Composers Datebook

He was dubbed the "French Beethoven," and like Ludwig van, was famous as both a composer and a pianist. Camille Saint-Saëns was born in Paris in 1835, and died on today's date, at the age of 86, in 1921. The death date seems rather fitting, in a macabre sort of way, since December 16th is also the date we celebrate as Beethoven's birthday. And imagine, if you will, the 10-year old Saint-Saens making his formal debut as a pianist at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, first performing a concerto by Beethoven, then, as an encore, offering to play any one of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas—from memory! Saint-Saens's keyboard skills were legendary. An early admirer of Wagner, Saint-Saens once amazed that composer by playing entire scores of his operas at sight. Berlioz, another admirer, once quipped that Saint-Saens: "knows everything but lacks inexperience." In addition to music, Saint-Saens was fascinated by mathematics, astronomy, and the natural sciences. As a young boy he collected fossils that he dug out himself from the stone quarries at Meudon. Maybe that experience inspired him years later to add a movement titled "fossils" to his "Carnival of the Animals," a chamber work he wrote as a private joke in 1886. Saint-Saens forbade its publication during his lifetime, and probably would have been appalled that this flippant work—and not his more serious symphonies or sonatas—has become his best-known and best-loved work.