Charles-Camille Saint-Saens (French: [SaRl kamij sesas]; 9 October 1835 - 16 December 1921) was a French composer, organist, conductor and pianist of the Romantic era. 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). Saint-Saens was a musical prodigy, making his concert debut at the age of ten.

In the early years of the 20th century, the anonymous author of the article on Saint-Saens in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians wrote:  Saint-Saens is a consummate master of composition, and no one possesses a more profound knowledge than he does of the secrets and resources of the art; but the creative faculty does not keep pace with the technical skill of the workman. His incomparable talent for orchestration enables him to give relief to ideas which would otherwise be crude and mediocre in themselves ... his works are on the one hand not frivolous enough to become popular in the widest sense, nor on the other do they take hold of the public by that sincerity and warmth of feeling which is so convincing.  Although a keen modernist in his youth, Saint-Saens was always deeply aware of the great masters of the past. In a profile of him written to mark his eightieth birthday, the critic D C Parker wrote, "That Saint-Saens knows Rameau ... Bach and Handel, Haydn and Mozart, must be manifest to all who are familiar with his writings. His love for the classical giants and his sympathy with them form, so to speak, the foundation of his art."  Less attracted than some of his French contemporaries to the continuous stream of music popularised by Wagner, Saint-Saens often favoured self-contained melodies. Though they are frequently, in Ratner's phrase, "supple and pliable", more often than not they are constructed in three- or four-bar sections, and the "phrase pattern AABB is characteristic". An occasional tendency to neoclassicism, influenced by his study of French baroque music, is in contrast with the colourful orchestral music more widely identified with him. Grove observes that he makes his effects more by characterful harmony and rhythms than by extravagant scoring. In both of those areas of his craft he was normally content with the familiar. Rhythmically, he inclined to standard double, triple or compound metres (although Grove points to a 5/4 passage in the Piano Trio and another in 7/4 in the Polonaise for two pianos). From his time at the Conservatoire he was a master of counterpoint; contrapuntal passages crop up, seemingly naturally, in many of his works.

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