Saint-Saëns composed and first played this work in 1868. It is scored for pairs of winds, horns and trumpets, plus timpani and strings. During his long and prodigiously creative life—first as a child prodigy, then as a "Futurist," then as a conservative, and finally as a vituperating fossil—Saint-Saëns composed five piano concertos between the ages of 20 and 61. The Second (and enduringly most popular) was created hurriedly in the spring of 1868 after the Russian pianist/composer/conductor Anton Rubinstein asked him to arrange a Paris concert. Because the Salle Pleyel was solidly booked and therefore not available for three more weeks, Saint-Saëns proposed that he himself write a new piece for the occasion. On May 6, with Rubinstein conducting, he introduced the Second Concerto, although not with much success. There had not been time to practice it sufficiently, and a portion of the audience was put off by the work's stylistic swings ("from Bach to Offenbach" was pianist Sigismond Stojowski's bon mot of the month).

Gabriel Fauré, a pupil of Saint-Saëns at the time, remembered years later that he had shown his teacher a Tantum ergo setting. Saint-Saëns glanced at it hurriedly, then said, "Give this to me. I can make something of it!" What emerged was the main theme of the first movement (Andante sostenuto) of the new G minor Piano Concerto, following a solo improvisation in the manner of Bach to get things started. A gentler sub-theme (the composer's own) has a Chopinesque flavor, especially in its keyboard embroidery in thirds.

Like Saint-Saëns' opening movement and finale, an Allegro scherzando in between is written in sonata form. The spirit is nonetheless elfin, in the Mendelssohn manner—much as the Frenchman's long-finished but not-yet-published Second Symphony had been —although the second theme in the second movement of the concerto anticipates the Carnival des animaux, still two decades down the road.

The finale is a Presto tarantella in 2/2 time, whose G minor tonality reminds us that Mendelssohn ended his "Italian" Symphony 35 years earlier with a minor-key tarantella. If Saint-Saëns' premiere audience was not immediately cordial—Parisians had become as exasperatingly superficial as the Viennese—Franz Liszt praised the Second Concerto without stint, saying that it pleased him "singularly." Not for the first time, nor for the last, was his praise prescient. Later on, of course, Parisian audiences let everyone believe they'd loved it from the start.

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