Camille Saint Saens - Essay Example

Camille Saint-Saens was a French composer, conductor, and pianist famous for combining many genres of music like, concerto, symphonies, and opera (Cummings). Regarded as one of those rare and gifted prodigies, Saint-Saens, learned to play the piano from his aunt when he was only two and a half years old and composed his first piece when he was three. Studying composition with Pierre Maledin, he went on to give a concert with “Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto and Mozart's B flat Concerto, K. 460” at the age of ten (Cummings).

Later studying at the Conservatoire de Paris, he wrote his first symphony when he was sixteen. His intelligence wasn’t just limited to music, for he excelled in such fields as geology, astronomy, and mathematics. Some of Saint-Saens famous works include the “Piano Concerto No. 2, Symphony No. 3 ("Organ"), and most noteworthy The Carnival of The Animals which he dedicated to close friend Franz Liszt (Cummings). Throughout his life, he produced a variety of expressive and dramatic works including poems, operas, and symphonies.

In 1908 Saint-Saens had the honor of being the first composer to write a musical piece for the motion picture The Assassination of the Duke of Guise (Cummings). Inspired by French Classicism, he was especially brilliant at composing piano music like the Variations on a Theme by Beethoven and the Scherzo. His married life proved to be a great tragedy with the death of both of his children. During this lonesome period he produced some of his best works like Danse macabre in 1875 and Samson et Dalila in 1878 (Cummings).

Saint-Saens was also very close to his mother and upon her death succumbed to an even lonelier and depressed stage of his life. After this he took to traveling and writing music about exotic places like Algeria and Egypt producing works like Africa and his Piano Concerto No. 5, the "Egyptian" (Cummings). While his stylistic techniques in later years were regarded with less enthusiasm and appeal by the French, Saint-Saens was “hailed as France's greatest living composer” in both England and the U.S. (Cummings).

Having lived the last few years of his life as a loner, the accomplished, French composer, died in 1921 in Algeria. Works Cited Cummings, Robert. Biography of Camille Saint-Saёns. saintsaens.com. Web. 26 Apr. 2011