Camille Saint-Saëns devoted himself mainly to the composition of instrumental music.

Along with
César Franck he was one of the most significant French composer in the period after Berlioz. The
wind sonatas were written shortly before Saint-Saëns’ death in 1921, with the bassoon sonata
being composed last. Inspired by the three chamber sonatas of Debussy, Saint-Saëns displays
the full maturity of his compositional style and the culmination of his technical refinement. The
piano part is economical, the wind part singable, the harmony simply laid out. This sonata is one
of the greatest ever written for bassoon, demonstrating its many assets in a truly French way.

Allegro moderato - The piano opens with a bed of cascading descending arpeggios allowing for
the bassoon melody to simply float upon it. This movement is the shortest of the three but
manages to capture sonata form in its most refined state. The development section is brief and
achieves the desired tension in such a short space of time by its modulation to Db major, a tritone
away from the tonic G major and thus the most harmonically tense. The recapitulation also
includes a short of cadenza passage and slowly fades away into the ascent towards a high B.

Allegro scherzando - In this rondo, Saint-Saëns moves to the relative minor of our opening key, E
minor. The movement can simply be described as a show piece of shorts. It makes use of the
bassoons ability for large jumps in rapid succession, swirling runs and intricate figurations. In this
rondo Saint-Saëns maintains interest by the alteration of the theme every time it comes back
between episodes. Listen out for the chromatic ascending scale to a high E at the end of the
movement, pushing the limits of the bassoon’s range as is typical of French writing due to the
French bassoon having greater facility in the extreme register.

Molto adagio - Allegro moderato - The final movement of the sonata is a quasi two movement
movement with the Allegro moderato acting as an extended coda for the whole sonata but comes
across as a separate movement to the ear. The addition of the coda section is logical as the third
movement is marked motto adagio and displays the bassoon lyrical and dramatic quality, which is
atypical for a final movement of a sonata. The Allegro moderato is in the style of a fanfare and like
the second movement displays more virtuosic aspects of the bassoon. The third movement
overall has the most interesting harmonic colouring in the work.