity. However, while the earthiness of the theme comes through the vocals and lyrics, it's missing in Thaman's music. Give this one a chance this weekend; you might just end up falling in love with the Seema dialect." 123Telugu reviewed it as, "There was a lot of expectation from Thaman as he was teaming up with Trivikram for the first time. But it looks like the ace composer has given importance to the emotions in the film rather than churning out commercial numbers. Peniviti and Anaganaganaga will be chartbusters and are our picks. Finally, the album of Aravinda Sametha is not your regular song and dance album and has been composed to gel with the narrative. It will grow on you slowly after watching the film on the big screen." Indiaglitz rated 3 out of 5 stars, and summarised it as "With just four songs, the album features two mood-based and two generic numbers." Cinejosh summarised it as "All in all, Aravinda Sametha weaves out a melodious album fitting in all the elements for an NTR and Trivikram combo film!"


title: Aravinda Sametha Veera Raghava

text: Though the album features four songs, a bonus track titled "Reddamma Thalli" sung by Penchal Das, and written by Ramajogayya Sastry, was released on 16 October 2018. The extended soundtrack, which contains the bonus track and complete background score, was released on 18 October 2018. In the album, the bonus song, consists of two versions; one of them is the original version sung by Mohana Bhogaraju. The other one sung by Penchal Das is the cover version of the song.


title: Aravinda Sametha Veera Raghava

text: On 19 May 2018, the title of the film was revealed as "Aravinda Sametha". Jr. NTR was featured in a chiseled avatar who worked out extensively with international trainer Lloyd Stevens for his new look for the film. Also S. Thaman's background music in the motion poster was appreciated by fans. The promotions of the film were commence on 10 September 2018.


title: Aravinda Sametha Veera Raghava

text: A pre-release event was held on 2 October 2018, at H.I.C.C. Novotel hotel in Hyderabad, where the makers also launched the theatrical trailer of the film. The trailer received predominantly positive response from all corners.


title: Aravinda Sametha Veera Raghava

text: "Aravinda Sametha Veera Raghava" was released theatrically on 11 October 2018. The film was dubbed and released in Tamil as "Idhu Ennoda Jilla".


title: Aravinda Sametha Veera Raghava

text: The Times of India gave 3.5 out of 5 stars stating, "An emotional drama camouflaged in a commercial exterior, here's a film that's courageous to stand apart from slapstick madness. Trivikram's treatment of this plot scores over his indulgence as Jr NTR delivers another fine performance".


title: Aravinda Sametha Veera Raghava

text: India Today gave 3 out of 5 stars stating, "Aravinda Sametha Veera Raghava is a commercial actioner backed by Trivikram's engaging script and Jr NTR's excellent performance. After the debacle of Pawan Kalyan-starrer Agnyaathavaasi, director Trivikram Srinivas has bounced back with Jr NTR's Aravinda Sametha Veera Raghava".


title: Aravinda Sametha Veera Raghava

text: "News18" gave 3 out of 5 stars stating "Jr NTR elevates tried-tested story of factionalism". "Hindustan Times" gave 3 out of 5 stars stating "Jr NTR is the torchbearer of peace in a film on factionalism".


title: Irrigation

text: Irrigation is the agricultural process of applying controlled amounts of water to land to assist in the production of crops, as well as to grow landscape plants and lawns, where it may be known as watering. Agriculture that does not use irrigation but instead relies only on direct rainfall is referred to as rain-fed. Irrigation has been a central feature of agriculture for over 5,000 years and has been developed independently by many cultures across the globe. Irrigation helps to grow agricultural crops, maintain landscapes, and revegetate disturbed soils in dry areas and during periods of less than average rainfall. Irrigation also has other uses in crop production, including frost protection, suppressing weed growth in grain fields and preventing soil consolidation. Irrigation systems are also used for cooling livestock, dust suppression, disposal of sewage, and in mining. Irrigation is often studied together with drainage, which is the removal of surface and sub-surface water from a given location.


title: Irrigation

text: There are several methods of irrigation. They vary in how the water is supplied to the plants. The goal is to apply the water to the plants as uniformly as possible, so that each plant has the amount of water it needs, neither too much nor too little. Irrigation can also be understood whether it is "supplementary" to rainfall as happens in many parts of the world, or whether it is "'full" irrigation' whereby crops rarely depend on any contribution from rainfall. Full irrigation is less common and only happens in arid landscapes experiencing very low rainfall or when crops are grown in semi-arid areas outside of any rainy seasons.


title: Irrigation

text: Surface irrigation, also known as gravity irrigation, is the oldest form of irrigation and has been in use for thousands of years. Micro-irrigation, sometimes called localized irrigation, low volume irrigation, or trickle irrigation is a system where water is distributed under low pressure through a piped network, in a pre-determined pattern, and applied as a small discharge to each plant or adjacent to it. Micro-irrigation uses less pressure and water flow than overhead irrigation. Drip irrigation trickles out at the root zone. In sprinkler or overhead irrigation, water is piped to one or more central locations within the field and distributed by overhead high-pressure sprinklers or guns. Subirrigation has been used for many years in field crops in areas with high water tables. It is a method of artificially raising the water table to allow the soil to be moistened from below the plants' root zone.


title: Irrigation

text: Irrigation water can come from groundwater (extracted from springs or by using wells), from surface water (withdrawn from rivers, lakes or reservoirs) or from non-conventional sources like treated wastewater, desalinated water, drainage water, or fog collection.


title: Irrigation

text: The environmental effects of irrigation relate to the changes in quantity and quality of soil and water as a result of irrigation and the subsequent effects on natural and social conditions in river basins and downstream of an irrigation scheme. The effects stem from the altered hydrological conditions caused by the installation and operation of the irrigation scheme. Amongst some of these problems is depletion of underground aquifers through overdrafting. Soil can be over-irrigated due to poor distribution uniformity or management wastes water, chemicals, and may lead to water pollution. Over-irrigation can cause deep drainage from rising water tables that can lead to problems of irrigation salinity requiring watertable control by some form of subsurface land drainage.


title: Irrigation

text: In year 2000, the total fertile land was 2,788,000 km (689 million acres) and it was equipped with irrigation infrastructure worldwide. About 68% of this area is in Asia, 17% in the Americas, 9% in Europe, 5% in Africa and 1% in Oceania. The largest contiguous areas of high irrigation density are found in Northern and Eastern India and Pakistan along the Ganges and Indus rivers; in the Hai He, Huang He and Yangtze basins in China; along the Nile river in Egypt and Sudan; and in the Mississippi-Missouri river basin, the Southern Great Plains, and in parts of California in the United States. Smaller irrigation areas are spread across almost all populated parts of the world.


title: Irrigation

text: By 2012, the area of irrigated land had increased to an estimated total of 3,242,917 km (801 million acres), which is nearly the size of India. The irrigation of 20% of farming land accounts for the production of 40% of food production.


title: Irrigation

text: The scale of irrigation increased dramatically over the 20th century. In 1800, 8 million hectares globally were irrigated, in 1950, 94 million hectares, and in 1990, 235 million hectares. By 1990, 30% of the global food production came from irrigated land. Irrigation techniques across the globe includes canals redirecting surface water, groundwater pumping, and diverting water from dams. National governments lead most irrigation schemes within their borders, but private investors and other nations, especially the United States, China, and European countries like the United Kingdom, also fund and organize some schemes within other nations.


title: Irrigation

text: Irrigation enables the production of more crops, especially commodity crops in areas which otherwise could not support them. Countries frequently invested in irrigation to increase wheat, rice, or cotton production, often with the overarching goal of increasing self-sufficiency.


title: Irrigation

text: While floodwater harvesting belongs to the accepted irrigation methods, rainwater harvesting is usually not considered as a form of irrigation. Rainwater harvesting is the collection of runoff water from roofs or unused land and the concentration of this.


title: Irrigation

text: Irrigation water can also come from non-conventional sources like treated wastewater, desalinated water, drainage water, or fog collection.


title: Irrigation

text: In countries where humid air sweeps through at night, water can be obtained by condensation onto cold surfaces. This is practiced in the vineyards at Lanzarote using stones to condense water. Fog collectors are also made of canvas or foil sheets. Using condensate from air conditioning units as a water source is also becoming more popular in large urban areas.


title: Irrigation

text: Until 1960s, there were fewer than half the current number of people on the planet. People were not as wealthy as today, consumed fewer calories and ate less meat, so less water was needed to produce their food. They required a third of the volume of water we presently take from rivers. Today, the competition for water resources is much more intense. This is because there are now more than seven billion people on the planet, increasing the likelihood of overconsumption of food produced by water-thirsty animal agriculture and intensive farming practices, and there is increasing competition for water from industry, urbanisation and biofuel crops. Farmers will have to strive to increase productivity to meet growing demands for food, while industry and cities find ways to use water more efficiently.


title: Irrigation

text: Successful agriculture is dependent upon farmers having sufficient access to water. However, water scarcity is already a critical constraint to farming in many parts of the world.


title: Irrigation

text: Surface irrigation, also known as gravity irrigation, is the oldest form of irrigation and has been in use for thousands of years. In "surface" ("furrow," "flood", or "level basin") irrigation systems, water moves across the surface of agricultural lands, in order to wet it and infiltrate into the soil. Water moves by following gravity or the slope of the land. Surface irrigation can be subdivided into furrow," border strip or basin irrigation". It is often called "flood irrigation" when the irrigation results in flooding or near flooding of the cultivated land. Historically, surface irrigation is the most common method of irrigating agricultural land across most parts of the world. The water application efficiency of surface irrigation is typically lower than other forms of irrigation, due in part to the lack of control of applied depths. Surface irrigation involves a significantly lower capital cost and energy requirement than pressurised irrigation systems. Hence it is often the irrigation choice for developing nations, for low value crops and for large fields. Where water levels from the irrigation source permit, the levels are controlled by dikes, usually plugged by soil. This is often seen in terraced rice fields (rice paddies), where the method is used to flood or control the level of water in each distinct field. In some cases, the water is pumped, or lifted by human or animal power to the level of the land.


title: Irrigation

text: Surface irrigation is even used to water urban gardens in certain areas, for example, in and around Phoenix, Arizona. The irrigated area is surrounded by a berm and the water is delivered according to a schedule set by a local irrigation district.


title: Irrigation

text: A special form of irrigation using surface water is spate irrigation, also called floodwater harvesting. In case of a flood (spate), water is diverted to normally dry river beds (wadis) using a network of dams, gates and channels and spread over large areas. The moisture stored in the soil will be used thereafter to grow crops. Spate irrigation areas are in particular located in semi-arid or arid, mountainous regions.


title: Irrigation

text: "Micro-irrigation", sometimes called localized irrigation, low volume irrigation, or trickle irrigation is a system where water is distributed under low pressure through a piped network, in a pre-determined pattern, and applied as a small discharge to each plant or adjacent to it. Traditional drip irrigation use individual emitters, subsurface drip irrigation (SDI), micro-spray or micro-sprinklers, and mini-bubbler irrigation all belong to this category of irrigation methods.


title: Irrigation

text: Drip (or micro) irrigation, also known as trickle irrigation, functions as its name suggests. In this system, water is delivered at or near the root zone of plants, one drop at a time. This method can be the most water-efficient method of irrigation, if managed properly; evaporation and runoff are minimized. The field water efficiency of drip irrigation is typically in the range of 80 to 90 percent when managed correctly.


title: Irrigation

text: In modern agriculture, drip irrigation is often combined with plastic mulch, further reducing evaporation, and is also the means of delivery of fertilizer. The process is known as "fertigation".


title: Irrigation

text: Deep percolation, where water moves below the root zone, can occur if a drip system is operated for too long or if the delivery rate is too high. Drip irrigation methods range from very high-tech and computerized to low-tech and labor-intensive. Lower water pressures are usually needed than for most other types of systems, with the exception of low energy center pivot systems and surface irrigation systems, and the system can be designed for uniformity throughout a field or for precise water delivery to individual plants in a landscape containing a mix of plant species. Although it is difficult to regulate pressure on steep slopes, pressure compensating emitters are available, so the field does not have to be level. High-tech solutions involve precisely calibrated emitters located along lines of tubing that extend from a computerized set of valves.


title: Irrigation

text: In "sprinkler" or overhead irrigation, water is piped to one or more central locations within the field and distributed by overhead high-pressure sprinklers or guns. A system using sprinklers, sprays, or guns mounted overhead on permanently installed risers is often referred to as a "solid-set" irrigation system. Higher pressure sprinklers that rotate are called "rotors" and are driven by a ball drive, gear drive, or impact mechanism. Rotors can be designed to rotate in a full or partial circle. Guns are similar to rotors, except that they generally operate at very high pressures of 275 to 900 kPa (40 to 130 psi) and flows of 3 to 76 L/s (50 to 1200 US gal/min), usually with nozzle diameters in the range of 10 to 50 mm (0.5 to 1.9 in). Guns are used not only for irrigation, but also for industrial applications such as dust suppression and logging.


title: Irrigation

text: Sprinklers can also be mounted on moving platforms connected to the water source by a hose. Automatically moving wheeled systems known as "traveling sprinklers" may irrigate areas such as small farms, sports fields, parks, pastures, and cemeteries unattended. Most of these use a length of polyethylene tubing wound on a steel drum. As the tubing is wound on the drum powered by the irrigation water or a small gas engine, the sprinkler is pulled across the field. When the sprinkler arrives back at the reel the system shuts off. This type of system is known to most people as a "waterreel" traveling irrigation sprinkler and they are used extensively for dust suppression, irrigation, and land application of waste water.


title: Irrigation

text: Other travelers use a flat rubber hose that is dragged along behind while the sprinkler platform is pulled by a cable.


title: Irrigation

text: Center pivot irrigation is a form of sprinkler irrigation utilising several segments of pipe (usually galvanized steel or aluminium) joined and supported by trusses, mounted on wheeled towers with sprinklers positioned along its length.


title: Irrigation

text: The system moves in a circular pattern and is fed with water from the pivot point at the center of the arc. These systems are found and used in all parts of the world and allow irrigation of all types of terrain. Newer systems have drop sprinkler heads as shown in the image that follows.


title: Irrigation

text: A "series of pipes, each with a wheel" of about 1.5 m diameter permanently affixed to its midpoint, and sprinklers along its length, are coupled together. Water is supplied at one end using a large hose. After sufficient irrigation has been applied to one strip of the field, the hose is removed, the water drained from the system, and the assembly rolled either by hand or with a purpose-built mechanism, so that the sprinklers are moved to a different position across the field. The hose is reconnected. The process is repeated in a pattern until the whole field has been irrigated.


title: Irrigation

text: This system is less expensive to install than a center pivot, but much more labor-intensive to operate – it does not travel automatically across the field: it applies water in a stationary strip, must be drained, and then rolled to a new strip. Most systems use 100 or 130 mm (4 or 5 inch) diameter aluminum pipe. The pipe doubles both as water transport and as an axle for rotating all the wheels. A drive system (often found near the centre of the wheel line) rotates the clamped-together pipe sections as a single axle, rolling the whole wheel line. Manual adjustment of individual wheel positions may be necessary if the system becomes misaligned.


title: Irrigation

text: Wheel line systems are limited in the amount of water they can carry, and limited in the height of crops that can be irrigated. One useful feature of a lateral move system is that it consists of sections that can be easily disconnected, adapting to field shape as the line is moved. They are most often used for small, rectilinear, or oddly-shaped fields, hilly or mountainous regions, or in regions where labor is inexpensive.


title: Irrigation

text: A lawn sprinkler system is permanently installed, as opposed to a hose-end sprinkler, which is portable. Sprinkler systems are installed in residential lawns, in commercial landscapes, for churches and schools, in public parks and cemeteries, and on golf courses. Most of the components of these irrigation systems are hidden under ground, since aesthetics are important in a landscape. A typical lawn sprinkler system will consist of one or more zones, limited in size by the capacity of the water source. Each zone will cover a designated portion of the landscape. Sections of the landscape will usually be divided by microclimate, type of plant material, and type of irrigation equipment. A landscape irrigation system may also include zones containing drip irrigation, bubblers, or other types of equipment besides sprinklers.


title: Irrigation

text: Although manual systems are still used, most lawn sprinkler systems may be operated automatically using an irrigation controller, sometimes called a clock or timer. Most automatic systems employ electric solenoid valves. Each zone has one or more of these valves that are wired to the controller. When the controller sends power to the valve, the valve opens, allowing water to flow to the sprinklers in that zone.


title: Irrigation

text: There are two main types of sprinklers used in lawn irrigation, pop-up spray heads and rotors. Spray heads have a fixed spray pattern, while rotors have one or more streams that rotate. Spray heads are used to cover smaller areas, while rotors are used for larger areas. Golf course rotors are sometimes so large that a single sprinkler is combined with a valve and called a 'valve in head'. When used in a turf area, the sprinklers are installed with the top of the head flush with the ground surface. When the system is pressurized, the head will pop up out of the ground and water the desired area until the valve closes and shuts off that zone. Once there is no more pressure in the lateral line, the sprinkler head will retract back into the ground. In flower beds or shrub areas, sprinklers may be mounted on above ground risers or even taller pop-up sprinklers may be used and installed flush as in a lawn area.


title: Irrigation

text: There are many types of hose-end sprinklers. Many of them are smaller versions of larger agricultural and landscape sprinklers, sized to work with a typical garden hose. Some have a spiked base allowing them to be temporarily stuck in the ground, while others have a sled base designed to be dragged while attached to the hose.


title: Irrigation

text: Subirrigation has been used for many years in field crops in areas with high water tables. It is a method of artificially raising the water table to allow the soil to be moistened from below the plants' root zone. Often those systems are located on permanent grasslands in lowlands or river valleys and combined with drainage infrastructure. A system of pumping stations, canals, weirs and gates allows it to increase or decrease the water level in a network of ditches and thereby control the water table.


title: Irrigation

text: Subirrigation is also used in the commercial greenhouse production, usually for potted plants. Water is delivered from below, absorbed by upwards, and the excess collected for recycling. Typically, a solution of water and nutrients floods a container or flows through a trough for a short period of time, 10–20 minutes, and is then pumped back into a holding tank for reuse. Sub-irrigation in greenhouses requires fairly sophisticated, expensive equipment and management. Advantages are water and nutrient conservation, and labor savings through reduced system maintenance and automation. It is similar in principle and action to subsurface basin irrigation.


title: Irrigation

text: Another type of subirrigation is the self-watering container, also known as a sub-irrigated planter. This consists of a planter suspended over a reservoir with some type of wicking material such as a polyester rope. The water is drawn up the wick through capillary action. A similar technique is the wicking bed; this too uses capillary action.


title: Irrigation

text: Modern irrigation methods are efficient enough to supply the entire field uniformly with water, so that each plant has the amount of water it needs, neither too much nor too little. Water use efficiency in the field can be determined as follows:


title: Irrigation

text: Increased irrigation efficiency has a number of positive outcomes for the farmer, the community and the wider environment. Low application efficiency infers that the amount of water applied to the field is in excess of the crop or field requirements. Increasing the application efficiency means that the amount of crop produced per unit of water increases. Improved efficiency may either be achieved by applying less water to an existing field or by using water more wisely thereby achieving higher yields in the same area of land. In some parts of the world, farmers are charged for irrigation water hence over-application has a direct financial cost to the farmer. Irrigation often requires pumping energy (either electricity or fossil fuel) to deliver water to the field or supply the correct operating pressure. Hence increased efficiency will reduce both the water cost and energy cost per unit of agricultural production. A reduction of water use on one field may mean that the farmer is able to irrigate a larger area of land, increasing total agricultural production. Low efficiency usually means that excess water is lost through seepage or runoff, both of which can result in loss of crop nutrients or pesticides with potential adverse impacts on the surrounding environment.


title: Irrigation

text: Improving the efficiency of irrigation is usually achieved in one of two ways, either by improving the system design or by optimising the irrigation management. Improving system design includes conversion from one form of irrigation to another (e.g. from furrow to drip irrigation) and also through small changes in the current system (for example changing flowrates and operating pressures). Irrigation management refers to the scheduling of irrigation events and decisions around how much water is applied.


title: Irrigation

text: Negative impacts frequently accompany extensive irrigation. Some projects which diverted surface water for irrigation dried up the water sources, which led to a more extreme regional climate. Projects that relied on groundwater and pumped too much from underground aquifers created subsidence and salinization. Salinization of irrigation water in turn damaged the crops and seeped into drinking water. Pests and pathogens also thrived in the irrigation canals or ponds full of still water, which created regional outbreaks of diseases like malaria and schistosomiasis. Governments also used irrigation schemes to encourage migration, especially of more desirable populations into an area. Additionally, some of these large nationwide schemes failed to pay off at all, costing more than any benefit gained from increased crop yields.


title: Irrigation

text: Overdrafting (depletion) of underground aquifers: In the mid-20th century, the advent of diesel and electric motors led to systems that could pump groundwater out of major aquifers faster than drainage basins could refill them. This can lead to permanent loss of aquifer capacity, decreased water quality, ground subsidence, and other problems. The future of food production in such areas as the North China Plain, the Punjab region in India and Pakistan, and the Great Plains of the US is threatened by this phenomenon.


title: Irrigation

text: Irrigation schemes involve solving numerous engineering and economic problems while minimizing negative environmental consequences. Such problems include:


title: Irrigation

text: Archaeological investigation has found evidence of irrigation in areas lacking sufficient natural rainfall to support crops for rainfed agriculture. Some of the earliest known use of the technology dates to the 6th millennium BC in Khuzistan in the south-west of present-day Iran. The site of Choga Mami, in Iraq on the border with Iran, is believed to be the earliest to show the first canal irrigation in operation at about 6000 BCE.


title: Irrigation

text: Irrigation was used as a means of manipulation of water in the alluvial plains of the Indus valley civilization, the application of which is estimated to have begun around 4500 BC and drastically increased the size and prosperity of their agricultural settlements. The Indus Valley Civilization developed sophisticated irrigation and water-storage systems, including artificial reservoirs at Girnar dated to 3000 BCE, and an early canal irrigation system from 2600 BCE. Large-scale agriculture was practiced, with an extensive network of canals used for the purpose of irrigation.


title: Irrigation

text: They developed "perennial irrigation", regularly watering crops throughout the growing season by coaxing water through a matrix of small channels formed in the field.


title: Irrigation

text: Ancient Egyptians practiced "basin irrigation" using the flooding of the Nile to inundate land plots which had been surrounded by dykes. The flood water remained until the fertile sediment had settled before the engineers returned the surplus to the watercourse. There is evidence of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Amenemhet III in the twelfth dynasty (about 1800 BCE) using the natural lake of the Faiyum Oasis as a reservoir to store surpluses of water for use during dry seasons. The lake swelled annually from the flooding of the Nile.


title: Irrigation

text: The Ancient Nubians developed a form of irrigation by using a waterwheel-like device called a "sakia". Irrigation began in Nubia some time between the third and second millennia BCE. It largely depended upon the flood waters that would flow through the Nile River and other rivers in what is now the Sudan.


title: Irrigation

text: In sub-Saharan Africa irrigation reached the Niger River region cultures and civilizations by the first or second millennium BCE and was based on wet-season flooding and water harvesting.


title: Irrigation

text: Evidence of "terrace irrigation" occurs in pre-Columbian America, early Syria, India, and China. In the Zana Valley of the Andes Mountains in Peru, archaeologists have found remains of three irrigation canals radiocarbon-dated from the 4th millennium BCE, the 3rd millennium BCE and the 9th century CE. These canals provide the earliest record of irrigation in the New World. Traces of a canal possibly dating from the 5th millennium BCE were found under the 4th-millennium canal.


title: Irrigation

text: Ancient Persia (modern day Iran) used irrigation as far back as the 6th millennium BCE to grow barley in areas with insufficient natural rainfall. The Qanats, developed in ancient Persia about 800 BCE, are among the oldest known irrigation methods still in use today. They are now found in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. The system comprises a network of vertical wells and gently sloping tunnels driven into the sides of cliffs and of steep hills to tap groundwater. The noria, a water wheel with clay pots around the rim powered by the flow of the stream (or by animals where the water source was still), first came into use at about this time among Roman settlers in North Africa. By 150 BCE the pots were fitted with valves to allow smoother filling as they were forced into the water.


title: Irrigation

text: The irrigation works of ancient Sri Lanka, the earliest dating from about 300 BCE in the reign of King Pandukabhaya, and under continuous development for the next thousand years, were one of the most complex irrigation systems of the ancient world. In addition to underground canals, the Sinhalese were the first to build completely artificial reservoirs to store water. These reservoirs and canal systems were used primarily to irrigate paddy fields, which require a lot of water to cultivate. Most of these irrigation systems still exist undamaged up to now, in Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, because of the advanced and precise engineering. The system was extensively restored and further extended during the reign of King Parakrama Bahu (1153–1186 CE).


title: Irrigation

text: The oldest known hydraulic engineers of China were Sunshu Ao (6th century BCE) of the Spring and Autumn period and Ximen Bao (5th century BCE) of the Warring States period, both of whom worked on large irrigation projects. In the Sichuan region belonging to the state of Qin of ancient China, the Dujiangyan Irrigation System devised by the Qin Chinese hydrologist and irrigation engineer Li Bing was built in 256 BCE to irrigate a vast area of farmland that today still supplies water. By the 2nd century AD, during the Han Dynasty, the Chinese also used chain pumps which lifted water from a lower elevation to a higher one. These were powered by manual foot-pedal, hydraulic waterwheels, or rotating mechanical wheels pulled by oxen. The water was used for public works, providing water for urban residential quarters and palace gardens, but mostly for irrigation of farmland canals and channels in the fields.


title: Irrigation

text: Korea, Jang Yeong-sil, a Korean engineer of the Joseon Dynasty, under the active direction of the king, Sejong the Great, invented the world's first rain-gauge, "uryanggye" (Korean:우량계) in 1441. It was installed in irrigation tanks as part of a nationwide system to measure and collect rainfall for agricultural applications. With this instrument, planners and farmers could make better use of the information gathered in the survey.


title: Irrigation

text: The earliest agricultural irrigation canal system known in the area of the present-day United States dates to between 1200 B.C. and 800 B.C. and was discovered by Desert Archaeology, Inc. in Marana, Arizona (adjacent to Tucson) in 2009. The irrigation-canal system predates the Hohokam culture by two thousand years and belongs to an unidentified culture. In North America, the Hohokam were the only culture known to rely on irrigation canals to water their crops, and their irrigation systems supported the largest population in the Southwest by AD 1300. The Hohokam constructed an assortment of simple canals combined with weirs in their various agricultural pursuits. Between the 7th and 14th centuries they built and maintained extensive irrigation networks along the lower Salt and middle Gila Rivers that rivaled the complexity of those used in the ancient Near East, Egypt, and China. These were constructed using relatively simple excavation tools, without the benefit of advanced engineering technologies, and achieved drops of a few feet per mile, balancing erosion and siltation. The Hohokam cultivated varieties of cotton, tobacco, maize, beans and squash, as well as harvesting an assortment of wild plants. Late in the Hohokam Chronological Sequence, they also used extensive dry-farming systems, primarily to grow agave for food and fiber. Their reliance on agricultural strategies based on canal irrigation, vital in their less-than-hospitable desert environment and arid climate, provided the basis for the aggregation of rural populations into stable urban centers.


title: Irrigation

text: The oldest known irrigation canals in the Americas are in the desert of northern Peru in the Zaña valley near the hamlet of Nanchoc. The canals have been radiocarbon dated to at least 3400 B.C. and possibly as old as 4700 B.C. The canals at that time irrigated crops such as peanuts, squash, manioc, chenopods, a relative of Quinoa, and later maize.


title: Irrigation

text: In the 20th century, global anxiety specifically about the American cotton monopoly fueled many empirical irrigation projects: Britain began developing irrigation in India, the Ottomans in Egypt, the French in Algeria, the Portuguese in Angola, the Germans in Togo, and Soviets in Central Asia.


title: Irrigation

text: Irrigated land in the United States increased from 300,000 acres in 1880 to 4.1 million in 1890, then to 7.3 million in 1900. Two thirds of this irrigation sources from groundwater or small ponds and reservoirs, while the other one third comes from large dams. One of the main attractions of irrigation in the West was its increased dependability compared to rainfall-watered agriculture in the East. Proponents argued that farmers with a dependable water supply could more easily get loans from bankers interested in this more predictable farming model. Most irrigation in the Great Plains region derived from underground aquifers. Euro-American farmers who colonized the region in the 19th century tried to grow the commodity crops that they were used to, like wheat, corn, and alfalfa, but rainfall stifled their growing capacity. Between the late 1800s and the 1930s, farmers used wind-powered pumps to draw groundwater. These windpumps had limited power, but the development of gas-powered pumps in the mid-1930s pushed wells deep into the Ogallala Aquifer. Farmers irrigated fields by laying pipes across the field with sprinklers at intervals, a labor-intensive process, until the advent of the center-pivot sprinkler after WWII, which made irrigation significantly easier. By the 1970s farmers drained the aquifer ten times faster than it could recharge, and by 1993 they had removed half of the accessible water.


title: Irrigation

text: Large-scale federal funding and intervention pushed through the majority of irrigation projects in the West, especially in California, Colorado, Arizona, and Nevada. At first, plans to increase irrigated farmland, largely by giving land to farmers and asking them to find water, failed across the board. Congress passed the Desert Land Act in 1877 and the Carey Act in 1894, which only marginally increased irrigation. Only in 1902 Congress passed the National Reclamation Act, which channeled money from the sale of western public lands, in parcels up to 160 acres large, into irrigation projects on public or private land in the arid West. The Congressmen who passed the law, as well as their wealthy supporters, supported Western irrigation because it would increase American exports, ‘reclaim’ the West, and push the Eastern poor out West in search of a better life.


title: Irrigation

text: While the National Reclamation Act was the most successful piece of federal irrigation legislation, the implementation of the act did not go as planned. Originally, the Reclamation Service planned to construct a small number of projects that would allow engineers to learn from the process, but President Roosevelt chose instead push as many irrigation projects through as fast as possible. The Reclamation Service also chose to push most of the Act’s money toward construction rather than settlement, so the Service overwhelmingly prioritized building large dams like the Hoover Dam. Over the 20th century Congress and state governments grew more frustrated with the Reclamation Service and the irrigation schemes in general. Frederick Newell, head of the Reclamation Service, proving uncompromising and difficult to work with, falling crop prices, resistance to delay debt payments, and refusal to begin new projects until the completion of old ones all contributed. The Reclamation Extension Act of 1914, transferring a significant amount of irrigation decision-making power regarding irrigation projects from the Reclamation Service to Congress, was in many ways a result of an increasing political unpopularity of the Reclamation Service.


title: Irrigation

text: In the lower Colorado Basin of Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada, the states derive irrigation water largely from rivers, especially the Colorado River, which irrigates more than 4.5 million acres of land, with a less significant amount coming from groundwater. In the 1952 case Arizona v. California, Arizona sued California for increased access to the Colorado, under the grounds that their groundwater supply could not sustain their almost entirely irrigation-based agricultural economy, which they won. California, which began irrigating in earnest in the 1870s in San Joaquin Valley, had passed the Wright Act of 1887 permitting agricultural communities to construct and operate needed irrigation works. The Colorado also irrigates large fields in California’s Imperial Valley, fed by the National Reclamation Act-built All-American Canal.


title: Irrigation

text: When the Bolsheviks conquered Central Asia in 1917, the native Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and Turkmens used minimal irrigation. The Slavic immigrants pushed into the area by the Tsarist government brought their own irrigation methods, including waterwheels, the use of rice paddies to restore salted land, and underground irrigation channels. Russians dismissed these techniques as crude and inefficient. Despite this, in absence of other solutions, tsarist officials maintained these systems through the late 19th century.


title: Irrigation

text: Before conquering the area, the Russian government accepted a 1911 American proposal to send hydraulic experts to Central Asia to investigate the potential for large-scale irrigation. A 1918 decree by Lenin then encouraged irrigation development in the region, and development began in the 1930s. When it did, Stalin and other Soviet leaders prioritized large-scale, ambitious hydraulic projects, especially along the Volga River. The Soviet irrigation push stemmed largely from their late 19th century fears of the American cotton monopoly and subsequent desire to achieve cotton self-sufficiency. They had built up their textile manufacturing industry in the 19th century, requiring increased cotton and irrigation, as the region did not receive enough rainfall to support cotton farming.


title: Irrigation

text: The Russians built dams on the Don and Kuban Rivers for irrigation, removing freshwater flow from the Sea of Azov and making it much saltier. Depletion and salinization scourged other areas of the Russian irrigation project. In the 1950s Soviet officials began also diverting the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, which fed the Aral Sea. Before diversion, the rivers delivered 55km3 of water to the Aral Sea per year, but after they only delivered 6km3 to the Sea. Because of its reduced inflow, the Aral Sea covered less than half of its original seabed, which made the regional climate more extreme and created airborne salinization, lowering nearby crop yields.


title: Irrigation

text: By 1975, the USSR used eight times as much water as they had in 1913, mostly for irrigation. Russia’s expansion of irrigation began to decrease in the late 1980s, and irrigated hectares in Central Asia capped out at 7 million. Mikhail Gorbachev killed a proposed plan to reverse the Ob and Yenisei for irrigation in 1986, and the breakup of the USSR in 1991 ended Russian investment in Central Asian cotton irrigation.


title: Irrigation

text: Different irrigation schemes with a variety of goals and success rates have been implemented across Africa in the 20th century, but have all been influenced by colonial forces. The Tana River Irrigation Scheme in eastern Kenya, completed between 1948 and 1963, opened up new lands for agriculture, and the Kenyan government attempted to resettle the area with detainees from the Mau Mau uprising. Libya’s underground water resources were discovered by Italian oil drillers during the Italian colonization of Libya. This water lay dormant until 1969, when Muammar al-Gaddafi and American Armand Hammer built the Great Man-Made River to deliver the Saharan water to the coast. The water largely contributed to irrigation but cost four to ten times more than the crops it produced were worth.


title: Irrigation

text: In 1912, the Union of South Africa created an irrigation department and began investing in water storage infrastructure and irrigation. The government used irrigation and dam-building to further social goals like poverty relief, both by creating construction jobs for poor whites and by creating irrigation schemes to increase white farming. One of their first major irrigation projects was the Hartbeespoort Dam, begun in 1916 as a mechanism to elevate the living conditions of the ‘poor whites’ in the region and eventually completed as a ‘whites only’ employment opportunity. The Pretoria irrigation scheme, Kammanassie project, and Buchuberg irrigation scheme on the Orange River all followed in the same vein in the 1920s and 30s.


title: Irrigation

text: In Egypt, modern irrigation began with Muhammad Ali Pasha in the mid-1800s, who sought to achieve Egyptian independence from the Ottomans through increased trade with Europe—specifically cotton exportation. His administration proposed replacing the traditional Nile basin irrigation, which took advantage of the annual ebb and flow of the Nile, with irrigation barrages in the lower Nile which better suited cotton production. Egypt devoted 105,000 ha to cotton in 1861, which increased fivefold by 1865. The majority of their exports were shipped to England, and the United-States-Civil-War-induced cotton scarcity in the 1860s cemented Egypt as England’s cotton producer. As the Egyptian economy became more dependent on cotton in the 20th century, it became more important to control even small Nile floods. Cotton production was more at risk of destruction than more common crops like barley or wheat. After the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, the British intensified the conversion to perennial irrigation with the construction of the Delta Barrage, the Assiut Barrage, and the first Aswan Dam. Perennial irrigation decreased local control over water and made traditional subsistence farming or the farming of other crops incredibly difficult, eventually contributing to widespread peasant bankruptcy and the 1879-1882 ‘Urabi revolt.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns (; 9 October 183516 December 1921) was a French composer, organist, conductor and pianist of the Romantic era. His best-known works include Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (1863), the Second Piano Concerto (1868), the First Cello Concerto (1872), "Danse macabre" (1874), the opera "Samson and Delilah" (1877), the Third Violin Concerto (1880), the Third ("Organ") Symphony (1886) and "The Carnival of the Animals" (1886).


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Saint-Saëns was a musical prodigy; he made his concert debut at the age of ten. After studying at the Paris Conservatoire he followed a conventional career as a church organist, first at Saint-Merri, Paris and, from 1858, La Madeleine, the official church of the French Empire. After leaving the post twenty years later, he was a successful freelance pianist and composer, in demand in Europe and the Americas.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: As a young man, Saint-Saëns was enthusiastic for the most modern music of the day, particularly that of Schumann, Liszt and Wagner, although his own compositions were generally within a conventional classical tradition. He was a scholar of musical history, and remained committed to the structures worked out by earlier French composers. This brought him into conflict in his later years with composers of the impressionist and expressionist schools of music; although there were neoclassical elements in his music, foreshadowing works by Stravinsky and Les Six, he was often regarded as a reactionary in the decades around the time of his death.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Saint-Saëns held only one teaching post, at the École de Musique Classique et Religieuse in Paris, and remained there for less than five years. It was nevertheless important in the development of French music: his students included Gabriel Fauré, among whose own later pupils was Maurice Ravel. Both of them were strongly influenced by Saint-Saëns, whom they revered as a genius.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Saint-Saëns was born in Paris, the only child of Jacques-Joseph-Victor Saint-Saëns (1798–1835), an official in the French Ministry of the Interior, and Françoise-Clémence, "née" Collin. Victor Saint-Saëns was of Norman ancestry, and his wife was from an Haute-Marne family; their son, born in the Rue du Jardinet in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, and baptised at the nearby church of Saint-Sulpice, always considered himself a true Parisian. Less than two months after the christening, Victor Saint-Saëns died of consumption (tuberculosis) on the first anniversary of his marriage. The young Camille was taken to the country for the sake of his health, and for two years lived with a nurse at Corbeil, to the south of Paris.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: When Saint-Saëns was brought back to Paris he lived with his mother and her widowed aunt, Charlotte Masson. Before he was three years old he displayed perfect pitch and enjoyed picking out tunes on the piano. His great-aunt taught him the basics of pianism, and when he was seven he became a pupil of Camille-Marie Stamaty, a former pupil of Friedrich Kalkbrenner. Stamaty required his students to play while resting their forearms on a bar situated in front of the keyboard, so that all the pianist's power came from the hands and fingers rather than the arms, which, Saint-Saëns later wrote, was good training. Clémence Saint-Saëns, well aware of her son's precocious talent, did not wish him to become famous too young. The music critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote of Saint-Saëns in 1969, "It is not generally realized that he was the most remarkable child prodigy in history, and that includes Mozart." The boy gave occasional performances for small audiences from the age of five, but it was not until he was ten that he made his official public debut, at the Salle Pleyel, in a programme that included Mozart's Piano Concerto in B (K450), and Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto. Through Stamaty's influence, Saint-Saëns was introduced to the composition professor Pierre Maleden and the organ teacher Alexandre Pierre François Boëly. From the latter he acquired a lifelong love of the music of Bach, which was then little known in France.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: As a schoolboy Saint-Saëns was outstanding in many subjects. In addition to his musical prowess, he distinguished himself in the study of French literature, Latin and Greek, divinity, and mathematics. His interests included philosophy, archaeology and astronomy, of which, particularly the last, he remained a talented amateur in later life.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: In 1848, at the age of thirteen, Saint-Saëns was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire, France's foremost music academy. The director, Daniel Auber, had succeeded Luigi Cherubini in 1842, and brought a more relaxed regime than that of his martinet predecessor, though the curriculum remained conservative. Students, even outstanding pianists like Saint-Saëns, were encouraged to specialise in organ studies, because a career as a church organist was seen to offer more opportunities than that of a solo pianist. His organ professor was François Benoist, whom Saint-Saëns considered a mediocre organist but a first-rate teacher; his pupils included Adolphe Adam, César Franck, Charles Alkan, Louis Lefébure-Wély and Georges Bizet. In 1849 Saint-Saëns won the Conservatoire's second prize for organists, and in 1851 the top prize; in the same year he began formal composition studies. His professor was a protégé of Cherubini, Fromental Halévy, whose pupils included Charles Gounod and Bizet.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Saint-Saëns's student compositions included a symphony in A major (1850) and a choral piece, "Les Djinns" (1850), after an eponymous poem by Victor Hugo. He competed for France's premier musical award, the Prix de Rome, in 1852 but was unsuccessful. Auber believed that the prize should have gone to Saint-Saëns, considering him to have more promise than the winner, Léonce Cohen, who made little mark during the rest of his career. In the same year Saint-Saëns had greater success in a competition organised by the Société Sainte-Cécile, Paris, with his "Ode à Sainte-Cécile", for which the judges unanimously voted him the first prize. The first piece the composer acknowledged as a mature work and gave an opus number was "Trois Morceaux" for harmonium (1852).


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: On leaving the Conservatoire in 1853, Saint-Saëns accepted the post of organist at the ancient Parisian church of Saint-Merri near the Hôtel de Ville. The parish was substantial, with 26,000 parishioners; in a typical year there were more than two hundred weddings, the organist's fees from which, together with fees for funerals and his modest basic stipend, gave Saint-Saëns a comfortable income. The organ, the work of François-Henri Clicquot, had been badly damaged in the aftermath of the French Revolution and imperfectly restored. The instrument was adequate for church services but not for the ambitious recitals that many high-profile Parisian churches offered. With enough spare time to pursue his career as a pianist and composer, Saint-Saëns composed what became his opus 2, the Symphony in E (1853). This work, with military fanfares and augmented brass and percussion sections, caught the mood of the times in the wake of the popular rise to power of Napoleon III and the restoration of the French Empire. The work brought the composer another first prize from the Société Sainte-Cécile.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Among the musicians who were quick to spot Saint-Saëns's talent were the composers Gioachino Rossini, Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt, and the influential singer Pauline Viardot, who all encouraged him in his career. In early 1858 Saint-Saëns moved from Saint-Merri to the high-profile post of organist of La Madeleine, the official church of the Empire; Liszt heard him playing there and declared him the greatest organist in the world.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Although in later life he had a reputation for outspoken musical conservatism, in the 1850s Saint-Saëns supported and promoted the most modern music of the day, including that of Liszt, Robert Schumann and Richard Wagner. Unlike many French composers of his own and the next generation, Saint-Saëns, for all his enthusiasm for and knowledge of Wagner's operas, was not influenced by him in his own compositions. He commented, "I admire deeply the works of Richard Wagner in spite of their bizarre character. They are superior and powerful, and that is sufficient for me. But I am not, I have never been, and I shall never be of the Wagnerian religion."


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: In 1861 Saint-Saëns accepted his only post as a teacher, at the École de Musique Classique et Religieuse, Paris, which Louis Niedermeyer had established in 1853 to train first-rate organists and choirmasters for the churches of France. Niedermeyer himself was professor of piano; when he died in March 1861, Saint-Saëns was appointed to take charge of piano studies. He scandalised some of his more austere colleagues by introducing his students to contemporary music, including that of Schumann, Liszt and Wagner. His best-known pupil, Gabriel Fauré, recalled in old age:


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Saint-Saëns further enlivened the academic regime by writing, and composing incidental music for, a one-act farce performed by the students (including André Messager). He conceived his best-known piece, "The Carnival of the Animals", with his students in mind, but did not finish composing it until 1886, more than twenty years after he left the Niedermeyer school.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: In 1864 Saint-Saëns caused some surprise by competing a second time for the Prix de Rome. Many in musical circles were puzzled by his decision to enter the competition again, now that he was establishing a reputation as a soloist and composer. He was once more unsuccessful. Berlioz, one of the judges, wrote:


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: According to the musical scholar Jean Gallois, it was apropos of this episode that Berlioz made his well-known "bon mot" about Saint-Saëns, "He knows everything, but lacks inexperience" ("Il sait tout, mais il manque d'inexpérience"). The winner, Victor Sieg, had a career no more notable than that of the 1852 winner, but Saint-Saëns's biographer Brian Rees speculates that the judges may "have been seeking signs of genius in the midst of tentative effort and error, and considered that Saint-Saëns had reached his summit of proficiency". The suggestion that Saint-Saëns was more proficient than inspired dogged his career and posthumous reputation. He himself wrote, "Art is intended to create beauty and character. Feeling only comes afterwards and art can very well do without it. In fact, it is very much better off when it does." The biographer Jessica Duchen writes that he was "a troubled man who preferred not to betray the darker side of his soul". The critic and composer Jeremy Nicholas observes that this reticence has led many to underrate the music; he quotes such slighting remarks as "Saint-Saëns is the only great composer who wasn't a genius", and "Bad music well written".


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: While teaching at the Niedermeyer school Saint-Saëns put less of his energy into composing and performing, although an overture entitled "Spartacus" was crowned at a competition instituted in 1863 by the Société Sainte Cécile of Bordeaux. But after he left the school in 1865 he pursued both aspects of his career with vigour. In 1867 his cantata "Les noces de Prométhée" beat more than a hundred other entries to win the composition prize of the Grande Fête Internationale in Paris, for which the jury included Auber, Berlioz, Gounod, Rossini and Giuseppe Verdi. In 1868 he premiered the first of his orchestral works to gain a permanent place in the repertoire, his Second Piano Concerto. Playing this and other works he became a noted figure in the musical life of Paris and other cities in France and abroad during the 1860s.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: In 1870, concerned at the dominance of German music and the lack of opportunity for young French composers to have their works played, Saint-Saëns and Romain Bussine, professor of singing at the Conservatoire, discussed the founding of a society to promote new French music. Before they could take the proposal further the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Saint-Saëns served in the National Guard during the war. During the brief but bloody Paris Commune that followed in March to May 1871 his superior at the Madeleine, the Abbé Deguerry, was murdered by rebels; Saint-Saëns escaped to a brief exile in England. With the help of George Grove and others he supported himself in London, giving recitals. Returning to Paris in May, he found that anti-German sentiments had considerably enhanced support for the idea of a pro-French musical society. The Société Nationale de Musique, with its motto, ""Ars Gallica"", had been established in February 1871, with Bussine as president, Saint-Saëns as vice-president and Henri Duparc, Fauré, Franck and Jules Massenet among its founder-members.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: As an admirer of Liszt's innovative symphonic poems, Saint-Saëns enthusiastically adopted the form; his first "poème symphonique" was "Le Rouet d'Omphale" (1871), premiered at a concert of the Sociéte Nationale in January 1872. In the same year, after more than a decade of intermittent work on operatic scores, Saint-Saëns finally had one of his operas staged. "La princesse jaune" ("The Yellow Princess"), a one-act, light romantic piece, was given at the Opéra-Comique, Paris in June. It ran for five performances.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Throughout the 1860s and early 1870s, Saint-Saëns had continued to live a bachelor existence, sharing a large fourth-floor flat in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré with his mother. In 1875, he surprised many by marrying. The groom was approaching forty and his bride was nineteen; she was Marie-Laure Truffot, the sister of one of the composer's pupils. The marriage was not a success. In the words of the biographer Sabina Teller Ratner, "Saint-Saëns's mother disapproved, and her son was difficult to live with". Saint-Saëns and his wife moved to the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, in the Latin Quarter; his mother moved with them. The couple had two sons, both of whom died in infancy. In 1878, the elder, André, aged two, fell from a window of the flat and was killed; the younger, Jean-François, died of pneumonia six weeks later, aged six months. Saint-Saëns and Marie-Laure continued to live together for three years, but he blamed her for André's accident; the double blow of their loss effectively destroyed the marriage.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: For a French composer of the 19th century, opera was seen as the most important type of music. Saint-Saëns's younger contemporary and rival, Massenet, was beginning to gain a reputation as an operatic composer, but Saint-Saëns, with only the short and unsuccessful "La princesse jaune" staged, had made no mark in that sphere. In February 1877, he finally had a full-length opera staged. His four-act "drame lyricque", "Le timbre d'argent" ("The Silver Bell"), to Jules Barbier's and Michel Carré's libretto, reminiscent of the Faust legend, had been in rehearsal in 1870, but the outbreak of war halted the production. The work was eventually presented by the Théâtre Lyrique company of Paris; it ran for eighteen performances.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: The dedicatee of the opera, Albert Libon, died three months after the premiere, leaving Saint-Saëns a large legacy "To free him from the slavery of the organ of the Madeleine and to enable him to devote himself entirely to composition". Saint-Saëns, unaware of the imminent bequest, had resigned his position shortly before his friend died. He was not a conventional Christian, and found religious dogma increasingly irksome; he had become tired of the clerical authorities' interference and musical insensitivity; and he wanted to be free to accept more engagements as a piano soloist in other cities. After this he never played the organ professionally in a church service, and rarely played the instrument at all. He composed a "Messe de Requiem" in memory of his friend, which was performed at Saint-Sulpice to mark the first anniversary of Libon's death; Charles-Marie Widor played the organ and Saint-Saëns conducted.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: In December 1877, Saint-Saëns had a more solid operatic success, with "Samson et Dalila", his one opera to gain and keep a place in the international repertoire. Because of its biblical subject, the composer had met many obstacles to its presentation in France, and through Liszt's influence the premiere was given at Weimar in a German translation. Although the work eventually became an international success it was not staged at the Paris Opéra until 1892.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Saint-Saëns was a keen traveller. From the 1870s until the end of his life he made 179 trips to 27 countries. His professional engagements took him most often to Germany and England; for holidays, and to avoid Parisian winters which affected his weak chest, he favoured Algiers and various places in Egypt.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Saint-Saëns was elected to the Institut de France in 1881, at his second attempt, having to his chagrin been beaten by Massenet in 1878. In July of that year he and his wife went to the Auvergnat spa town of La Bourboule for a holiday. On 28 July he disappeared from their hotel, and a few days later his wife received a letter from him to say that he would not be returning. They never saw each other again. Marie Saint-Saëns returned to her family, and lived until 1950, dying near Bordeaux at the age of ninety-five. Saint-Saëns did not divorce his wife and remarry, nor did he form any later intimate relationship with a woman. Rees comments that although there is no firm evidence, some biographers believe that Saint-Saëns was more attracted to his own sex than to women. After the death of his children and collapse of his marriage, Saint-Saëns increasingly found a surrogate family in Fauré and his wife, Marie, and their two sons, to whom he was a much-loved honorary uncle. Marie told him, "For us you are one of the family, and we mention your name ceaselessly here."


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: In the 1880s Saint-Saëns continued to seek success in the opera house, an undertaking made the more difficult by an entrenched belief among influential members of the musical establishment that it was unthinkable that a pianist, organist and symphonist could write a good opera. He had two operas staged during the decade, the first being "Henry VIII" (1883) commissioned by the Paris Opéra. Although the libretto was not of his choosing, Saint-Saëns, normally a fluent, even facile composer, worked at the score with unusual diligence to capture a convincing air of 16th-century England. The work was a success, and was frequently revived during the composer's lifetime. When it was produced at Covent Garden in 1898, "The Era" commented that though French librettists generally "make a pretty hash of British history", this piece was "not altogether contemptible as an opera story".


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: The open-mindedness of the Société Nationale had hardened by the mid-1880s into a dogmatic adherence to Wagnerian methods favoured by Franck's pupils, led by Vincent d'Indy. They had begun to dominate the organisation and sought to abandon its ""Ars Gallica"" ethos of commitment to French works. Bussine and Saint-Saëns found this unacceptable, and resigned in 1886. Having long pressed the merits of Wagner on a sometimes sceptical French public, Saint-Saëns was now becoming worried that the German's music was having an excessive impact on young French composers. His increasing caution towards Wagner developed in later years into stronger hostility, directed as much at Wagner's political nationalism as at his music.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: By the 1880s Saint-Saëns was an established favourite with audiences in England, where he was widely regarded as the greatest living French composer. In 1886 the Philharmonic Society of London commissioned what became one of his most popular and respected works, the Third ("Organ") Symphony. It was premiered in London at a concert in which Saint-Saëns appeared as conductor of the symphony and as soloist in Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, conducted by Sir Arthur Sullivan. The success of the symphony in London was considerable, but was surpassed by the ecstatic welcome the work received at its Paris premiere early the following year. Later in 1887 Saint-Saëns's "drame lyrique" "Proserpine" opened at the Opéra-Comique. It was well received and seemed to be heading for a substantial run when the theatre burnt down within weeks of the premiere and the production was lost.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: In December 1888 Saint-Saëns's mother died. He felt her loss deeply, and was plunged into depression and insomnia, even contemplating suicide. He left Paris and stayed in Algiers, where he recuperated until May 1889, walking and reading but unable to compose.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: During the 1890s Saint-Saëns spent much time on holiday, travelling overseas, composing less and performing more infrequently than before. A planned visit to perform in Chicago fell through in 1893. He wrote one opera, the comedy "Phryné" (1893), and together with Paul Dukas helped to complete "Frédégonde" (1895) an opera left unfinished by Ernest Guiraud, who died in 1892. "Phryné" was well received, and prompted calls for more comic operas at the Opéra-Comique, which had latterly been favouring grand opera. His few choral and orchestral works from the 1890s are mostly short; the major concert pieces from the decade were the single movement fantasia "Africa" (1891) and his Fifth ("Egyptian") Piano Concerto, which he premiered at a concert in 1896 marking the fiftieth anniversary of his début at the Salle Pleyel in 1846. Before playing the concerto he read out a short poem he had written for the event, praising his mother's tutelage and his public's long support.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Among the concerts that Saint-Saëns undertook during the decade was one at Cambridge in June 1893, when he, Bruch and Tchaikovsky performed at an event presented by Charles Villiers Stanford for the Cambridge University Musical Society, marking the award of honorary degrees to all three visitors. Saint-Saëns greatly enjoyed the visit, and even spoke approvingly of the college chapel services: "The demands of English religion are not excessive. The services are very short, and consist chiefly of listening to good music extremely well sung, for the English are excellent choristers". His mutual regard for British choirs continued for the rest of his life, and one of his last large-scale works, the oratorio "The Promised Land", was composed for the Three Choirs Festival of 1913.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: In 1900, after ten years without a permanent home in Paris, Saint-Saëns took a flat in the rue de Courcelles, not far from his old residence in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. This remained his home for the rest of his life. He continued to travel abroad frequently, but increasingly often to give concerts rather than as a tourist. He revisited London, where he was always a welcome visitor, went to Berlin, where until the First World War, he was greeted with honour, and travelled in Italy, Spain, Monaco and provincial France. In 1906 and 1909 he made highly successful tours of the United States, as a pianist and conductor. In New York on his second visit he premiered his "Praise ye the Lord" for double choir, orchestra and organ, which he composed for the occasion.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Despite his growing reputation as a musical reactionary, Saint-Saëns was, according to Gallois, probably the only French musician who travelled to Munich to hear the premiere of Mahler's Eighth Symphony in 1910. Nonetheless, by the 20th century Saint-Saëns had lost much of his enthusiasm for modernism in music. Though he strove to conceal it from Fauré, he did not understand or like the latter's opera "Pénélope" (1913), of which he was the dedicatee. In 1917 Francis Poulenc, at the beginning of his career as a composer, was dismissive when Ravel praised Saint-Saëns as a genius. By this time, various strands of new music were emerging with which Saint-Saëns had little in common. His classical instincts for form put him at odds with what seemed to him the shapelessness and structure of the musical impressionists, led by Debussy. Nor did Arnold Schönberg's atonality commend itself to Saint-Saëns:


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Holding such conservative views, Saint-Saëns was out of sympathy – and out of fashion – with the Parisian musical scene of the early 20th century, fascinated as it was with novelty. It is often said that he walked out, scandalised, from the premiere of Vaslav Nijinsky and Igor Stravinsky's ballet "The Rite of Spring" in 1913. In fact, according to Stravinsky, Saint-Saëns was not present on that occasion, but at the first concert performance of the piece the following year he expressed the firm view that Stravinsky was insane.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: When a group of French musicians led by Saint-Saëns tried to organise a boycott of German music during the First World War, Fauré and Messager dissociated themselves from the idea, though the disagreement did not affect their friendship with their old teacher. They were privately concerned that their friend was in danger of looking foolish with his excess of patriotism, and his growing tendency to denounce in public the works of rising young composers, as in his condemnation of Debussy's "En blanc et noir" (1915): "We must at all costs bar the door of the Institut against a man capable of such atrocities; they should be put next to the cubist pictures." His determination to block Debussy's candidacy for election to the Institut was successful, and caused bitter resentment from the younger composer's supporters. Saint-Saëns's response to the neoclassicism of Les Six was equally uncompromising: of Darius Milhaud's polytonal symphonic suite "Protée" (1919) he commented, "fortunately, there are still lunatic asylums in France".


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Saint-Saëns gave what he intended to be his farewell concert as a pianist in Paris in 1913, but his retirement was soon in abeyance as a result of the war, during which he gave many performances in France and elsewhere, raising money for war charities. These activities took him across the Atlantic, despite the danger from German submarines.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: In November 1921, Saint-Saëns gave a recital at the Institut for a large invited audience; it was remarked that his playing was as vivid and precise as ever, and that his personal bearing was admirable for a man of eighty-six. He left Paris a month later for Algiers, with the intention of wintering there, as he had long been accustomed to do. While there, he died without warning of a heart attack on 16 December 1921. His body was taken back to Paris, and after a state funeral at the Madeleine he was buried at the cimetière du Montparnasse. Heavily veiled, in an inconspicuous place among the mourners from France's political and artistic élite, was his widow, Marie-Laure, whom he had last seen in 1881.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: In the early years of the 20th century, the anonymous author of the article on Saint-Saëns in "Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians" wrote:


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Although a keen modernist in his youth, Saint-Saëns was always deeply aware of the great masters of the past. In a profile of him written to mark his eightieth birthday, the critic DCParker wrote, "That Saint-Saëns knows Rameau... Bach and Handel, Haydn and Mozart, must be manifest to all who are familiar with his writings. His love for the classical giants and his sympathy with them form, so to speak, the foundation of his art."


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Less attracted than some of his French contemporaries to the continuous stream of music popularised by Wagner, Saint-Saëns often favoured self-contained melodies. Though they are frequently, in Ratner's phrase, "supple and pliable", more often than not they are constructed in three- or four-bar sections, and the "phrase pattern AABB is characteristic". An occasional tendency to neoclassicism, influenced by his study of French baroque music, is in contrast with the colourful orchestral music more widely identified with him. "Grove" observes that he makes his effects more by characterful harmony and rhythms than by extravagant scoring. In both of those areas of his craft he was normally content with the familiar. Rhythmically, he inclined to standard double, triple or compound metres (although "Grove" points to a 5/4 passage in the Piano Trio and another in 7/4 in the Polonaise for two pianos). From his time at the Conservatoire he was a master of counterpoint; contrapuntal passages crop up, seemingly naturally, in many of his works.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: The authors of the 1955 "The Record Guide", Edward Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor write that Saint-Saëns's brilliant musicianship was "instrumental in drawing the attention of French musicians to the fact that there are other forms of music besides opera." In the 2001 edition of "Grove's Dictionary", Ratner and Daniel Fallon, analysing Saint-Saëns's orchestral music rate the unnumbered Symphony in A (c.1850) as the most ambitious of the composer's juvenilia. Of the works of his maturity, the First Symphony (1853) is a serious and large-scale work, in which the influence of Schumann is detectable. The "Urbs Roma" Symphony (1856) in some ways represents a backward step, being less deftly orchestrated, and "thick and heavy" in its effect. Ratner and Fallon praise the Second Symphony (1859) as a fine example of orchestral economy and structural cohesion, with passages that show the composer's mastery of fugal writing. The best known of the symphonies is the Third (1886) which, unusually, has prominent parts for piano and organ. It opens in C minor and ends in C major with a stately chorale tune. The four movements are clearly divided into two pairs, a practice Saint-Saëns used elsewhere, notably in the Fourth Piano Concerto (1875) and the First Violin Sonata (1885). The work is dedicated to the memory of Liszt, and uses a recurring "motif" treated in a Lisztian style of thematic transformation.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Saint-Saëns's four symphonic poems follow the model of those by Liszt, though, in Sackville-West's and Shawe-Taylor's view, without the "vulgar blatancy" to which the earlier composer was prone. The most popular of the four is "Danse macabre" (1874) depicting skeletons dancing at midnight. Saint-Saëns generally achieved his orchestral effects by deft harmonisation rather than exotic instrumentation, but in this piece he featured the xylophone prominently, representing the rattling bones of the dancers. "Le Rouet d'Omphale" (1871) was composed soon after the horrors of the Commune, but its lightness and delicate orchestration give no hint of recent tragedies. Rees rates "Phaëton" (1873) as the finest of the symphonic poems, belying the composer's professed indifference to melody, and inspired in its depiction of the mythical hero and his fate. A critic at the time of the premiere took a different view, hearing in the piece "the noise of a hack coming down from Montmartre" rather than the galloping fiery horses of Greek legend that inspired the piece. The last of the four symphonic poems, "La jeunesse d'Hercule" ("Hercules's Youth", 1877) was the most ambitious of the four, which, Harding suggests, is why it is the least successful. In the judgment of the critic Roger Nichols these orchestral works, which combine striking melodies, strength of construction and memorable orchestration "set new standards for French music and were an inspiration to such young composers as Ravel".


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Saint-Saëns wrote a one-act ballet, "Javot" (1896), the score for the film "L'assassinat du duc de Guise" (1908), and incidental music to a dozen plays between 1850 and 1916. Three of these scores were for revivals of classics by Molière and Racine, for which Saint-Saëns's deep knowledge of French baroque scores was reflected in his scores, in which he incorporated music by Lully and Charpentier.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Saint-Saëns was the first major French composer to write piano concertos. His First, in D (1858), in conventional three-movement form, is not well known, but the Second, in G minor (1868) is one of his most popular works. The composer experimented with form in this piece, replacing the customary sonata form first movement with a more discursive structure, opening with a solemn cadenza. The scherzo second movement and "presto" finale are in such contrast with the opening that the pianist Zygmunt Stojowski commented that the work "begins like Bach and ends like Offenbach". The Third Piano Concerto, in E (1869) has another high-spirited finale, but the earlier movements are more classical, the texture clear, with graceful melodic lines. The Fourth, in C minor (1875) is probably the composer's best-known piano concerto after the Second. It is in two movements, each comprising two identifiable sub-sections, and maintains a thematic unity not found in the composer's other piano concertos. According to some sources it was this piece that so impressed Gounod that he dubbed Saint-Saëns "the Beethoven of France" (other sources base that distinction on the Third Symphony). The Fifth and last piano concerto, in F major, was written in 1896, more than twenty years after its predecessor. The work is known as the "Egyptian" concerto; it was written while the composer was wintering in Luxor, and incorporates a tune he heard Nile boatmen singing.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: The First Cello Concerto, in A minor (1872) is a serious although animated work, in a single continuous movement with an unusually turbulent first section. It is among the most popular concertos in the cello repertory, much favoured by Pablo Casals and later players. The Second, in D minor (1902), like the Fourth Piano Concerto, consists of two movements each subdivided into two distinct sections. It is more purely virtuosic than its predecessor: Saint-Saëns commented to Fauré that it would never be as popular as the First because it was too difficult. There are three violin concertos; the first to be composed dates from 1858 but was not published until 1879, as the composer's Second, in C major. The First, in A, was also completed in 1858. It is a short work, its single 314-bar movement lasting less than a quarter of an hour. The Second, in conventional three-movement concerto form, is twice as long as the First, and is the least popular of the three: the thematic catalogue of the composer's works lists only three performances in his lifetime. The Third, in B minor, written for Pablo de Sarasate, is technically challenging for the soloist, although the virtuoso passages are balanced by intervals of pastoral serenity. It is by some margin the most popular of the three violin concertos, but Saint-Saëns's best-known concertante work for violin and orchestra is probably the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, in A minor, Op. 28, a single-movement piece, also written for Sarasate, dating from 1863. It changes from a wistful and tense opening to a swaggering main theme, described as faintly sinister by the critic Gerald Larner, who goes on, "After a multi-stopped cadenza ... the solo violin makes a breathless sprint through the coda to the happy ending in A major".


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Discounting his collaboration with Dukas in the completion of Guiraud's unfinished "Frédégonde", Saint-Saëns wrote twelve operas, two of which are "opéras comiques". During the composer's lifetime his "Henry VIII" became a repertory piece; since his death only "Samson et Dalila" has been regularly staged, although according to Schonberg, "Ascanio" (1890) is considered by experts to be a much finer work. The critic Ronald Crichton writes that for all his experience and musical skill, Saint-Saëns "lacked the 'nose' of the theatre animal granted, for example, to Massenet who in other forms of music was his inferior". In a 2005 study, the musical scholar Steven Huebner contrasts the two composers: "Saint-Saëns obviously had no time for Massenet's histrionics". Saint-Saëns's biographer James Harding comments that it is regrettable that the composer did not attempt more works of a light-hearted nature, on the lines of "La princesse jaune", which Harding describes as like Sullivan "with a light French touch".


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Although most of Saint-Saëns's operas have remained neglected, Crichton rates them as important in the history of French opera, as "a bridge between Meyerbeer and the serious French operas of the early 1890s". In his view, the operatic scores of Saint-Saëns have, in general, the strengths and weaknesses of the rest of his music – "lucid Mozartian transparency, greater care for form than for content... There is a certain emotional dryness; invention is sometimes thin, but the workmanship is impeccable." Stylistically, Saint-Saëns drew on a range of models. From Meyerbeer he drew the effective use of the chorus in the action of a piece; for "Henry VIII" he included Tudor music he had researched in London; in "La princesse jaune" he used an oriental pentatonic scale; from Wagner he derived the use of leitmotifs, which, like Massenet, he used sparingly. Huebner observes that Saint-Saëns was more conventional than Massenet so far as through composition is concerned, more often favouring discrete arias and ensembles, with less variety of tempo within individual numbers. In a survey of recorded opera Alan Blyth writes that Saint-Saëns "certainly learned much from Handel, Gluck, Berlioz, the Verdi of "Aida", and Wagner, but from these excellent models he forged his own style."


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: From the age of six and for the rest of his life Saint-Saëns composed "mélodies", writing more than 140. He regarded his songs as thoroughly and typically French, denying any influence from Schubert or other German composers of "Lieder". Unlike his protégé Fauré, or his rival Massenet, he was not drawn to the song cycle, writing only two during his long career – "Mélodies persanes" ("Persian Songs", 1870) and "Le Cendre rouge" ("The Red Ash Tree", 1914, dedicated to Fauré). The poet whose works he set most often was Victor Hugo; others included Alphonse de Lamartine, Pierre Corneille, Amable Tastu, and, in eight songs, Saint-Saëns himself: among his many non-musical talents he was an amateur poet. He was highly sensitive to word setting, and told the young composer Lili Boulanger that to write songs effectively musical talent was not enough: "you must study the French language in depth; it is indispensable." Most of the "mélodies" are written for piano accompaniment, but a few, including "Le lever du soleil sur le Nil" ("Sunrise over the Nile", 1898) and "Hymne à la paix" ("Hymn to Peace", 1919), are for voice and orchestra. His settings, and chosen verses, are generally traditional in form, contrasting with the free verse and less structured forms of a later generation of French composers, including Debussy.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Saint-Saëns composed more than sixty sacred vocal works, ranging from motets to masses and oratorios. Among the larger-scale compositions are the Requiem (1878) and the oratorios "Le déluge" (1875) and "The Promised Land" (1913) with an English text by Herman Klein. He was proud of his connection with British choirs, commenting, "One likes to be appreciated in the home, "par excellence", of oratorio." He wrote a smaller number of secular choral works, some for unaccompanied choir, some with piano accompaniment and some with full orchestra. In his choral works, Saint-Saëns drew heavily on tradition, feeling that his models should be Handel, Mendelssohn and other earlier masters of the genre. In Klein's view, this approach was old-fashioned, and the familiarity of Saint-Saëns's treatment of the oratorio form impeded his success in it.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Nichols comments that, although as a famous pianist Saint-Saëns wrote for the piano throughout his life, "this part of his oeuvre has made curiously little mark". Nichols excepts the "Étude en forme de valse" (1912), which he observes still attracts pianists eager to display their left-hand technique. Although Saint-Saëns was dubbed "the French Beethoven", and his Variations on a Theme of Beethoven in E (1874) is his most extended work for unaccompanied piano, he did not emulate his predecessor in composing piano sonatas. He is not known even to have contemplated writing one. There are sets of bagatelles (1855), études (two sets – 1899 and 1912) and fugues (1920), but in general Saint-Saëns's works for the piano are single short pieces. In addition to established forms such as the song without words (1871) and the mazurka (1862, 1871 and 1882) popularised by Mendelssohn and Chopin, respectively, he wrote descriptive pieces such as "Souvenir d'Italie" (1887), "Les cloches du soir" ("Evening bells", 1889) and "Souvenir d'Ismaïlia" (1895).


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Unlike his pupil, Fauré, whose long career as a reluctant organist left no legacy of works for the instrument, Saint-Saëns published a modest number of pieces for organ solo. Some of them were written for use in church services – "Offertoire" (1853), "Bénédiction nuptiale" (1859), "Communion" (1859) and others. After he left the Madeleine in 1877 Saint-Saëns wrote ten more pieces for organ, mostly for concert use, including two sets of preludes and fugues (1894 and 1898). Some of the earlier works were written to be played on either the harmonium or the organ, and a few were primarily intended for the former.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Saint-Saëns wrote more than forty chamber works between the 1840s and his last years. One of the first of his major works in the genre was the Piano Quintet (1855). It is a straightforward, confident piece, in a conventional structure with lively outer movements and a central movement containing two slow themes, one chorale-like and the other "cantabile". The Septet (1880), for the unusual combination of trumpet, two violins, viola, cello, double bass and piano, is a neoclassical work that draws on 17th-century French dance forms. At the time of its composition Saint-Saëns was preparing new editions of the works of baroque composers including Rameau and Lully. The "Caprice sur des airs danois et russes" (1887) for flute, oboe, clarinet and piano, and the Barcarolle in F major (1898) for violin, cello, harmonium and piano are further examples of Saint-Saëns's sometimes unorthodox instrumentation.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: In Ratner's view, the most important of Saint-Saëns's chamber works are the sonatas: two for violin, two for cello, and one each for oboe, clarinet and bassoon, all seven with piano accompaniment. The First Violin Sonata dates from 1885, and is rated by "Grove's Dictionary" as one of the composer's best and most characteristic compositions. The Second (1896) signals a stylistic change in Saint-Saëns's work, with a lighter, clearer sound for the piano, characteristic of his music from then onwards. The First Cello Sonata (1872) was written after the death of the composer's great-aunt, who had taught him to play the piano more than thirty years earlier. It is a serious work, in which the main melodic material is sustained by the cello over a virtuoso piano accompaniment. Fauré called it the only cello sonata from any country to be of any importance. The Second (1905) is in four movements, and has the unusual feature of a theme and variations as its scherzo.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: The woodwind sonatas are among the composer's last works and part of his efforts to expand the repertoire for instruments for which hardly any solo parts were written, as he confided to his friend Jean Chantavoine in a letter dated to 15 April 1921: "At the moment I am concentrating my last reserves on giving rarely considered instruments the chance to be heard." Ratner writes of them, "The spare, evocative, classical lines, haunting melodies, and superb formal structures underline these beacons of the neoclassical movement." Gallois comments that the Oboe Sonata begins like a conventional classical sonata, with an andantino theme; the central section has rich and colourful harmonies, and the molto allegro finale is full of delicacy, humour and charm with a form of tarantella. For Gallois the Clarinet Sonata is the most important of the three: he calls it "a masterpiece full of impishness, elegance and discreet lyricism" amounting to "a summary of the rest". The work contrasts a "doleful threnody" in the slow movement with the finale, which "pirouettes in 4/4 time", in a style reminiscent of the 18th century. The same commentator calls the Bassoon Sonata "a model of transparency, vitality and lightness", containing humorous touches but also moments of peaceful contemplation. Saint-Saëns also expressed an intention to write a sonata for the cor anglais, but did not do so.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: The composer's most famous work, "The Carnival of the Animals" (1887), although far from a typical chamber piece, is written for eleven players, and is considered by "Grove's Dictionary" to be part of Saint-Saëns's chamber output. "Grove" rates it as "his most brilliant comic work, parodying Offenbach, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Rossini, his own "Danse macabre" and several popular tunes". He forbade performances of it during his lifetime, concerned that its frivolity would damage his reputation as a serious composer.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Saint-Saëns was a pioneer in recorded music. In June 1904 The Gramophone Company of London sent its producer Fred Gaisberg to Paris to record Saint-Saëns as accompanist to the mezzo-soprano Meyriane Héglon in arias from "Ascanio" and "Samson et Dalila", and as soloist in his own piano music, including an arrangement of sections of the Second Piano Concerto (without orchestra). Saint-Saëns made more recordings for the company in 1919.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: In the early days of the LP record, Saint-Saëns's works were patchily represented on disc. "The Record Guide" (1955) lists one recording apiece of the Third Symphony, Second Piano Concerto and First Cello Concerto, alongside several versions of "Danse Macabre", "The Carnival of the Animals", the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso and other short orchestral works. In the latter part of the 20th century and the early 21st, many more of the composer's works were released on LP and later CD and DVD. The 2008 "Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music" contains ten pages of listings of Saint-Saëns works, including all the concertos, symphonies, symphonic poems, sonatas and quartets. Also listed are an early Mass, collections of organ music, and choral songs. A recording of twenty-seven of Saint-Saëns's "mélodies" was released in 1997.


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: With the exception of "Samson et Dalila" the operas have been sparsely represented on disc. A recording of "Henry VIII" was issued on CD and DVD in 1992. "Hélène" was released on CD in 2008. There are several recordings of "Samson et Dalilah", under conductors including Sir Colin Davis, Georges Prêtre, Daniel Barenboim and Myung-Whun Chung. In the early 2020s the Centre de musique romantique française's Bru Zane label issued new recordings of "Le Timbre d'argent" (conducted by François-Xavier Roth, 2020), "La Princesse jaune" (Leo Hussain, 2021), and "Phryné" (Hervé Niquet, 2022).


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Saint-Saëns was made a "Chevalier" of the Legion of Honour in 1867 and promoted to "Officier" in 1884, and "Grand Croix" in 1913. Foreign honours included the British Royal Victorian Order (CVO) in 1902, the Monégasque Order of Saint-Charles in 1904 and honorary doctorates from the universities of Cambridge (1893) and Oxford (1907).


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: In a short poem, "Mea culpa", published in 1890 Saint-Saëns accused himself of lack of decadence, and commented approvingly on the excessive enthusiasms of youth, lamenting that such things were not for him. An English commentator quoted the poem in 1910, observing, "His sympathies are with the young in their desire to push forward, because he has not forgotten his own youth when he championed the progressive ideals of the day." The composer sought a balance between innovation and traditional form. The critic Henry Colles, wrote, a few days after the composer's death:


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: "Grove" concludes its article on Saint-Saëns with the observation that although his works are remarkably consistent, "it cannot be said that he evolved a distinctive musical style. Rather, he defended the French tradition that threatened to be engulfed by Wagnerian influences and created the environment that nourished his successors".


title: Camille Saint-Saëns

text: Since the composer's death writers sympathetic to his music have expressed regret that he is known by the musical public for only a handful of his scores such as "The Carnival of the Animals", the Second Piano Concerto, the Third Violin Concerto, the Organ Symphony, "Samson et Dalila", "Danse macabre" and the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso. Among his large output, Nicholas singles out the Requiem, the Christmas Oratorio, the ballet "Javotte", the Piano Quartet, the Septet for trumpet, piano and strings, and the First Violin Sonata as neglected masterpieces. In 2004, the cellist Steven Isserlis said, "Saint-Saens is exactly the sort of composer who needs a festival to himself ... there are Masses, all of which are interesting. I've played all his cello music and there isn't one bad piece. His works are rewarding in every way. And he's an endlessly fascinating figure."


title: Radio Free Asia

text: Radio Free Asia (RFA) is a United States government-funded private non-profit news service that broadcasts radio programs and publishes online news, information, and commentary for its audiences in Asia. The service, which provides editorially independent reporting, has the stated mission of providing accurate and uncensored reporting to countries in Asia that have poor media environments and limited protections for press freedom and freedom of speech.


title: Radio Free Asia

text: Based on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, it was established by the US International Broadcasting Act of 1994 with the stated aim of "promoting democratic values and human rights", and countering the narrative of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as providing media reports about the North Korean government. It is funded and supervised by the U.S. Agency for Global Media (formerly Broadcasting Board of Governors), an independent agency of the United States government.


title: Radio Free Asia

text: RFA distributes content in ten Asian languages for audiences in China, North Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar.