Camille Saint-Saëns - The Carnival of the Animals : Part II (Analysis)

Across these five miniature scenes, Saint-Saëns turns leaps, echoes and wingbeats into musical theatre, allowing wit, mystery and weightless wonder to inhabit the same enchanted world.

i Work Information

Composer:

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921)

Title:

The Carnival of the Animals (Le Carnaval des animaux), Part II — R 125

Year of composition:

February 1886

First private performance:

9 March 1886, Paris, at a Shrovetide musical gathering hosted by the cellist Charles-Joseph Lebouc

First complete public performance:

25 February 1922, Concerts Colonne, conducted by Gabriel Pierné

Genre:

Humorous programmatic suite — “Grand Zoological Fantasy”

Structure:

14 movements in all; this article examines movements VI–X

Duration:

approx. 7–9 minutes for these five movements

Instrumentation:

Two pianos, two violins, viola, cello, double bass, flute, clarinet in C and glass harmonica, used in varying combinations; the glass harmonica is often replaced by celesta or glockenspiel

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At the midpoint of The Carnival of the Animals, the animals almost begin to lose their bodies. The kangaroo becomes a sequence of leaps and silences, the fish dissolve into reflections, the donkey is compressed into a cry, the cuckoo is heard but never seen, and the birds turn into lightning trajectories in the flute. The music gradually moves from caricaturing the body to creating an illusion of space.

The suite’s first five movements presented creatures with an emphatic physical presence: the lion’s stately tread, the nervous activity of the henhouse, the wild asses’ headlong speed, the tortoises’ lethargy and the elephant’s bulk. In movements VI–X, Saint-Saëns turns to subtler dimensions. Distance, resonance, transparency, sudden acceleration and the placement of an instrument on or beyond the stage assume leading roles. The composer is no longer concerned only with how an animal moves; he also observes how it is perceived, how it appears for a moment and vanishes, and how its voice reaches the listener through an entire environment.

This change is accompanied by a striking economy of means. Kangaroos requires only two pianos, and Characters with Long Ears only two violins. In both miniatures, Saint-Saëns strips away every unnecessary colour and retains the single feature he needs: the spring-like propulsion of the leap in the first, the naked, unpolished voice in the second.

Aquarium and Aviary take the opposite path. Distinct instrumental voices are laid one above another to form multi-layered sonic environments. Between them, The Cuckoo in the Depths of the Woods creates a sense of actual depth through a simple but ingenious theatrical instruction: the clarinet must play out of sight. Orchestration ceases to be merely the distribution of notes and becomes an art of position, proximity and distance.

These five movements reveal one of the suite’s most refined qualities. Saint-Saëns does more than imitate animal movements or calls. He makes the listener’s own acoustic perception part of the composition: sounds draw near and recede, hover without apparent weight, or cross the space so quickly that they are perceived more as traces than as completed melodies.

📖 Before Part II

The complete Work Guide introduces the history, instrumentation and fourteen musical tableaux of the suite, while Part I follows the Introduction and Royal March of the Lion through The Elephant.

Movements / Structure

Movements VI–X trace a path from earthly motion towards an increasingly immaterial world of sound. The kangaroos’ leaps lead into the watery depth of the aquarium; its calm is abruptly broken by the two violins’ braying, then restored within the cuckoo’s distant forest. The aviary closes the group by filling the entire space with ceaseless motion.

VI. Kangourous — Kangaroos

A miniature study for two pianos, built from grace-note chords, abrupt accelerations and decelerations. The action passes alternately from one instrument to the other, while the silence after each leap makes the body seem momentarily suspended in mid-air.

VII. Aquarium

Flute, strings and glass harmonica unfold long lyrical lines above the contrary motions of the two pianos. Saint-Saëns does not portray an individual fish; he constructs an entire environment of water, glass, light and depth, in which forms seem to glide without weight.

VIII. Personnages à longues oreilles — Characters with Long Ears

Two unaccompanied violins alternate piercing high calls with low ones, producing the unmistakable bray of a donkey. Flexible tempo and the vast separation between the instruments’ extreme ranges turn a simple imitation into a sharply drawn caricature.

IX. Le Coucou au fond des bois — The Cuckoo in the Depths of the Woods

The two pianos establish a slow, dark harmonic depth while a hidden clarinet repeats the cuckoo’s call from afar. The two notes never change, yet the harmony around them continually shifts, giving the call a different shade each time.

X. Volière — Aviary

The flute races across much of its range above tremolo, pizzicato and brief piano interventions. In only thirty-one bars, Saint-Saëns creates a space alive with wingbeats, birdsong, tiny landings and intersecting flights.

Musical Analysis

VI. Kangaroos — The Shape of a Leap

Kangaroos, centred on C minor and marked Moderato, reduces the ensemble to two pianos. In the Wild Asses of the preceding article, the instruments had merged into almost continuous parallel motion, racing as a single amplified body. Here they separate. One piano presents the musical figure, then withdraws and allows the other to repeat or reshape the same behaviour. The scene suggests two animals appearing in succession, neither remaining in one place for long.

The basic figure consists of chords preceded by brief grace-note flourishes. This tiny addition acts like a spring: the sound does not begin at its point of arrival but receives an instantaneous impulse that propels it forward. As the motion rises, the chords accelerate and grow louder; as it descends, they slow and soften. The successive accel. and rit. markings are the mechanism of the image itself. The music gathers, launches and gradually loses momentum.

Just as important is the silence between the leaps. The rests interrupt the linear flow of time and make each movement self-contained. The kangaroo does not cross the space at an even pace. It appears at one point, springs upward and lands somewhere else. For a moment nothing is heard, yet the preceding leap remains alive in the memory and the ear is already waiting for the next.

This interrupted behaviour also gives unusual weight to the chords that complete each small episode. The endings sound less like conventional cadences than temporary landings. The moment the body appears to have regained its balance, another grace-note flourish prepares the next launch. Musical time is thus organised as a succession of compressions and releases of energy.

The twenty-bar form grows from the alternation of these short episodes and from their passage between the two pianos. For all its immediate comedy, the miniature calls for delicate coordination. The pianists must share not only the notes but the precise way in which time contracts and expands. Mechanical accelerations or overplayed silences rob the motion of its natural ease. The humour lies in elasticity: every leap must seem spontaneous, even though its entire trajectory has been meticulously notated.

VII. Aquarium — Light behind Glass

In Aquarium, the pianos’ dry articulation gives way to a world of continuous flow. The movement is marked Andantino, in 4/4, and centres on A minor, although chromatic motion and constantly changing harmonic shades blur the sense of a stable tonal surface. Sharp attacks and heavy accents are avoided, allowing harmony to register more as light and shadow than as a succession of clearly separated functions.

The two pianos form the kinetic core. The first descends in rapid streams of notes while the second unfolds rising arpeggios. This contrary motion suggests two currents crossing without colliding. One appears to sink as the other rises, and between them a space opens in which the remaining voices may float.

The piano patterns range widely across the keyboards and continue almost without interruption at a low dynamic. They soon cease to sound like displays of virtuosity. The ear no longer follows each note separately but receives them collectively as a fluid surface. The writing is dense, yet the impression remains light because the activity is evenly distributed and never gathered into forceful rhythmic climaxes.

Above this flow, flute, two violins and viola unfold long phrases. The muted strings soften the attack and distance their melodic lines from immediate human expressiveness. Their voices do not seem to stand directly before the listener; they appear as pale outlines behind the pianos’ motion.

The cello sustains notes in its low range, creating an almost motionless depth. This foundation is so discreet that it is sensed more as support than as an independent line. Above it move the arpeggios, the melodic phrases and the glass harmonica’s flashes of light. The music is arranged in several transparent layers: stability in the cello, motion in the pianos, melody in flute and strings, radiance in the glass harmonica.

The glass harmonica never claims the role of soloist. It appears like a reflection, often close to the flute line, adding a sonority that is difficult to connect with any material source. Its quality intensifies the sense that the music is being heard through a transparent surface. Near the end, its glissandos briefly illuminate the entire ensemble like reflections moving across glass or refracted beneath the water.

The form is based on two principal melodic ideas and their transformations through changing combinations of the same sonic layers. Returns are never mere repetitions. Each changes the density, harmonic shadow or position of a voice within the whole. A line first heard in the foreground may later recede, while an element of the accompanying texture moves closer to the surface.

Even the climax remains restrained. Intensity grows without destroying the sense of depth, and the music avoids a heavy or decisive close. In the brief coda, the melodic forms gradually withdraw while the arpeggios preserve the water’s movement a little longer. When the final glimmer dies away, the image does not seem to have ended; it appears to continue behind the glass, now beyond the reach of hearing.

Aquarium is distinctive because overt satire is almost absent. No single animal is caricatured and no familiar melody distorted. Saint-Saëns creates a space into which the listener is invited to look. The music lies close to the ear yet remains inaccessible, like a world visible through transparent material that cannot be touched.

VIII. Characters with Long Ears — A Voice Stretched to Its Limits

The magic of Aquarium is broken by perhaps the barest caricature in the entire suite. Characters with Long Ears lasts only twenty-six bars and uses just two violins. The marking Tempo ad libitum frees the players from strictly measured time and allows them to handle sounds and silences as though exchanging actual voices.

The first violin launches loud, piercing notes in its extreme upper range. The second answers lower down with rough, insistent calls. Together they form the two parts of a bray: a penetrating cry and its deeper conclusion. As the figure repeats, the two voices begin to draw closer in time, overlap and prolong one another.

No harmonic accompaniment is needed, since the music’s substance lies in the immense separation of pitch, sudden dynamics and altered violin tone. The movement has no key signature and retains points of reference around A minor, but a stable tonal sense is less important than the intervals’ vocal function. The notes are heard first and foremost as syllables of an inarticulate call.

The absence of accompaniment leaves the violins exposed, without any sonic depth to soften the image’s harshness. The effect is almost uncomfortably immediate: after the filtered, distant world of Aquarium, this new voice reaches the ear without any protective space.

The title has often been read as an allusion to music critics, or to listeners who pronounced loud judgements without sufficient understanding. That interpretation suits the suite’s satirical climate, yet it cannot be securely confirmed from Saint-Saëns’s own evidence. The ambiguity may be more effective than any fixed identification. The movement remains a remarkably exact bray, while its curiously human title leaves us wondering whether the true exhibit in this musical zoo might be seated among the audience.

IX. The Cuckoo in the Depths of the Woods — The Music of Distance

With The Cuckoo in the Depths of the Woods, Saint-Saëns leaves direct caricature behind once more and creates one of the suite’s most inward landscapes. The Andante marking, 3/4 metre and key of E major provide a tranquil foundation. The two pianos, marked una corda and playing very softly, sustain slow, dense chords that change without any outward sense of haste.

The harmony functions like the forest itself: always present, yet offering no clear melodic path. The chords move chromatically, alternately lighting and darkening the surroundings. Low notes in the second piano add depth, while the first piano’s connected voices form a thick veil of sound. The changes are slow enough for the ear to perceive the space as still, even though its harmony is undergoing continuous transformation.

Within this environment comes the cuckoo’s call: two notes in the clarinet, C–A, forming a descending minor third. Both lie outside the basic diatonic collection of E major. The call therefore enters as a foreign presence—recognisable and constant, yet never surrendering its independence within the harmonic landscape.

The score instructs the clarinettist to play offstage. This has an immediate musical consequence: distance changes the clarity, intensity and apparent location of the sound, making the call seem to emerge from real depth. The listener cannot see its source, only sense the relationship between the pianos’ stationary forest and an invisible voice appearing somewhere beyond it.

The hidden clarinet creates a different kind of theatre. In the preceding movements, a character could be identified with an instrument visible before the audience. Here absence from the visual field becomes part of the image. The cuckoo exists precisely because it cannot be seen: its voice turns what lies beyond sight into imagined space.

The two-note call remains essentially unchanged, but the chords around it do not. Repetition therefore produces no true stasis. The same minor third acquires a different harmonic shadow and degree of proximity each time. At one moment it is clearly isolated; at another it seems absorbed into the pianos’ forest; later it returns like a distant memory of its previous appearance. The call itself does not develop; the space surrounding it changes without cease.

X. Aviary — When Density Becomes Weightless

Aviary, in F major, 3/4 and marked Moderato grazioso, brings the flute into the foreground. Its first entrance comes almost without preparation: a rapid descent from the upper range, filled with small changes of direction, repeated notes and brief figures that seem to generate one another.

The line traverses much of the instrument’s range. It is not organised as a melody that could readily be sung, but as a series of trajectories: ascent, dive, sudden turn, momentary suspension and renewed launch. Some figures resemble birdsong; others evoke the motion of wings themselves. Saint-Saëns does not identify any particular species. He captures the unstable, unpredictable activity of a space crowded with different voices.

The unbroken motion demands clear articulation and exceptionally controlled breathing. The technical difficulty must remain hidden, since any audible effort would immediately weigh the image down. Speed must retain grace, elasticity and sharply defined changes of direction, so that the flute seems to fly rather than merely perform a virtuoso exercise.

Beneath the solo line, violins and viola maintain a delicate tremolo while cello and double bass play short pizzicato notes. These articulations create different kinds of motion. The tremolo suggests the ceaseless vibration of wings or the rustle of a multitude of birds; the pizzicato supplies tiny points of contact, sudden landings and almost imperceptible taps within the general commotion.

The pianos no longer form the stable environment heard in Aquarium. They intervene with trills, short scales and bright chords, as though adding new voices to the scene. Each entrance briefly changes the depth and direction of the movement without interrupting the flute’s flow. At times they seem to answer a call; at others they momentarily thicken the flock.

The harmonic language is clearer than in Aquarium, and F major lends the scene brightness and outward energy. Yet the key does not lead to broad cadential arrivals. Continuous motion, trills and fleeting interventions prevent the music from settling for long. Whenever a phrase seems close to completion, another flute trajectory immediately opens a new direction.

The music is extremely dense, yet never heavy. This is one of the orchestration’s most remarkable achievements: density is transformed into an impression of weightlessness. Rapid notes, detached attacks and the concentration of sound in the middle and upper ranges prevent the formation of a solid orchestral mass.

The aviary is ultimately not a collection of clearly differentiated birds, each with a melody of its own. It is a space in which individual voices cross so quickly that they become a collective flutter. When the miniature stops, the silence that follows feels less like a conventional ending than the sky suddenly emptying.

From Body to Space

Across these five movements, Saint-Saëns makes a different musical parameter the principal means of recognition each time. Melody remains present, but it is no longer the image’s sole carrier. The animal or environment emerges from time, distance, range, articulation and the relationship among layers of sound.

Movement	Principal Compositional Means	Audible Effect
Kangaroos	Acceleration, deceleration and silence	Motion acquires impulse, leap and momentary suspension
Aquarium	Contrary motion and multi-layered orchestration	An illusion of water, depth and refraction
Characters with Long Ears	Extreme ranges and free tempo	Instrumental writing becomes a rough vocal caricature
The Cuckoo in the Depths of the Woods	Repetition and actual offstage distance	An invisible voice gains a position within an imagined landscape
Aviary	Speed, tremolo, pizzicato and upper range	Dense lines create the sensation of light, unceasing flight

The sequence reveals a gradual expansion of the acoustic image. In Kangaroos and Characters with Long Ears, sound stands before the listener, clear and almost tangible. In Aquarium it acquires depth and transparency. In The Cuckoo, depth becomes actual distance; in Aviary, the entire space fills with intersecting motion.

There is also a deeper distinction. Kangaroos and Characters with Long Ears can be recognised through one clear musical event: a leap and a bray. In the other three movements, the listener perceives an environment above all. Water, forest and bird-filled air are not objects that briefly appear within the music; they are the spaces in which everything else occurs.

Orchestration as Stagecraft

The original version was written for only eleven players, with single strings. At this scale, changes of instrumental combination become exceptionally clear. The withdrawal or entrance of a single instrument alters the identity of the whole scene, much as a new character changes the balance of a small theatrical company.

Saint-Saëns treats the ensemble as a company of musical characters. In Kangaroos, the two pianos stand alone so that the movement acquires no added colour or weight. In Characters with Long Ears, even the harmonic foundation disappears, exposing the violins as two naked voices. Economy becomes part of the humour: leap and bray are presented in their most concentrated forms.

In The Cuckoo, separation is achieved through distance. The pianos remain visible and form the harmonic landscape, while the clarinet is moved beyond sight. It still belongs to the ensemble, but its physical removal creates the impression of a world larger than the stage. The concert hall itself temporarily becomes part of the orchestration.

Aquarium and Aviary follow the opposite principle. Several voices act simultaneously, but each retains a clearly defined task. In the first, sounds are arranged in depth: low foundation, piano flow, melodic lines and flashes of light. In the second, voices cross at greater speed, creating the sense of many bodies sharing the same air.

The result is not a homogeneous orchestral mass but a set of transparent, mobile layers. Orchestration determines which character occupies the foreground, which moves in the distance and which is perceived only as a reflection, a far-off call or a fleeting trace. This is why the original scoring with single strings has such theatrical force: every voice remains a character even when contributing to a larger landscape.

🪶 A Chapter in the Life of the Work

The Forgotten Instrument That Returned inside the Aquarium

In 1761, more than a century before The Carnival of the Animals was composed, Benjamin Franklin was in London watching musicians produce tones by running wet fingers around the rims of glasses filled with different amounts of water. Musical glasses were not a new idea. Franklin, however, recognised in that delicate, fragile experience the possibility of a complete instrument.

Working with the glassmaker Charles James, he created glass bowls of graduated sizes, tuned to specific pitches and nested along a horizontal spindle. As the spindle turned, the player touched the rims with moistened fingers. The hands no longer had to travel among separate glasses: the notes were gathered directly in front of the performer, almost like a glass keyboard without keys.

Franklin called the instrument the armonica, from the Italian word for harmony, and counted it among the inventions that had given him the greatest personal satisfaction. Its sound differed from that of most keyboard and percussion instruments. It began without a sharply defined strike and could continue as long as the finger remained in contact with the revolving glass. Notes seemed to emerge without a clear beginning, while adjacent tones could merge into chords of extraordinary softness.

The glass harmonica became remarkably popular. Marie Antoinette was among its amateur players, Franz Anton Mesmer used it in his celebrated therapeutic sessions, and Mozart composed the Adagio and Rondo, K. 617, for it. The late Enlightenment heard in its glassy voice something suspended between music, science and the inexplicable. With no visible striking mechanism, the instrument could seem almost supernatural.

That fascination gradually acquired a darker side. During the early nineteenth century, the glass harmonica became associated with rumours of nervous exhaustion, mental disturbance and dangerous effects on players and listeners. Some stories arose from the mysterious nature of its sound, others from fears surrounding pigments and construction materials, and many belonged more to fantasy than to science. Restrictions on the instrument were even imposed in certain cities.

There were more practical difficulties as well. It was fragile, hard to transport and limited in volume, while larger halls and more powerful symphonic ensembles favoured instruments capable of penetrating dense orchestral textures. By the middle of the 1830s, the glass harmonica had almost disappeared from ordinary European musical life. It survived more as the memory of an earlier age than as a living member of the orchestra.

And yet, in 1886, Saint-Saëns sought it out again.

For Aquarium, he did not need an instrument that would dominate. He needed a sonority capable of appearing among flute, strings and piano arpeggios without violently attracting attention. The forgotten glass harmonica was ideal precisely because it seemed not to belong entirely to the orchestra’s material world. Its voice could hover above the music and disappear without a clearly perceptible boundary.

In the score, the instrument is never displayed as an exotic curiosity. Its interventions are brief and discreet. It often draws close to the flute melody, as though reflecting part of it, and near the end adds glissandos that briefly illuminate the entire sonic surface. The listener may never identify the instrument being heard. That uncertainty is central to the magic: the sound is perceived as radiance before it is perceived as an instrument.

Saint-Saëns’s choice nevertheless created a practical problem. Even in his own time, a functioning glass harmonica and an experienced player were not easy to find. The first printed edition allowed the use of glockenspiel, and the celesta later became one of the most common substitutes. Neither reproduces the voice of revolving glass bowls, but both allow the luminous line to survive within the orchestration.

The celesta brings a wonderful historical coincidence. It was invented in Paris by Auguste Mustel in the very year Saint-Saëns composed The Carnival of the Animals: 1886. While the composer was returning to an eighteenth-century instrument that had almost vanished, a new keyboard instrument with metal sound plates was being born in the same city and would later take its place in many performances. Past and future in instrument making thus met, without yet knowing it, inside the same aquarium.

Substitution perceptibly changes the musical image. The glockenspiel offers a clearer metallic brilliance, with a distinct percussive beginning to each note. The celesta attacks more softly and blends more readily with the pianos and flute. The glass harmonica, by contrast, allows sound to arise from friction itself, without the instantaneous blow of a hammer. Notes seem to appear from nowhere and return there.

Every modern performance of Aquarium therefore contains a small historical and aesthetic decision. The notes may remain the same, but the water is not illuminated in the same way. With glockenspiel it acquires clean, sparkling highlights; with celesta it becomes more dreamlike and enchanted; with glass harmonica it seems to lose its material boundaries altogether.

An instrument that had been almost silent for half a century thus found, within a brief private fantasy, one of the most fitting roles in its history. It did not need to return as a soloist or reclaim the place it had lost in concert life. Saint-Saëns allowed it to do something subtler: to pass behind the glass for a few moments, illuminate an imaginary underwater world and disappear within it.

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🎧 Listening Guide

This middle group becomes clearer when attention moves away from melody alone and towards time, distance and the layering of sound. Each movement has a characteristic audible landmark, around which Saint-Saëns organises motion and space in a different way.

• The trajectory of the leap: in Kangaroos, acceleration leads towards the crest of the motion and deceleration towards the landing. The rests between chords hold the body in mid-air for a moment and prepare the next launch.
• The layers of the water: in Aquarium, the pianos’ contrary motion forms the current, the long lines of flute and strings add depth, and the glass harmonica—or its substitute—creates the reflections of light.
• The distance between two voices: in Characters with Long Ears, the caricature becomes recognisable through the alternation of the piercing high cry and its deeper answer. Free tempo makes the exchange sound less measured and more spontaneous.
• The unchanging call inside changing harmony: in The Cuckoo, the clarinet’s two notes remain the same while the pianos’ harmonic landscape alters their colour and apparent distance.
• Flight as collective motion: in Aviary, the flute dominates, yet the sensation of a crowded space comes from the conjunction of rapid trajectories, tremolo, pizzicato and the pianos’ brief interventions.

🎶 Further Listening

The following recordings illuminate the five miniatures from different perspectives: the transparency of the original chamber scoring, the breadth of a symphonic approach and the freshness of a modern family performance. Listen especially to the balance within Aquarium, the tangible sense of distance in The Cuckoo, and the degree of freedom given to the flute in Aviary.

• Renaud and Gautier Capuçon, Emmanuel Pahud, Paul Meyer, Michel Dalberto, Frank Braley and friends: single strings preserve the clarity of the original scoring and allow each instrumental voice to remain a distinct character. Emmanuel Pahud brings exceptional agility and precision to Aviary, while the layers of Aquarium stay lucid without sacrificing atmosphere.
• Güher and Süher Pekinel · Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France · Marek Janowski: a broader orchestral reading with carefully judged balances and a particularly atmospheric Aquarium. The larger body of strings adds depth while the glass harmonica’s luminous voice retains its independence above the piano flow.
• The Kanneh-Masons: a contemporary approach marked by immediacy, youthful energy and a clear sense of ensemble. The contrasts between the elasticity of Kangaroos, watery stillness, the distant cuckoo and the mobility of Aviary unfold with naturalness and narrative continuity.

📚 Further Reading

Study of movements VI–X benefits particularly from following the complete score, since so much of their imagery arises from the position and function of voices within the orchestration. It is equally rewarding to explore the two historical worlds that meet in Aquarium: the eighteenth-century glass harmonica and the later performing practice of celesta and glockenspiel.

• Durand’s first complete edition of 1922: reveals the exact instrumental combinations, the successive accelerations and decelerations in Kangaroos, the glass-harmonica writing in Aquarium and the offstage instruction for the clarinet in The Cuckoo.
• Peter Jost’s critical edition for Breitkopf & Härtel: offers a modern editorial approach grounded in the primary sources and helps distinguish the autograph from readings found in the first printed edition.
• Ernst-Günter Heinemann’s Urtext edition for G. Henle Verlag: includes editorial observations on differences among the sources and accurately restores the original eleven-player scoring.
• Philharmonie de Paris’s digital feature: explores the original instrumentation, the distinct layers of Aquarium and the special role of the glass harmonica, alongside archival and modern performances.
• Jean-Claude Chapuis’s study of the glass harmonica and other glass instruments: places the instrument within the history of science, instrument making and European musical life, clarifying how unusual Saint-Saëns’s choice was in 1886.

🔗 Related Works

These works illuminate musical images of water and birds, the use of actual acoustic distance and the glass harmonica’s singular sound world. Their affinities reach beyond shared subject matter to the way timbre and motion can evoke an entire environment.

• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — Adagio and Rondo in C minor/C major, K. 617: writing for glass harmonica, flute, oboe, viola and cello reveals the immaterial, sustained quality Saint-Saëns also seeks in Aquarium.
• Ludwig van Beethoven — Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68, “Pastoral”: near the close of the Scene by the Brook, the clarinet voices the cuckoo within a wider natural landscape, beside the flute’s nightingale and the oboe’s quail.
• Claude Debussy — Poissons d’or, from Images for piano: quick reflections, fluid harmony and constant changes of direction turn the keyboard into a watery, luminous environment without literal imitation.
• Maurice Ravel — Daphnis et Chloé, “Lever du jour”: dawn emerges from superimposed orchestral layers, flowing motion and birdsong, expanding the spatial thinking encountered in Aquarium and Aviary.
• Olivier Messiaen — Le Merle noir: birdsong ceases to be a brief imitation and becomes the central melodic and rhythmic material of an entire work, opening a path from zoological miniature to systematic observation of nature.

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🎼 Closing Reflection

Sometimes the animal is not before our eyes. It hides beyond the stage, dissolves into water or passes so swiftly that only a sound remains where its shape had been. Saint-Saëns reminds us that music need not show a thing in order to make it visible.

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📖 References & Sources

This analysis draws on comparison of the autograph and first complete printed score with modern critical editions, together with research into the orchestration, historical instruments and early performance history. Particular attention has been given to the differing functions of the two pianos, the instruction to place the clarinet offstage and the original use of glass harmonica in Aquarium. Widely repeated interpretations unsupported by primary evidence—including the identification of the “characters with long ears” as particular music critics—are treated as possible readings rather than documented statements of the composer’s intent.

Scores and Critical Editions

• Saint-Saëns, Camille. Le Carnaval des animaux: Grande Fantaisie Zoologique. Paris: Durand & Fils, 1922, plate D. & F. 10,154.
• Saint-Saëns, Camille. Le Carnaval des Animaux. Edited by Peter Jost. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, PB 5321.
• Saint-Saëns, Camille. Le Carnaval des animaux. Edited by Ernst-Günter Heinemann. Munich: G. Henle Verlag, HN 9939.

Primary and Historical Sources

• Saint-Saëns, Camille. Autograph score of Le Carnaval des animaux. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de la Musique, MS-2456 (1–14).
• Durand & Fils. Historical and editorial note in the first complete edition of Le Carnaval des animaux. Paris, 1922.
• Bonnerot, Jean. Camille Saint-Saëns, 1835–1921: sa vie et son œuvre. Paris: Durand, 1922.

Secondary Literature

• Ratner, Sabina Teller. Camille Saint-Saëns, 1835–1921: A Thematic Catalogue of His Complete Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Rees, Brian. Camille Saint-Saëns: A Life. London: Chatto & Windus, 1999.
• Pasler, Jann, ed. Camille Saint-Saëns and His World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.
• Flynn, Timothy. Camille Saint-Saëns: A Guide to Research. New York: Routledge, 2003.
• Chapuis, Jean-Claude. Glass armonica et autres instruments de verre. Montreuil: Les Éditions de l’Œil, 2017.

Selected Discography

• Capuçon, Renaud and Gautier; Dalberto, Michel; Braley, Frank; Pahud, Emmanuel; Meyer, Paul; and friends. Saint-Saëns: Le Carnaval des animaux. Virgin Classics, 2003.
• Pekinel, Güher and Süher; Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France; Janowski, Marek. Saint-Saëns: Le Carnaval des animaux. Recorded 1990, Warner Classics.
• The Kanneh-Masons. Carnival. Decca Classics, 2020.

Digital and Institutional Resources

• Bibliothèque nationale de France / Gallica — digitised autograph, first printed edition and historical material relating to the work.
• Philharmonie de Paris / Musée de la musique — documentation of the original scoring, analysis of the layers in Aquarium and historical material on the glass harmonica.
• The Franklin Institute — historical documentation on Benjamin Franklin’s construction and musical use of the glass harmonica.
• G. Henle Verlag — editorial information on Urtext edition HN 9939 and the work’s sources.
• Breitkopf & Härtel — information on critical edition PB 5321, edited by Peter Jost.
• International Music Score Library Project — digital access to the autograph, Durand’s first edition and historical performance material.

Note on the Editions

Durand’s first complete edition is an essential historical document, but its posthumous publication means that it should be examined alongside the autograph. The more recent Breitkopf & Härtel and G. Henle editions are not simple reprints: they assess differences among the sources and document their editorial decisions. For this analysis, tempo, dynamics, articulation, instrumentation and spatial placement were checked against the score and cross-referenced with the corresponding critical and institutional information.