Camille Saint-Saëns showed perfect pitch before age three, mastered Latin, Greek, mathematics, and astronomy as a schoolboy, and was trained on a mechanical piano method that produced a crystalline, typewriter-like technique. Yet he failed the Prix de Rome twice, with judges including Berlioz mistaking his flawless polish for a lack of inner fire. This episode follows his double life as organist at La Madeleine, the official church of the French Empire, while secretly sharing the banned scores of Wagner, Schumann, and Liszt with his students at the École Niedermeyer, including a young Gabriel Fauré.

We then trace the trauma that hardened him: the Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune, the founding of the Société Nationale de Musique under the motto Ars Gallica, and the loss of both his young sons within six weeks in 1878, after which he wal ...