![]() ![]() Her voice had been the inspiration behind Saint-Saëns’s opera Samson et Dalila – though, to his regret, she never sang it. Like many exiled Parisians, he loathed the smog, the weather and the food but he found a sympathetic milieu thanks to his friend Pauline Viardot, the great opera singer and composer, who recreated her celebrated Parisian salon while living near Marylebone High Street. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 found Camille Saint-Saëns heading for safety in London. ![]() His extensive travels took him to 27 countries, including two tours of the US in the early 1900s, as well as Russia and, even more astonishingly, Uruguay. 5 (written in Luxor) and even a discarded idea by his teenage star pupil, Gabriel Fauré, immortalised in Saint-Saëns’s popular Piano Concerto No. Nevertheless, he was something of a compositional magpie, collecting influences and novel colours the way a chef collects spices: a bit of paprika from Spain for the Havanaise for violin and orchestra, graphically Middle Eastern flavours for the ‘Egyptian’ Piano Concerto No. Throughout, Camille Saint-Saëns wrote music, as he put it, “as an apple tree grows apples”. Saint-Saëns wrote music “as an apple tree grows apples” He became, too, a legendary organist, holding the chief post at the Madeleine for two decades from 1858. ![]() With this, he would examine the stars from his Parisian rooftop, sometimes joined by his pupils from the Ecole Niedermeyer where, in his twenties, he had his only teaching job. He grew to be a true polymath, his spread of interests and expertise almost dizzying: mathematician, writer, zoologist, botanist and fossil hunter, he added astronomy to that list and once used the proceeds of some duos for harmonium and piano to commission a telescope to his own specifications. Despite a meteoric career as a child prodigy pianist – he once offered to play as an encore, from memory, any one of the 32 Beethoven sonatas – he quickly set his sights on becoming a composer. Raised by his mother and great-aunt after his father’s early death, Saint-Saëns was desperately precocious, composing his first piece aged three. ![]()
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