Composer Spotlight: Camille Saint-Saëns
Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns (October 9, 1835 – December 16, 1921) was a French composer, organist, pianist, and conductor. His best-known works—Danse macabre (1874), the opera Samson and Delilah (1877), Symphony No. 3 in C minor (“Organ Symphony”, 1886) and The Carnival of the Animals (1886)—are widely played and loved, but those pieces represent but a small sampling. Because Saint-Saëns wrote his first piece shortly after his third birthday and was still composing a year before his death at the age of 86, the number of works he racked up during his lifetime is remarkable. The prolific composer created nearly 400 works that spanned a wide range of genres, including symphonies, tone poems, concertos, and operas. Besides the conventional compositions, Saint-Saëns wrote the first significant score by a major composer for the fledgling art of the cinema (L’assassinat du duc de Guise, 1908).
New York Times music critic Richard Alrich, memorializing Saint-Saën in an article published nine days after the composer’s death, described him as a “fertile and unwearied composer” and “one of the most impressive figures in the world of music for the qualities he possessed (and) for the work he had done.”
Young Saint-Saëns was a musical prodigy. At the age of ten, he made his concert debut playing a full-scale Mozart piano concerto. After studying at the Paris Conservatoire, Saint-Saëns was appointed in 1858 to France’s most prestigious organ post, that of the La Madeleine in Paris. He remained there for nearly two decades, developing his legendary gift for improvisation. In 1871, at the age of 36, Saint-Saëns was the driving force behind the new Société Nationale de Musique, formed to promote a characteristic national music and introduce French composers, one of France’s cultural responses to its defeat in the previous year’s Franco-Prussian War.
In contrast to his professional success, Saint-Saëns’s personal life became one of suffering. Tragically, both sons died young and within six weeks of each other—one from illness and the other falling from a four-story window. Blaming his young wife for the accident, Saint-Saëns left her. The death of Saint-Saëns’s mother in 1888 caused another emotional blow, driving the composer into prolonged mourning. Unable to face living in the family apartment, Saint-Saëns traveled widely and became increasingly bitter and misanthropic. He died in Algiers at the age of 86 and was given a state funeral at La Madeleine.
EXTRA CREDIT READING #1: Apart from his exceptional skills as a musician—virtuoso pianist and organist, composer, conductor, and distinguished pedagogue—Saint-Saëns demonstrated talents in a variety of disciplines. He wrote with authority on science, mathematics, and archaeology. He was a multi-linguist, poet, playwright and essayist on botany and ancient music. A favorite “spare time” discipline was astronomy. Saint-Saëns planned concerts to coincide with major astronomical events and became a member of the Astronomical Society of France.
EXTRA CREDIT READING #2: Saint-Saëns traveled extensively, visiting every continent except Australia and Antarctica. Most frequently, he traveled to Algeria. He chronicled his travels in several popular books under the pseudonym, “Sannois.”
Learn more about our upcoming Dueling Keyboards concert on October 25, 2024.