Camille Saint-Saëns: Fagottsonate, Op.168

Following the sonatas for oboe and clarinet, the bassoon sonata is the last of the compositions for wind from 1921, the year of Saint-Saëns’ death. He did not have a chance to write the sonata for cor anglais he had planned. The humorous, technically not very demanding work hardly shows that the composer was not particularly well acquainted with the instrument. In a letter he admitted to his publisher that he had preferred to check a school to confirm the range of the bassoon at a high passage. However, trial runs with the subsequent dedicatee Léon Letellier went extremely well for both parties. The autograph was made available for the first time for the publication of our Urtext edition.