Description

The error would doubtless be to expect the score of Le Timbre d’argent, Camille Saint-Saëns’s trial run in the field of opera, to present the aspect of a work planned, matured and set down on paper without any concern for the general audience to whom, by definition, delicate pleasures are a closed book. The truth is quite different, and Saint-Saëns himself detailed the vicissitudes which succeeded one another from the commission, in 1864, until the premiere, at the Théâtre National Lyrique on 23 February 1877.