Camille Saint-Saëns' (1835-1921) long artistic career corresponds to one of the most inventive periods in the history of music instruments making: flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets, and other wind instruments gradually adopted the modern form that we know today and the new families of saxophones, saxhorns or sarrussophones, born from the intuition of genius makers, enriched the sound palette of the orchestra. It was primarily in the Normandy town of La Couture-Boussey and its neighbouring villages where famous dynasties of instrument makers such as Buffet, Godfroy, Julliot, Martin, Noblet and Thibouville practised their art, that most of these woodwind instruments innovations emerged and that new instruments were mass-produced, initially using traditional methods and later on an industrial scale. Contrary to the majority of his contemporaries, Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) took a sustained and continuous interest in wind instruments. The catalogue of his work alone is ample proof of this, encompassing some fifty titles for a wide variety of ensembles, ranging from intimate chamber music with piano to more spectacular scores involving wind bands, simphony orchestras and choirs, as well as a wealth of concertante pieces. In addition to these original compositions, more than 120 orchestrations or transcriptions of his own works were published during his lifetime with his permission. For both these reasons, Saint-Saëns is undoubtedly the composer of his generation whose works were the most widely arranged, performed and distributed between the 1850s and 1920s. He surrounded himself with leading performers, with sometimes conflicting aesthetics and playing techniques, who provided a source of inspiration and enabled him to achieve his sound ideal, by exploiting all the technical possibilities of the winds and their expressive richness. Clarinetists as Louis Dorus (1812-1896) and Paul Taffanel (1844-1908), oboist as Georges Gillet (1854-1920) and Louis Bas (1863-1944), bassoonist Léon Letellier (1859- 1937), hornist as Jules-Léon Antoine, dit Halary (1827-19..), Jean-Henri Garigue (1842-1906) and Henri Chaussier (1854-1914), all collaborated at various levels with Saint-Saëns, and were dedicatees and first performers of its works for solo wind instruments. Saint-Saëns' attachment to wind instruments is closely linked to the “timbre”, i.e. the “tone colour” or sound characteristics of the instrument, and the possibilities offered by combining the various instrumental timbres with each other. His own works are characterised by a choice of modern instrumentation that respects each individual instrument, together with an innovative and balanced approach to orchestration. He always had a clear idea of the sound he wanted to achieve, and he used the most modern instruments available, recommending the use of specific models for the performances.