- Unlike many French composers of his own and the next generation, Saint-Saëns, for all his enthusiasm for and knowledge of Wagner's operas, was not influenced by him in his own compositions. He commented, "I admire deeply the works of Richard Wagner in spite of their bizarre character. They are superior and powerful, and that is sufficient for me. But I am not, I have never been, and I shall never be of the Wagnerian religion.".
- Saint-Saëns was a keen traveller. From the 1870s until the end of his life he made 179 trips to 27 countries. His professional engagements took him most often to Germany and England; for holidays, and to avoid Parisian winters which affected his weak chest, he favoured Algiers and various places in Egypt.
- Before he was three years old he displayed perfect pitch and enjoyed picking out tunes on the piano. His great-aunt taught him the basics of pianism, and when he was seven he became a pupil of Camille-Marie Stamaty, a former pupil of Friedrich Kalkbrenner.
- Less than two months after the christening, his father Victor Saint-Saëns died of consumption (tuberculosis) on the first anniversary of his marriage. The young Camille was taken to the country for the sake of his health, and for two years lived with a nurse at Corbeil, 29 kilometers (18 mi) to the south of Paris. When Saint-Saëns was brought back to Paris he lived with his mother and her widowed aunt, Charlotte Masson.
- His mother, well aware of her son's precocious talent, did not wish him to become famous too young. The music critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote of Saint-Saëns in 1969, "It is not generally realized that he was the most remarkable child prodigy in history, and that includes Mozart." The boy gave occasional performances for small audiences from the age of five, but it was not until he was ten that he made his official public debut, at the Salle Pleyel, in a programme that included Mozart's Piano Concerto in Bb (K450), and Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto.
- Among the musicians who were quick to spot Saint-Saëns's talent were the composers Gioachino Rossini, Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt, and the influential singer Pauline Viardot, who all encouraged him in his career.
- Despite his growing reputation as a musical reactionary, Saint-Saëns was, according to Gallois, probably the only French musician who travelled to Munich to hear the premiere of Mahler's Eighth Symphony in 1910.
- His best-known works include Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (1863), the Second Piano Concerto (1868), the First Cello Concerto (1872), Danse macabre (1874), the opera Samson and Delilah (1877), the Third Violin Concerto (1880), the Third ("Organ") Symphony (1886) and The Carnival of the Animals (1886).
- As a young man, Saint-Saëns was enthusiastic for the most modern music of the day, particularly that of Schumann, Liszt and Wagner, although his own compositions were generally within a conventional classical tradition.
- In 1848, at the age of thirteen, Saint-Saëns was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire, France's foremost music academy. The director, Daniel Auber, had succeeded Luigi Cherubini in 1842, and brought a more relaxed regime than that of his martinet predecessor, though the curriculum remained conservative. Students, even outstanding pianists like Saint-Saëns, were encouraged to specialise in organ studies, because a career as a church organist was seen to offer more opportunities than that of a solo pianist.
- Saint-Saëns was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1867 and promoted to Officier in 1884, and Grand Croix in 1913. Foreign honours included the British Royal Victorian Order (CVO) in 1902, the Monégasque Order of Saint-Charles in 1904[168] and honorary doctorates from the universities of Cambridge (1893) and Oxford (1907).
- Saint-Saëns held only one teaching post, at the École de Musique Classique et Religieuse in Paris, and remained there for less than five years. It was nevertheless important in the development of French music: his students included Gabriel Fauré, among whose own later pupils was Maurice Ravel. Both of them were strongly influenced by Saint-Saëns, whom they revered as a genius.
- He was a scholar of musical history, and remained committed to the structures worked out by earlier French composers. This brought him into conflict in his later years with composers of the impressionist and expressionist schools of music; although there were neoclassical elements in his music, foreshadowing works by Stravinsky and Les Six, he was often regarded as a reactionary in the decades around the time of his death.
- As a schoolboy Saint-Saëns was outstanding in many subjects. In addition to his musical prowess, he distinguished himself in the study of French literature, Latin and Greek, divinity, and mathematics. His interests included philosophy, archaeology and astronomy, of which, particularly the last, he remained a talented amateur in later life.
- Saint-Saëns was born in Paris, the only child of Jacques-Joseph-Victor Saint-Saëns (1798-1835), an official in the French Ministry of the Interior, and Françoise-Clémence, née Collin.
- In 1906 and 1909 he made highly successful tours of the United States, as a pianist and conductor. In New York on his second visit he premiered his "Praise ye the Lord" for double choir, orchestra and organ, which he composed for the occasion.
- He was a French composer, organist, conductor and pianist of the Romantic era.
- After studying at the Paris Conservatoire he followed a conventional career as a church organist, first at Saint-Merri, Paris and, from 1858, La Madeleine, the official church of the French Empire. After leaving the post twenty years later, he was a successful freelance pianist and composer, in demand in Europe and the Americas.
- His teacher Camille-Marie Stamaty required his students to play while resting their forearms on a bar situated in front of the keyboard, so that all the pianist's power came from the hands and fingers rather than the arms, which, Saint-Saëns later wrote, was good training.
- Saint-Saëns was a musical prodigy; he made his concert debut at the age of ten.
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