Biography
Camille Saint-Saëns' yearn life spanned about a entire duration of the Romantic period of music. He was a portion of a efflorescence of the movement & found its dying & the dawn of 20th-century music.

Child Prodigy
Saint-Saëns was natural within Paris to a government clerk world health organization died sole threesome months when his boy's birth. His mother, Clémence, sought a help of her aunty, Charlotte Masson, world health organization moved around & introduced Camille to the piano. One of a virtually all gifted musical child prodigies of all period, he experienced perfect pitch and began piano lessons with his dandy-grandaunt at both years old, so nearly immediately began composing. His number one composition, a bit piece for the piano dated 22 March 1839, is now saved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Saint-Saëns' precocity was non limited to music; he may review & write per instance he was trine, & experienced learned Latin four years later.

His number one soft recital was given at age 5, whenever he accompanied the Beethoven violin sonata. He went within to lead off in-depth survey of the fully score of Don Giovanni. Inside 1842, Saint-Stheëns began piano lessons with Camille-Marie Stamaty, a pupil of Friedrich Kalkbrenner, who got his students play the piano when resting their forearms in a bar placed before of the keyboard, therefore that all the piano player's power come from either a h& & fingers and non a arms. At tenner years aged, Saint-Saëns gave his debut public recital at a Salle Pleyel, playing Mozart's PiaThere are no Concerto No. Xv within B-flat major (K. 450), and various pieces by Handel, Kalkbrenner, Hummel, and Bach. As an encore, Saint-Saëns offered to play any of the thirty-2 Beethoven piano sonatas from either memory. Word of this unbelievable concert spread through Europe and even to America, appearing in the Boston newspaper.

In the late 1840s, Saint-Saëns entered the Paris Conservatory, where he exposed organ & composition, a latter under Jacques Halévy. Saint-Saëns won numerous top prizes, however he failed to win a prestigious Prix de Rome in both 1852 and 1864. A reputation these awards garnered him resulted within his introduction to Franz Liszt, who became one of his nighest friends. At a age of 16, Saint-Saëns wrote his 1st symphony; his second, published when a Symphony There are no. I inside E-flat major, was performed around 1853 to the astonishment of numbers of critics & fellow composers. Hector Berlioz, who became one of Saint-Saëns' serious friends, famously commented, "Il sait tout, mais il manque d'inexpéience" ("He knows everything, but lacks inexperience").

Middle Years
For income, Saint-Saëns worked swimming a organ at various churches in Paris. Around 1857, he replaced Lefébure-Wely at a eminent position of organist at the Église de la Madeleine, which he kept until 1877. His hebdomadally improvisations stunned the Parisian public & earned Liszt's 1866 observation that Saint-Saëns was the greatest organist in the globe.

From either 1861 to 1865, Saint-Saëns held his only teaching position when prof of piano at a École Niedermeyer, in which he raised brow by including contemporary music—Liszt, Gounod, Schumann, Berlioz, and Wagner—along with a school's otherwise conservative programme of Bach & Mozart. His virtually all successful students at a Niedermeyer were André Messager and Gabriel Fauré, who was Saint-Saëns' favorite pupil & presently his nighest friend.

Saint-Stheëns was a multi-multifarious intellect. From either an early age, he exposed geology, archaeology, botany, and lepidoptery. He was renowned at mathematics. Late, additionally to composing, performing, & writing musical criticism, he held discussions sustaining Europe's finest man of science & wrote scholarly articles in acoustics, occult sciences, Roman theatre decoration, and ancient instruments. He wrote the philosophical work, Problèmes et Mystères, which spoke of science and art replacing religion; Saint-Saëns' pessimistic and atheistic ideas foreshadowed Existentialism. More literary accomplishment involved Rimes familières, the volume of poetry, and La Crampe des écrivains, the successful farcical play. He was as well the member of the Astronomical Society of France; he gave lectures in mirages, had the telescope made to his own specifications, & potentially aforethought concerts to correspond to astronomic cases like solar eclipses.

Within 1870, Saint-Saëns was conscripted into the National Guard to fight in the Franco-Prussian War, which, though over around barely sise months, left an unerasable mark on the composer. Within 1871, he co-founded (with Romain Bussine) the Société Nationale de Musique in order to promote a fresh & specifically French music. Fallowing a fall of the Paris Commune, the Society premiered works by members rather Fauré, César Franck, Édouard Lalo, and Saint-Saëns himself, world health organization served when a society's co-president. inside that way, Saint-Saëns became a mighty figure in shaping the new of French music.

Around 1875, Saint-Saëns married Marie-Laure Truffot & it experienced 2 babies, André and Jean-François, world health organization died inside captawithin hicks weeks of every more in 1878. Saint-Saëns left his married woman triad years late. Them never divorced, however lived a rest of their experiences apart from either a single a second. It has been suggested that Saint-Saëns was taking part inside homosexual relationships later inside life, though grounds to believe of this is largely circumstantial. In existence accused of at the social occasion, he is reported to develop countered "Je ne suis pas homosexuel, je suis pédéraste!"

Later Years
1886 brought two of Saint-Saëns' virtually all notable compositions: Le Carnaval des Animaux and his third symphony, dedicated to Franz Liszt who had died that year. That equivalent season, notwithstanding, Vincent d'Indy and his allies had Saint-Saëns removed from the Société Nationale de Musique. Both years late, Saint-Saëns' mother died, camping a sorrowing composer out of France to the Canary Islands with the assumed name Sannois. All over a next many years he travelled the world, camping exotic locations within Europe, North Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America. Saint-Saëns chronicled his travels around numbers of popular books written under a Sannois title.

Saint-Saëns continued to write of musical, scientific, & historical topics, often travelling prior to spending his go years inside Algiers, Algeria. Within recognition of his accomplishments, a food and drug administration of France awarded him the Legion of Honour.

Camille Saint-Saëns died of pneumonia in 16 December 1921, at the Hôtefifty delaware l'Oasis inside Algiers. His system was brought back to Paris for the state funeral at La Madeleine & was buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.

Legacy
Relationships to other composers
In the period of his life, Saint-Stheëns was either a friend or even enemy to Europe's virtually all distinguished musicians. He stayed about Franz Liszt until Liszt's dying & maintained a convenient friendly relationship sustaining his pupil Gabriel Fauré until the prevent of his life. However despite existence the harfive hundred advocate for French music, Saint-Saëns openly detested numerous of his fellow French composers like Franck, d'Indy, & Jules Massenet. Saint-Saëns besides despised a music of Claude Debussy; he is reported to have told Pierre Lalo, "I have stayed in Paris to speak ill of Pelléas et Mélisande." The household animus was reciprocal; Debussy quipped: "I have a horror of a sentimentality and I cannot forget its name is Saint-Saëns." In more occasions, notwithstanding, Debussy likewise acknowledged an admiration for Saint-Saëns' musical talents.

Saint-Saëns experienced been an early champion of Richard Wagner's music within France, teaching his pieces in a period of his tenure at a École Niedermeyer & premiering the March from either Tannhäuser. He got stunned potentially Wagner himself while he sight-read the entire orchestral scores of Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, and Siegfried, prompting Hans von Bülow to call him "the greatest musical mind" of the era. Notwithstanding, despite admitting appreciation for the power of Wagner's act, Saint-Saëns rebelliously stated that he was non an aficionado. Inside 1886, Saint-Saëns was punished for some particularly coarse & anti-German comments on the Paris production of Lohengrin by losing engagements and getting blackball reviews throughout Germany. Late, fallowing World War I, Saint-Saëns angered both French & Germans sustaining his inflammatory articles entitled Germanophilie, which ruthlessly attacked Wagner.

In 29 May 1913, Saint-Saëns famously stormed out of a première of Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring), allegedly infuriated across a abuse of the bassoon in the ballet's opening blocks.

Reputation

Saint-Saëns began his musical career as a musical pioneer, introducing France to the symphonic poem & championing a radical works of Liszt & Wagner around the period after Bach and Mozart were the norms. He experienced been a embodiment of artistic modernness when you took a 1850s and 1860s, but presently transformed himself into the crusty & somewhat bitterly reactionary. Per sunup of the 20th century, Saint-Saëns was an ultra-conservative, fighting a influence of Debussy & Richard Strauss. This is hardly surprising—Saint-Saëns' career began when Chopin and Mendelssohn were in their prime, and terminated at a commencement of the Jazz Age; but these are this ornery image that lives.

As a composer, Saint-Saëns has universally bordered on the edge of obscurity. He is slightingly known now when "the greatest second-rate composer" & "the greatest composer who was not a genius". He is remembered in the main for his popular however critically abortive works like Samson et Dalila and Le Carnaval des Animaux.

Music

Style

Saint-Saëns a composer is widely regarded when writing music that is elegant & technically unflawed, however typically uninspired. His works keep close at h& been known as logical & uninfected, polished, sales person, and never excessive. His soft music, spell non when deep or even when challenging when a few of his coeval, forms a stylistic connection between Liszt & Ravel. Though within late life Saint-Saëns wwhen thought of when old-fashioned, he experienced explored several recently forms too as reinvigorated older ones. His compositions come strongly fixed in the Authoritative tradition, & the bit of assume him to become a forerunner of Neoclassicism.

Around performance, Saint-Saëns is said to own been "unequalled on the organ", & rivaled just by two or three on the soft—Liszt himself is reported to use at times thought that Saint-Saëns & himself were them better piano player within Europe. Notwithstanding, Saint-Saëns' concert style was restrained, subtle, & cool; he sat unmoving at a piano. His swimming was marked by inordinately possibly scales & passagework, wonderful speed, & aristocratical filtration. A recordings he left at a prevent of his life give glimpses one traits. He was typically charged using existence reserved & business-prefer, then he was less memorable than other more magnetic performing artist. He was probably the number 1 piano player to publicly perform a period of all the Mozart piano concertos. Around a select few events these influenced his have soft concertos; for instance, a 1st movement of his 4th soft concerto, around C Minor, strongly resembles a go movement of Mozart's 24th Concerto, which is in the same key. Successively, his keep around concertos have appeared to influence victims of Sergei Rachmaninoff and other late Romanticistic composers. Throughout his life, Saint-Saëns continued to play by having a system taught to him by Stamaty, which saved a performing nature & severity in a hand and non a arm, then the recordings he mass produced in the 1910s are remarkable in that a single could hear a pianistic system of Kalkbrenner, which predates Chopin.

Musical Works

Understand: List of compositions by Camille Saint-Saëns

Saint-Saëns' 86 years provided him by owning instance to write hundreds of compositions; in the period of his yearn career, he wrote several dramatic works, including four symphonic poems, and 13 operas, of which Samson et Dalila and a symphonic poem Danse Macabre are among his most famous. All told, he composed all over 3 hundred works & was a number 1 major composer to write music specifically for the cinema, for Henri Lavedan's film ''50'Assassinat du Duc de Guise''.

Inside 1886 he wrote his Symphony No. 3, "avec orgue" ("with organ"), perhaps the most famous of all his works. Assisted by monumental symphonious organs built inside France by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, at that time the world's first organ builder, this act particularly is immersed in the spirit of "gigantism" of the anxious 19th century, along with a Eiffel Tower, the Universal Exposition at Paris and the beginning of the "belle époque". A Maestoso of the quaternary movement is clearly an expression of the confidence of the European human around himself, around his technology, his science, his "age of reason" (somewhat ironically, a melody wwhen late utilized as a basis for the theme music of the vastly popular film Babe). He wwhen oftentimes known as as "the most German composer of all the French composers", perhaps due to his todays skills exhibited in the construction of melodic passages.

Too inside 1886, Saint-Saëns completed Le Carnaval des Animaux, which was first performed in 9 March. Despite a function's outstanding popularity in todays world, Saint-Saëns forbade complete performances of it shortly fletting its première, allowing merely a single movement, "Le Cygne" ("The Swan"), the piece for cello and piano, to be published around his life-time. A piece was written as a rather musical jest, & Saint-Saëns believed it would damage his "serious" reputation.

Saint-Saëns besides wrote captain hicks preludes and fugues for organ, three around op. 99 & 3 inside op. 109, a virtually all performed of which is the Prelude & Fugue around E flat major, op. 99, there are no. Terzetto.