Saint-Saens, Camille

Camille Saint-Saëns was a French composer, organist, conductor, and pianist of the Romantic era, born on October 9, 1835, in Paris1. He is best known for his symphonic poems, the opera “Samson et Dalila,” and the orchestral piece “The Carnival of the Animals.” Saint-Saëns was a musical prodigy, making his concert debut at the age of ten. After studying at the Paris Conservatoire, he became a church organist and later a successful freelance pianist and composer.

Saint-Saëns was enthusiastic for the most modern music of his time, particularly that of Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner. His own compositions were generally within a conventional classical tradition, but he was also a scholar of musical history and remained committed to the structures worked out by earlier French composers1. This sometimes brought him into conflict with composers of the impressionist and expressionist schools of music in his later years.

He held only one teaching post at the École de Musique Classique et Religieuse in Paris and remained there for less than five years. However, it was an important institution in the development of French music, with his students including Gabriel Fauré1. Saint-Saëns’s influence on later composers is widely recognized, and he is revered as a genius by many.