CAMILLE SAINT-SAENS
French Pianist and Composer (1835-1921)

Camille Saint-Saens was a prolific composer of the first rank, a pianist who was greatly admired by Franz Liszt and Anton Rubinstein, the pianistic giants of the age, a botanist, geologist, archaeologist, lepidopterist, and mathematician, a poet and playwright and philosopher - he was an atheist who believed that science and art would ultimately replace religion. In short, he was a Renaissance man.

But it is as a composer that he is best known. He composed in every genre; opera, symphony; concerto, chamber music, solo piano music, and he was the first composer in history to write music specifically for a film, La Mort du duc de Guise (1908).

He was an early advocate of Richard Wagner and amazed Wagner by sight reading the full scores of several of his operas. He was a supporter of Franz Liszt and dedicated to Liszt his Third Symphony, the crowning glory of 19th century French Orchestral music. Camille Saint-Saens was called "the greatest musical mind" of the era by Hans von Bülow, the leading German conductor of the time.

But he was no diplomat. And he made no secret of his intense dislike of many of the most important French composers of his time. He hated the music of Claude Debussy, César Franck, Jules Massenet, Vincent D'Indy. And he made a most public display of walking out of the première of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps over what he called Stravinsky's "misuse" of the bassoon.

He was a melodist first and foremost and the new musical language of some of his peers must have been anathema to him. (But Massenet?) He once said of himself that melodies fell from him like apples from an apple tree. This certainly would not be said of the majority of the composers he so disliked and whose music was looking forward toward new fundamentals of music.

Saint-Saëns  Piano Concerto 2 in G minor, Op 22

In the first recording, from 1904, the composer plays an abridged solo version of the first movement.  This extraordinary document is a performance by a pianist born 180 years ago, and one is unlikely ever to have heard this music played quite in this manner.  It is a window into what the composer had in mind when he wrote the music.