Saint-Saëns

He began playing at two, and at his debut recital aged ten offered to perform any Beethoven sonata the audience cared to name. Berlioz said he knew everything but lacked inexperience. He lived to eighty-six, saw the whole road from Romanticism to the Jazz Age, and ended as a reactionary who loathed The Rite of Spring in public.

He had exceptionally clean ears and formidable craft. The Organ Symphony puts an organ and a piano duet inside a symphony orchestra, and the sound of that was entirely new in 1886. He forbade publication of The Carnival of the Animals in his lifetime, allowing only The Swan to appear separately: he was afraid the joke would destroy his standing as a serious composer, and it became the most famous thing he wrote.