“I produce music as an apple tree produces apples.” Camille Saint-Saëns’ life spanned more than eight decades and his musical harvest was rich. Born in 1835, he showed immense early talent, making his official public debut at the Salle Pleyel at the age of just ten, performing concertos by Beethoven and that other famous prodigy, Mozart. Indeed, the American critic Harold C Schonberg described him as “the most remarkable child prodigy in history, and that includes Mozart”. As a composer, Saint-Saëns was a classicist – his musical gods were Bach and Mozart – but there’s a crispness about his writing that still feels remarkably fresh.
Listen to the charming Tarantelle for flute and clarinet, composed in 1857 and presented by Rossini, no less, at one of his musical soirées in Paris. The audience acclaimed the work, assuming it to be by Rossini himself, who lapped up the praise before revealing that the composer was actually the young pianist.
Saint-Saëns was a young pioneer, the first Frenchman to compose piano concertos as well as writing symphonies at a time when they were regarded with suspicion in France (too Germanic a form for fashionable Parisian tastes). His chamber music influenced later composers such as Fauré and Ravel. Saint-Saëns was also a polymath, a student of astronomy and archaeology, and a keen traveller, often visiting north Africa during the winter months. In 1870 he co-founded the Société nationale de musique, with the aim of promoting French music, although he was forced out by Vincent d’Indy in 1886 when he objected to proposals to open up the society to non-French music and musicians.
By the time he reached his dotage, Saint-Saëns was seen as a reactionary, his music doggedly conservative. And yet he embraced new forms and technologies, making early piano roll recordings such as his improvisations on a theme from his most famous opera, Samson et Dalila (above), and even composing what is often cited as the first original score for a silent film, L'Assassinat du duc de Guise (1908, below).
Saint-Saëns remained active as a composer, the sonatas for oboe, clarinet and bassoon all written in his final year of his long life. But here are our top ten works you really should know.
1Symphony no. 3 in C minor, “Organ”
Saint-Saëns final symphony – his fifth (two earlier ones are unnumbered) – includes an obbligato organ part, initially quite subtle, but then making its full effect in the finale. That Maestoso finale is a gloriously uplifting theme, decorated with rippling piano four-hands. The theme gained enormous popularity when used in the 1995 film Babe.
2Samson et Dalila
Saint-Saëns composed 13 operas, but only his biblical blockbuster Samson et Dalila is performed with anything approaching regularity. There are places where it feels more oratorio than opera – particularly the choral sections of Act 1 – but the Philistines’ bacchanale is suitably wild and Dalila’s Act 2 aria “Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix” is deeply seductive, especially when sung by Elīna Garanča…
But let’s not miss the Bacchanale!
3Danse macabre
This famous tone poem, with death scraping out a brooding melody on the violin at midnight, started life as a song composed to a text by Henri Cazalis. Its waltz theme is infectious and Saint-Saëns added xylophones to his orchestration to depict rattling bones (which he would later mimic in the Fossils section of The Carnival of the Animals).