Piano Concerto no. 5 "Egyptian" in F major, op. 103

Saint-Saëns wrote the Fifth Piano Concerto in Luxor in the winter of 1895–96, during one of the long stays in Egypt he made to escape the Paris winter, and played it in Paris on 6 June 1896 at a concert marking fifty years since his public debut as a child. The slow movement quotes a boatmen's song he had heard on the Nile and adds gestures borrowed from Javanese and Spanish music; he described the whole work as a sea voyage. The nickname Egyptian follows from the circumstances of composition rather than from any title of his.