Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)

Piano Trio No.1 in F Major, Op. 18
Piano Trio No.2 in E Minor, Op. 92

Camille Saint-Saëns was, like Mozart and Mendelssohn, precocious in his musical talents, first shown after piano lessons from his great-aunt at the age of two and a half. He coupled with his musical interests a wide general enthusiasm for learning of all kinds, literary and scientific, and was, as a composer, to produce music of many genres during a career that spanned the second half of the nineteenth century and the first twenty-one years of the twentieth, starting in a period that knew Mendelssohn and continuing beyond the death of Debussy.

Saint-Saëns was born in Paris in 1835, the son of a clerk in the French government service, who died shortly after the birth of his only child. He was cared for by his mother and her aunt, who gave him his first piano lessons. Thereafter he studied with Camille Stamaty, a pupil of Kalkbrenner and of