Camille Saint-Saëns

Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns, born on 9 October 1835, was a French composer, organist, conductor, and pianist of the Romantic era whose best-known works include Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, the Second Piano Concerto, Danse macabre, the opera Samson and Delilah, the Organ Symphony, and The Carnival of the Animals. A prodigy who gave his first concert at ten, he trained at the Paris Conservatoire and served as a church organist, first at Saint-Merri and from 1858 at La Madeleine, leaving after two decades to work as a sought-after freelance pianist and composer across Europe and the Americas. Enthusiastic in youth for Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner, he nonetheless composed within classical structures and, as a scholar of French musical tradition, came into conflict with impressionist and expressionist contemporaries. His single teaching post, at the École Niedermeyer, lasted under five years but proved consequential: his pupils included Gabriel Fauré, whose own student Maurice Ravel likewise revered him. He died on 16 December 1921.