Camille Saint-Saëns

Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns made his concert debut at ten, studied at the Paris Conservatoire, and settled into twenty years as organist at La Madeleine, the official church of the French Empire. He left in 1877 - the year his opera Samson and Delilah premiered - and spent the rest of his life as a freelance pianist and composer touring Europe and the Americas. His catalog from the 1860s through 1886 includes the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, the Second Piano Concerto, the First Cello Concerto, Danse macabre, the Third Violin Concerto, the Third Symphony, and The Carnival of the Animals. As a young man he championed Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner, but his own work stayed within classical structures inherited from earlier French composers. That conservatism turned him into a target: by his final years the impressionists and expressionists saw him as a reactionary, even though neoclassical elements in his music foreshadowed Stravinsky and Les Six. He taught for less than five years at the École Niedermeyer, but his students included Gabriel Fauré, who taught Maurice Ravel - both revered Saint-Saëns as a genius long after the broader world had moved on.