Photographic portrait of Camille Saint-Saëns. Paris Musées, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0).
9 March 1886 is Mardi Gras, and in Paris, at the home of the cellist Charles Lebouc, a Carnival evening of music is under way. On the programme is a novelty nobody has yet heard, a “grand zoological fantasy” for a small ensemble. At the two pianos sit Louis Diémer and the composer, Camille Saint-Saëns; the flute is Paul Taffanel’s, the clarinet Charles Turban’s, and Lebouc plays the cello. It is the first performance of The Carnival of the Animals. Saint-Saëns wrote it in February, on holiday in an Austrian village near Vienna, to amuse his friends.
The friends are very much amused. On 2 April the piece is repeated in Pauline Viardot’s salon, before Franz Liszt, who nine years earlier had had Samson and Delilah, rejected by the French theatres, staged at Weimar, and who by the end of July will be dead. The story goes that he relished the quotations and the orchestration. In the years that follow, the Carnival makes the rounds of private homes and salons in Paris: by 1894 it has been played at least ten times, always with success. Then the composer shuts the door. He forbids public performances and refuses to publish it. Only one number is allowed out: The Swan, dedicated to Lebouc, printed in 1887 for cello and piano.
The reason every biographer gives is fear for his reputation as a serious composer. And it is easy to see why, listening to what the fourteen numbers of the Carnival do to his colleagues, from the lion with his royal march to the finale. The tortoises drag themselves along to Offenbach’s cancan, the very one from Orpheus in the Underworld, slowed until it becomes a march of weary beasts. The elephant is a double bass dancing to Berlioz’s featherlight Dance of the Sylphs. The fossils are melodies worn thin by use: little French songs, an aria from Rossini’s Barber, and even a theme from his own Danse macabre, one of his greatest hits, reduced to a skeleton among skeletons. Among the animals, too, are the pianists, who play their scales stumbling like first-year students; the word “beginners”, printed on the score, was added later by the publisher. A man who had sat at the Institut de France since 1881 knew that in Paris an academician caught mocking his colleagues, living or dead, soon stops being taken seriously, and he knew even better that a piece like this, once printed, could overshadow everything else.
The ban worked only in part. The Swan, the lone escapee and one of the few numbers without parody, a cello singing above the stirred water of the two pianos, made the fortune the composer had denied the other thirteen. In 1905 Michel Fokine turned it into a solo for Anna Pavlova, The Dying Swan, and that page for cello became one of the most recognisable images of twentieth-century ballet. Saint-Saëns lived long enough to watch it travel the world while the rest of the score stayed in the drawer. In his will of 1911 he wrote that after his death the Carnival could be published.
He died in Algiers on 16 December 1921, at the age of eighty-six. His regular publisher, Durand, set to work at once. Even before the score reached the shops, on 25 and 26 February 1922, at the Concerts Colonne, Gabriel Pierné conducted the first complete public performance of The Carnival of the Animals. The printed edition came out in March. The piece written for one Mardi Gras evening was thirty-six years old, and its author had been dead for ten weeks.