
Camille Saint-Saëns
Camille Saint-Saëns: Thème varié, Op. 97
Saint-Saëns was one, if not the greatest of all music prodigies! He produced his first composition at age 3, and publicly performed a Beethoven violin sonata at age 4. In a legendary concert at the Salle Pleyel, and at the tender age of 10, he offered to play as an encore any of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas from memory! Hector Berlioz famously said of him, “He knows everything but lacks inexperience.” Saint-Saëns was a piano virtuoso of the highest caliber, and he transferred his bravura brilliance as a performer into a substantial number of works for that instrument. However, his steadfast dedication to musical moderation, logic, clarity, balance and precision deservedly earned him the nickname “the French Beethoven.” Or as we might deduce from the masterly and complex character studies of his Six Fugues, Op. 161, he might as easily have been called “the French Mendelssohn.”
Camille Saint-Saëns: Six Fugues, Op. 161

Camille Saint-Saëns at the piano, 1916
Camille Saint-Saëns: Valse canariote in A Minor, Op. 88
Valse mignonne in E-Flat Major, Op. 104
Valse nonchalante in D-Flat Major, Op. 110
Valse langoureuse in E Major, Op. 120
Valse gaie, Op. 139
Saint-Saëns was certainly an excellent craftsman with a fine sense of musical style. And although he was considered old-fashioned in his late life, he explored many new forms and reinvigorated some older ones. Among them was the revival of the piano suite, a genre that sprung back to life during celebrations of the centenary of Rameau‘s death in the composer’s hometown of Dijon. Saint-Saëns, who was one of the featured attractions of that festival, devoted an entire concert program to the composer, and he later edited the first volume of the complete Rameau edition. In his own suite compositions, the piano writing becomes more linear and less heavy, and the venerated genre is projected through a 19th century harmonic lens. Deeply inspired by French classicism, Saint-Saëns compositional approach made him an important forerunner of the neoclassicism practices of Ravel and others.
Camille Saint-Saëns: Suite pour le piano, Op. 90