This article: Saint-Saëns was born in Paris, the only child of Jacques-Joseph-Victor Saint-Saëns (1798–1835), an official in the French Ministry of the Interior, and Françoise-Clémence, née Collin. Victor Saint-Saëns was of Norman ancestry, and his wife was from an Haute-Marne family; their son, born in the Rue du Jardinet in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, and baptised at the nearby church of Saint-Sulpice, always considered himself a true Parisian. Less than two months after the christening, Victor Saint-Saëns died of consumption on the first anniversary of his marriage. The young Camille was taken to the country for the sake of his health, and for two years lived with a nurse at Corbeil, 29 kilometres (18 mi) to the south of Paris.
When Saint-Saëns was brought back to Paris he lived with his mother and her widowed aunt, Charlotte Masson. Before he was three years old he displayed perfect pitch and enjoyed picking out tunes on the piano. His great-aunt taught him the basics of pianism, and when he was seven he became a pupil of Camille-Marie Stamaty, a former pupil of Friedrich Kalkbrenner. Stamaty required his students to play while resting their forearms on a bar situated in front of the keyboard, so that all the pianist's power came from the hands and fingers rather than the arms, which, Saint-Saëns later wrote, was good training. Clémence Saint-Saëns, well aware of her son's precocious talent, did not wish him to become famous too young. The music critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote of Saint-Saëns in 1969, "It is not generally realized that he was the most remarkable child prodigy in history, and that includes Mozart." The boy gave occasional performances for small audiences from the age of five, but it was not until he was ten that he made his official public debut, at the Salle Pleyel, in a programme that included Mozart's Piano Concerto in B♭ (K450), and Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto. Through Stamaty's influence, Saint-Saëns was introduced to the composition professor Pierre Maleden and the organ teacher... contains an answer for the question: What was the first name of the person who had perfect pitch by the time he was three years old?, what is it ?


Camille