sonatas for a variety of instruments, incidental music, chamber music, songs, masses, choral works, and works for piano and organ. As a Romantic composer, Saint-Saëns’s outlook was frequently akin to that of Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Brahms, strongly routed in the eighteenth-century Viennese tradition established by Haydn and Mozart. As Sabrina Teller Ratner writes, “Like Mozart, to whom he was often compared, [Saint-Saëns] was a brilliant craftsman, versatile and prolific, who contributed to every genre of French music . . . He was one of the leaders of the French musical renaissance of the 1870s. ”In the early days of 1871, Saint-Saëns’s great aunt, first piano teacher, and “second mother,” Charlotte, died at the age of ninety-one. Reeling from the unexpectedness of her death and from the loss of a trusted counselor, the composer canceled all concerts for a month. The Sonata in C Minor and the Concerto in A Minor, both for cello, were written in the aftermath of this loss. During this period in the 1870s, Saint-Saëns was working to write music that sounded new, while simultaneously trying to recreate and maintain a French national style based on historic precedents. It should not therefore surprise us that the Cello Concerto in A Minor should evince, on the one hand, avant garde or progressive features and, on the other hand, “neoclassical” or reactionary features. Formally, the piece is progressive. Traditional large-scale structure for a concerto includes three movements, usually fast-slow-fast. The Cello Concerto in A Minor is reduced to a single movement in sonata form, but that form itself is altered. The usual sonata sequence of Exposition—Development—Recapitulation becomes here Exposition— Development—Allegretto-Minuet—Recapitulation. The Allegretto-Minuet is the strikingly reactionary feature of the work. Stephen Stubbs description of the concerto is revealing: The chief hallmark . . . of the concerto is melodic abundance. Wealth of melody combined with a lack of formal correctness . . . gives the concerto the character more of a concert fantasy, and it is no surprise that it came to be referred to . . . as a concert piece . . . The listener has the impression less of a shape than of a succession of themes and moods, a kind of musical tableau . . . The cello concerto provides an unusual case of content outweighing form. But that does not prevent it from being one of Saint-Saëns’s most appealing works. He achieves a satisfying balance between soloist and orchestra, and the haunting otherworldliness that characterizes so many of his melodies is here strongly felt . . . The allegretto, which in piano reduction came to be a favorite salon piece in its own right, is a delicate minuet on muted staccato strings that suggests the ghostly evocation of an eighteenth-century drawing room . . . If Saint-Saëns was here thinking of his beloved great-aunt and the oft-recounted days of her youth, it is a touchingly dainty tribute to her memory. 23