A mainstream artist before his time, Saint-Saëns has permeated not only the world of scholarly music but also, during his lifetime, that of popular culture. Before becoming the soundtrack for the red carpet at the Cannes festival, his swaying melodies were the soundtrack of Parisian life at the end of the 19th century. And whilst improvisations on the piano and small orchestras for utilitarian purposes were legion in theatres, Saint-Saëns wrote in 1908 the first music specifically composed for a cinematographic work (L'Assassinat du Duc de Guise) and is associated with an artistic form which seeks to reconcile a learned art (actors of the Comédie Française, the first attempt at an “art film") and a popular pastime. Much like the future pop musicians several few decades later, Saint-Saëns employs in this first soundtrack a form of sound editing punctuated by effects, far from the developments of his symphonic music.

Listen to the original soundtrack composed by Camille Saint-Saëns from the film L'Assasinat du Duc de Guise directed by André Calmettes in 1908.

This dual lineage, in both pop culture and cinema, marks the rise of Saint-Saëns into our cultural space. On the side of pop culture, the affection demonstrated by the Disney studios, either directly (Fantasia 2000), or in the form of a tribute (Beauty and the Beast). On the scholarly side, the loyalty that creators such as the inspired Terence Malick have shown the composer (Days of Heaven) or the provocative Roman Polanski (The Ninth Gate). Thanks to these cinematic productions, it is now as much the visual fantasy of the most sophisticated animations as the intimacy of the close-ups on the expressive faces of Richard Gere and Johnny Depp that our contemporaries associate with the immortal sound discoveries of the composer of the Carnival des Animaux and the Havanaise, who passed away exactly one hundred years ago.