Camille Saint-Saëns

Camille Saint-Saëns was a French composer, organist, conductor and pianist of the Romantic era who made his concert debut at the age of ten. After studying at the Paris Conservatoire he was a church organist, from 1858 at La Madeleine, the official church of the French Empire, and later a freelance pianist and composer in Europe and the Americas. His works include Danse macabre (1874), the opera Samson and Delilah (1877), the Third (Organ) Symphony (1886) and The Carnival of the Animals (1886). At the École Niedermeyer he taught Gabriel Fauré; committed to classical structures, he was often regarded as a reactionary late in life, and he died in Algiers in 1921.