The Carnival of the Animals (Le carnaval des animaux)
is a musical suite of fourteen movements by the French
Romantic composer Camille Saint-Saëns. The work was
written for private performance by an ad hoc ensemble
of two pianos and other instruments, and lasts around
25 minutes.
Following a disastrous concert tour of Germany in
1885–86, Saint-Saëns withdrew to a small Austrian
village, where he composed The Carnival of the Animals
in February 1886. It is scored for two pianos, two
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The Carnival of the Animals (Le carnaval des animaux)
is a musical suite of fourteen movements by the French
Romantic composer Camille Saint-Saëns. The work was
written for private performance by an ad hoc ensemble
of two pianos and other instruments, and lasts around
25 minutes.
Following a disastrous concert tour of Germany in
1885–86, Saint-Saëns withdrew to a small Austrian
village, where he composed The Carnival of the Animals
in February 1886. It is scored for two pianos, two
violins, viola, cello, double bass, flute (and
piccolo), clarinet (C and B?), glass harmonica, and
xylophone.
From the beginning, Saint-Saëns regarded the work as a
piece of fun. On 9 February 1886 he wrote to his
publishers Durand in Paris that he was composing a work
for the coming Shrove Tuesday, and confessing that he
knew he should be working on his Third Symphony, but
that this work was "such fun" ("... mais c'est si
amusant!"). He had apparently intended to write the
work for his students at the École Niedermeyer, but in
the event it was first performed at a private concert
given by the cellist Charles Lebouc on Shrove Tuesday,
9 March 1886.
A second (private) performance was given on 2 April at
the home of Pauline Viardot with an audience including
Franz Liszt, a friend of the composer, who had
expressed a wish to hear the work. There were other
private performances, typically for the French mid-Lent
festival of Mi-Carême, but Saint-Saëns was adamant
that the work would not be published in his lifetime,
seeing it as detracting from his "serious" composer
image. He relented only for the famous cello solo The
Swan, which forms the penultimate movement of the work,
and which was published in 1887 in an arrangement by
the composer for cello and solo piano (the original
uses two pianos).
Saint-Saëns did specify in his will that the work
should be published posthumously. Following his death
in December 1921, the work was published by Durand in
Paris in April 1922, and the first public performance
was given on 25 February 1922 by Concerts Colonne (the
orchestra of Édouard Colonne).
Carnival has since become one of Saint-Saëns's
best-known works, played by the original eleven
instrumentalists, or more often with the full string
section of an orchestra. Normally a glockenspiel
substitutes for the rare glass harmonica. Ever popular
with music teachers and young children, it is often
recorded in combination with Prokofiev's Peter and the
Wolf or Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the
Orchestra.
No. 5 "L'éléphant" (The Elephant) was originally
scored for Double bass and piano. In the opening
section, it is marked Allegro pomposo, the perfect
caricature for an elephant. The piano plays a
waltz-like triplet figure while the bass hums the
melody beneath it. Like "Tortues," this is also a
musical joke—the thematic material is taken from the
Scherzo from Mendelssohn's incidental music to A
Midsummer Night's Dream and Berlioz's "Dance of the
Sylphs" from The Damnation of Faust. The two themes
were both originally written for high, lighter-toned
instruments (flute and various other woodwinds, and
violin, accordingly); the joke is that Saint-Saëns
moves this to the lowest and heaviest-sounding
instrument in the orchestra, the double bass.
Although originally scored for double bass and piano, I
created this arrangement for Solo Viola & Piano.