Poor Saint-Saëns! He was blessed from childhood with a polished facility of utterance that made most of his fellow composers (Ravel excepted) seem like hysterical tyros by comparison. But somehow, even at the apex of his renown, Camille Saint-Saëns remained eminently patronizable. Just how high his repute was during this century’s early decades, within France above all, bears remembering. Saint-Saëns—he died in 1921, having exercised his creativity for a record-breaking eighty-two years—lived to see a statue of himself unveiled at Dieppe, outside a museum that displayed, to edify pilgrims, such relics as his great-aunt’s pin-cushion. Gounod called him in complete seriousness “the French Beethoven.” The novelist Camille Mauclair likened Saint-Saëns’s artistic achievements to Racine’s; in 1919 a Parisian critic, Jean Montargis, ranked Saint-Saëns alongside Berlioz and Rameau as one of France’s three greatest musicians; and French peasant women with more piety than literacy mistook cigarette cards containing Saint-Saëns’s portrait for holy pictures of a saint called Saëns.

Yet the more tributes officialdom heaped on him (these included the Legion of Honor, the German Order of Merit, doctorates from Oxford and Cambridge, and a request—which he declined—to write Turkey’s national anthem), the more his detractors scorned him as the musical equivalent of an artiste pompier. Romain Rolland confided to his diary in 1907 that Saint-Saëns’s “music hasn’t the slightest interest … one can talk for hours, among musicians, of French music without even thinking of pronouncing the name of Saint-Saëns.” Ravel, nine years later, was much more pert: