Camille Saint-Saëns
Petit, Pierre (1831-1909). Photographer, restored by Adam Cuerden, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Although many composers have been touted as child prodigies, Camille Saint-Saëns actually was one. He began piano lessons with his family at the age of 3, had perfect pitch, and started studying formally at the age of 7. At his first public concert in 1846, a 10-year-old Saint-Saëns performed works by Bach, Händel, and Mozart, and as an encore, allowed the audience to pick any one of Beethoven's thirty-two piano sonatas for him to perform from memory. He enrolled at the Paris Conservatory and soon gained a reputation as an excellent organist. After leaving the Conservatory, he met Franz Liszt, who called him the greatest organist in the world after hearing him play. Saint-Saëns remained a friend of Liszt and was a supporter of Wagner's music, taking a clear side in the program vs. absolute music debate.

In 1857, he became the principal organist at Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, a neoclassical Catholic church in Paris, where he gained renown as a performer and composer.

His support for Wagner's music aside, Saint-Saëns was a French nationalist and sought to promote a distinctively French symphonic style, in opposition to the German traditions that had dominated music for the past three centuries. The period following the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of the Second French Empire was a productive time. His symphonic work "Danse Macabre," notable both for marking the debut of the xylophone in Western music, and for the non-functional i-vii harmonic progression that underlies the melody, debuted in 1874. The following year, Saint-Saëns married a woman named Marie-Laure Truffot. They had two sons, André and Jean-François.

The next two years saw many calamities befall Saint-Saëns. His opera "Samson and Delilah," although Franz Liszt helped get it premiered in Weimar, Germany, was not a success in France. The following year, André fell out of a window and died, followed by his brother perishing of an illness a few months later. The traumatic strain this caused on their marriage caused Saint-Saëns and his wife to permanently separate.

His musical output did not decline, however, and he continued composing ballets, concerti, orchestral suites. Two of his most famous works both premiered in 1886. His colossal Organ Symphony was dedicated to the memory of Franz Liszt, who had passed away earlier that year. The programmatic "Carnival of the Animals" depicts the animals at a circus, and continued to push compositional boundaries. The "Aquarium" movement, for example, includes a transitional phrase that sequences through a series of diminished chords across all twelve tones of the chromatic scale. In 1908, Saint-Saëns also became one of the first composers to write a film score. He lived until 1921, passing away of pneumonia in Algeria at the age of 86.