Germanic influences

Camille Saint-Saëns’s very first piano quartet, composed at the age of eighteen, remained unpublished until the 1990s. Some believe that the score was too close to its Germanic models for the champion of French music to consider it worthy of appearing in his catalogue. The influence of Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann is indeed noticeable, but not surprising: they were the principal composers of piano quartets performed in Paris in the 1850s. When the young Tournemire approached the same genre (in 1899), the shadow of another Germanic figure hovered over his work: Richard Wagner.