Without consideration of his many admirable compositions, one should bear this in mind: in the face of difficulties, discouragement, misunderstanding, sneers, he worked steadily from his youth up, and always to the best of his ability, for righteousness in absolute music; he endeavored to introduce into French music thoughtfulness and sincerity for the advantage and the glory of the country that he dearly loved.—Philip Hale.

Many composers began as freakish children, but by any standards Saint-Saëns was an extreme case. As a two-year-old he could read and write, and was picking out melodies on the piano. Shortly after his third birthday he began composing, and by the age of five had given his first piano recital. At seven he was reading Latin, studying botany and developing what was to become an eighty-year interest in lepidoptery, (the study of butterflies and moths). As an encore after his formal debut as a concert pianist, the 10-year-old Camille offered to play any of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas from memory. In short, his childhood suggested Mozartian potential that was never realized. Saint-Saëns once remarked that he lived “in music like a fish in water” and that composing was as natural as “an apple tree producing apples.” And there lay the problem. As with Mendelssohn, the technique came so easily to him that it virtually extinguished the spark of originality.
That said, for years he was considered by many to be France’s greatest musical revolutionary, though his reputation grew more from his outspoken support for other composers’ music—especially Wagner’s—than from any work of his own. As well as promoting contemporary music, Saint-Saëns threw his energies into researching the work of his forerunners. Along with Mendelssohn, he was one of the first to reestablish the music of Bach (converting the skeptical Berlioz in the process) and he did much to restore Mozart to his rightful place, being the first to play a complete cycle of the piano concerti. Handel was another unfashionable composer to engage Saint-Saëns’ attention, and (as with Berlioz) Gluck held a fascination that lasted most of his life.
By the time Saint-Saëns reached his mid-fifties, the past had won the upper hand over the present. Embittered, ill-tempered and restless, he became the arch-traditionalist, opposing the progressive music of Debussy and Ravel, bellowing outrage at the first performance of The Rite of Spring, and yet, for all his reactionary pomposity, he was one of the first neo-classicists, embodying many of the finest traditional qualities of French music—neatness, clarity, elegance and dignity. His best epitaph is the rueful one he wrote for himself: “I ran after the chimera of purity of style and perfection of form.”