Camille Saint-Saëns

A work in which hands honed by organ playing and sheer wit collide within a single concerto.

• The first movement opens with a solemn, Bach-like introduction before suddenly drifting into a free cadenza (a passage where the soloist improvises alone) — this dramatic shift compresses the character of the entire work into a single moment.
• It is said to have been completed in just seventeen days, though the exact length of composition varies slightly from biography to biography.
• The final movement races breathlessly along in the rhythm of a tarantella (a fast dance in 6/8 time from southern Italy), and pianists widely describe it as demanding enough to strain the wrist.
• The pianist Zygmunt Stojowski is said to have joked that the concerto "begins with Bach and ends with Offenbach," and hearing the gap between the weight of the first movement and the lighthearted commotion of the final one, the remark hardly feels like an exaggeration.

Born of his friendship with the violinist Sarasate, it is a brief but brilliant crystallization of virtuosity.

• The slow introduction has the violin singing alone, almost as if sighing, foreshadowing the tension of the entire piece.
• The rondo (a form in which the same theme returns again and again) borrows Spanish-flavored rhythms, written with the virtuosity of its dedicatee, the Spanish violinist Pablo de Sarasate, in mind.
• Rapid double stopping (bowing two strings at once) and left-hand pizzicato (plucking the strings with the fingers) follow one after another, making it one of the pieces violinists most prize as a showcase of technique.
• The accelerating rush toward the end is considered a passage in which the performer cannot afford to relax the tension until the very last note.

A work steeped in the dark, impassioned air of the period just after the defeat.

• Unlike most concertos, there is no orchestral introduction; the solo cello plunges in passionately from the very first note.
• The three movements are joined without pause into a single continuous structure, so the slow middle movement slips in like a brief, breath-catching waltz.
• Cellists often say that the accuracy of the rapid, bouncing-bow passages determines whether a performance succeeds or fails.
• The dark, impassioned mood running through the whole work is often linked to the atmosphere of the period just after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

His most famous orchestral work, depicting death and fate as a dance mixing humor and horror.

• The piece opens with the harp striking twelve bell-tolls to announce midnight.
• The solo violin uses scordatura, tuning one string a half step lower, to play an unsettling interval (the tritone, known as the devil's interval), creating the sense that death itself is playing the violin.
• The xylophone's clacking sound is widely known to imitate the rattling of skeletons' bones.
• In the final passage, the oboe plays the crowing of the rooster at dawn, and the music and skeletons vanish in haste — a scene that shows Saint-Saëns's characteristic balance of humor and horror.

A biblical opera of love and betrayal that, with Liszt's help, reached the stage first in Germany.

• Dalila's aria in act 2, "Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix," is a slow, sensuous melody and the most frequently performed standalone aria (an opera's self-contained solo song) in the entire opera.
• The Bacchanale (a dance depicting the frenzy of an ancient festival) in act 3 paints the Philistines' triumphant frenzy through the oboe's exotic melody and an ever-accelerating rhythm.
• The chorus in act 1 builds the lament of the oppressed Hebrews to a heavy weight, creating a dramatic contrast with Samson's entrance that follows.
• The orchestral writing in the final scene, as the temple collapses, is famous for a brief but overwhelming percussion effect.

Dedicated to Liszt, this is his summit — organ and orchestra resounding as a single body.

• The moment the organ first bursts in with a full chord in the finale is the most widely recognized passage in the piece — even listeners who know nothing else about it recognize this moment.
• The entire work is built on a cyclic structure in which a single theme returns slowly, quickly, and grandly in ever-changing guises, so that if you listen to the end you can catch the opening melody reappearing in entirely different clothing.
• In the second movement, the piano joins in four hands (two players), adding an unusual color to the symphony.
• Dedicated to Liszt, the work became even more special to Saint-Saëns after Liszt died a few months after its premiere.

Born from a Mardi Gras joke among colleagues, this piece was not fully revealed to the world until after his death.

• The slow, singing cello melody of No. 13, "The Swan," is the only movement in the whole suite that was allowed to be published during his lifetime, and it remains the most beloved today.
• In "Fossils," the xylophone lifts the skeleton theme straight from his own earlier Danse macabre, turning even his own music into a joke, like a fossil in a museum.
• "Pianists" deliberately mimics the tedious scale exercises of études, clumsily, slipping a piano student in among the zoo's other "animals" as a joke.
• "Tortoises" stretches Offenbach's can-can from Orpheus in the Underworld out to an extreme slowness, showing just how comical a fast dance becomes when dragged to a crawl.