In the final four movements of The Carnival of the Animals, Saint-Saëns moves from the satire of Pianists and the borrowed memories of Fossils to the lyrical stillness of The Swan, before gathering the ensemble’s voices once more in the brilliant Finale.
Work Information
- Composer:
- Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921)
- Title:
- The Carnival of the Animals (Le Carnaval des animaux: Grande fantaisie zoologique), R 125 — Part III, movements XI–XIV
- Date of composition:
- February 1886
- First private performance:
- 9 March 1886, Paris, at the Shrovetide concert of the cellist Charles-Joseph Lebouc
- Genre:
- Humorous programmatic fantasy in fourteen miniatures
- Structure:
- XI. Pianistes · XII. Fossiles · XIII. Le Cygne · XIV. Finale
- Duration:
- Approximately 8–10 minutes for the four movements, depending on the performance
- Instrumentation / Ensemble:
- Two pianos, flute doubling piccolo, clarinet, two violins, viola, cello, double bass, xylophone and glass harmonica, used in varying combinations. Modern performances often substitute another instrument for the rare glass harmonica.
At the close of The Carnival of the Animals, Saint-Saëns places among his exhibits two pianists practising scales. This human joke sets the suite’s final journey in motion: a game with old melodies, the quiet appearance of the Swan and a closing parade in which the instruments assemble once again. Movements XI–XIV show how music can satirise itself, recover its own memories and then, almost without warning, speak with unexpected tenderness.
In the preceding movements, speed, weight, distance and timbre gave shape to animals and imaginary places. Attention now turns towards the world of music itself. Pianists parodies the routine of daily practice; Fossils displays tunes that were already familiar to listeners in 1886; The Swan allows the cello to sing above the pianos’ unbroken motion. Their succession does not erase their differences: each movement has its own pace, instrumental design and way of addressing the ear.
Saint-Saëns composed the work in February 1886 for a Shrovetide concert organised by the cellist Charles-Joseph Lebouc, while he was also working on his Third Symphony. At the first performance, Saint-Saëns played one piano and Louis Diémer the other. The work’s origin within a circle of virtuosos matters especially in these last miniatures. The deliberately “clumsy” practising demands exceptional control, while the brief musical quotations require quickness of articulation and orchestral wit. The Finale produces a rich sonic surface from a chamber ensemble rather than a large symphony orchestra.
This third part of the analysis completes the journey through all fourteen numbers. It considers the final four miniatures as compositions in their own right while following the relationship between them: from the sound of practice to the recycling of musical memory, from a melody that seems to withdraw from the carnival to the return of the celebration itself.
Movements / Structure
XI. Pianistes — Pianists
Marked Allegro moderato and beginning in C major, the movement presents the two pianos as pupils repeating scales and exercises. The strings comment on this persistent activity with short interventions, while the ending leaves the impression that the practice session could continue indefinitely.
XII. Fossiles — Fossils
The Allegro ridicolo, beginning in G minor, gathers well-known tunes into a quick and animated sequence. The xylophone gives the sound the dry, sharply articulated quality already associated with Saint-Saëns’s own Danse macabre, while pianos, clarinet and strings take up different fragments of this musical past.
XIII. Le Cygne — The Swan
The Andantino grazioso, in G major, reduces the ensemble to cello and two pianos. The cello’s long melodic line unfolds above continuous arpeggios and harmonic support. Time seems to broaden, creating a listening space quite unlike the high spirits that precede it.
XIV. Finale — Finale
Marked Molto allegro and returning to C major, the music recalls the opening of the suite and gathers the ensemble together. Rapid motion, brief reminders of earlier characters and exchanges among the instruments lead to a conclusion in which the parade itself becomes the carnival’s final “animal”.
Musical Analysis
XI. Pianists — Practice Enters the Cage
After the delicate fluttering of Aviary, the opening of Pianists sounds almost defiantly earthbound. In place of another animal comes the familiar sight of two people at keyboards, running up and down their scales. Saint-Saëns, one of the outstanding pianists of his age, knew the world he was satirising from within. The joke does not depend on arbitrary wrong notes or careless playing. It comes from turning technical practice into a public spectacle.
The pianos begin exposed. Successive ascending and descending passages carry attention from one region of the keyboard to another. Their repetitions suggest musicians attempting the same task again in search of greater ease. The initial reference to C major has the elementary clarity of a first scale; as the harmonic ground changes, the exercise continues with the same solemn determination. Here lies one of the parody’s subtler pleasures: the players treat commonplace material with the concentration they might devote to a major virtuoso work.
Listeners usually hear scales as preparation for the piece that will follow. Here the preparation has moved to centre stage, complete with small hesitations and dutiful persistence. That displacement gives the title its particular wit. After lions, birds and kangaroos, pianists are observed from the same detached perspective: their everyday behaviour becomes the defining trait of yet another species in this imaginary musical museum.
The strings periodically interrupt the exercise with clipped chords or short phrases. They sound like comments from the practice room, while also giving theatrical rhythm to the simple activity. Saint-Saëns thereby organises a real ensemble: two independent pianists must coordinate with one another and with the strings, even while the music seeks an impression of awkwardness. This performing paradox gives the miniature its charm. The clumsy surface depends upon immaculate precision.
The later printed score includes an editorial instruction to imitate the awkward playing of a beginner. Its source matters: it should not be presented as a securely documented verbatim remark by the composer. In performance, the more interesting choice lies between lightly controlled unease and exaggerated comic mimicry. If the intention is stated too heavily, the carefully shaped miniature risks sounding like a sketch detached from its musical form.
The exercise’s final chords do not suggest a courteous bow. A deliberate roughness remains, as though the pupils had risen abruptly from the piano bench. The next scene transfers this energy from scales to another kind of recycling: songs and melodies that everyone assumes they know.
XII. Fossils — When Melodies Acquire a Second Life
The xylophone enters Fossils with a dry, brittle sound. The connection with Danse macabre, the symphonic poem in which Saint-Saëns had already used the instrument for the dance of the skeletons, is immediately perceptible. Yet the “fossil” here is more than a prehistoric creature. It is also a melody heard so often that it seems preserved in collective memory. The composer places himself among the old musical remains.
The rapid motion is built from brief, clearly presented ideas. The figure recalling Danse macabre returns as a frame between other tunes. A change of instrument works almost like a change of speaker: the clarinet may release a familiar line, the pianos may set it against another or turn it into play, and the strings may briefly sustain a singing fragment. The movement preserves its speed because each quotation receives only enough time to be recognised, or at least to awaken the suspicion that one has heard it before.
Among the recognisable materials are the French songs J’ai du bon tabac, Ah! vous dirai-je, maman, Au clair de la lune and Partant pour la Syrie, together with an allusion to Rosina’s aria from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. The tune of Ah! vous dirai-je, maman is internationally familiar through children’s songs and Mozart’s variations; Saint-Saëns is referring here to the pre-existing melody, rather than quoting Mozart’s composition. Some fragments are recognised at once, while others pass so swiftly that they create a feeling of familiarity more than a distinct recollection.
J’ai du bon tabac offers a clear example of the process. The familiar melody is intertwined with contrary motion and moved into a different harmonic setting, acquiring fresh rhythmic vitality. Returns of the xylophone’s central figure hold the sequence together despite the diversity of its sources. This is more inventive than a simple parade of popular favourites: musical memory becomes material for counterpoint, colour and surprise.
Rosina’s aria brings another kind of familiarity into the same brief scene. A song circulating outside the theatre encounters a melody belonging to opera, and Saint-Saëns treats both as material available within shared aural memory. The miniature gains another discreet smile. Children’s and popular songs stand beside his own Danse macabre and Rossini, like musical visitors recognising one another in an unusual exhibition room.
Critical study of the score reveals that the joke does not have an entirely uniform text in every edition. In bars 21–24, during the J’ai du bon tabac episode, the first violin and viola differ between the manuscript and the first complete printed score. Henle’s edition adopts the manuscript reading and records the alternative in its commentary. Without turning a detail of textual criticism into an aural puzzle, it is useful to remember that this apparently effortless miniature arose from extremely detailed writing.
XIII. The Swan — A Melody within the Flow
After the noisy play of Fossils, The Swan changes the way time is measured. The cello sings a long phrase while the two pianos keep the sound in continuous, gentle motion. This is not a static background: the arpeggios of one piano and the harmonic support of the other create the current above which the melody can slow, stretch and recover its course.
The score places the movement in G major, in 6/4 metre, with the marking Andantino grazioso. The six quarter-note beats allow the cello line to breathe in broad curves. As the melody climbs and returns to a lower register, its phrases preserve the sense of an uninterrupted journey. Harmonic changes in the pianos add shadow or brightness without arresting the rippling motion of their shorter note values. The image of the swan arises from the relationship between the melody’s smooth surface and the activity that supports it.
The cello needs no spectacular climax to hold attention. Small dynamic gradations and careful joining of notes give weight to every ascent. When the phrase reaches higher, the sound gathers warmth before returning to calm. The music readily invites images of water or motion across a lake. These are interpretative images formed in listening, rather than a programme of death or farewell written into the score.
Within the suite, the accompaniment is written for two pianos. The celebrated independent version for cello and one piano has its own historical legitimacy, since it appeared with the composer’s permission in 1887. Hearing the two versions in succession makes the difference especially revealing: in the original ensemble, support for the melody is divided between two distinct sources of sound, giving the flow a greater sense of space.
This distribution also creates a demanding question of balance. The arpeggios need steady, delicate motion so that the cello can shape long phrases without losing the underlying pulse. If the pianos become too strong, they narrow the solo line’s acoustic space; if they lose cohesion, the surface ceases to sound continuous. The famous simplicity of The Swan rests upon this difficult balance among three performers.
The Swan offers repose just before the close, but its position makes the next change more vivid. As the cello’s final song withdraws, the return to the carnival’s public, brilliant sound feels like the opening of an entire stage.
Note on the accompanying video: Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott perform the independent version for cello and one piano. Their reading illuminates the piece’s melodic breathing; the different relationship created by the suite’s original scoring, with two pianos, is best heard in a complete performance of the work.
XIV. Finale — The Parade Finds Its Voice Again
The Finale begins with a memory of the introduction. Trills and gathering expectation recall the suite’s first moments before the rapid pulse takes possession of the stage. The return acts as a signal of recognition: listeners once again face the carnival as a whole and hear the chamber ensemble expand through the successive addition of timbres.
In C major, the Molto allegro rests on quick, steady movement that makes its melodic phrases sound like successive entrances into a parade. The two pianos provide the mobile foundation and add brilliant passagework. The strings supply momentum, the woodwinds cut through the texture with more distinct lines, and xylophone and glass harmonica contribute two different kinds of brightness. The orchestration now unites materials that had appeared separately in earlier movements.
Brief, recognisable returns pass through the flow. The rapid motion of Wild Asses, the clipped notes recalling Hens and Cocks, and passing flashes of other scenes preserve the character of the carnival without requiring the Finale to replay the whole suite. Characters appear for a moment, yield to the next and join the general momentum. Near the close comes even the rough, braying voice of Characters with Long Ears, before the forceful final chords place the definitive seal on the work. The joke retains its place until the last second.
The Finale’s effectiveness depends upon clarity within speed. If the piano figures, woodwinds and strings merge into an undifferentiated loud sound, the fleeting returns disappear. When the individual lines remain audible, the conclusion feels like a real gathering of characters.
The reappearance of Characters with Long Ears shortly before the end is typical of Saint-Saëns’s dramatic design. Just as everything seems headed towards a brilliant and orderly conclusion, the suite’s least elegant voice briefly interrupts the ceremony. The final outburst thereby acquires something of a real celebration, whose participants do not all take their bows in the same manner. The music reunites its characters without erasing their peculiarities.
From Practice to Quotation: Two Kinds of Musical Memory
Pianists and Fossils stand next to one another for a reason that can be heard beyond the apparent contrast between their titles. In the first movement, memory is physical: hands repeat scales until the sequence becomes habitual. In the second, memory is collective: songs and familiar musical phrases emerge from what the people around the composer had heard. In both cases, Saint-Saëns takes something already known and changes the setting in which it is heard.
In the parody of practice, the expected becomes strange because it is being watched as a public performance. In Fossils, old material suddenly regains its agility through counterpoint, speed and the instruments that carry it. The satire turns simultaneously towards musicians and their musical education, without requiring a modern listener to recognise every nineteenth-century French song. The sound of the xylophone and the rapid exchange of motifs already tell the story of an old world beginning to move again.
The Ensemble Contracts and Opens Out
The four movements also create a clear dramaturgy of scale. Strings frame the two pianists; xylophone and clarinet join the colourful play of Fossils; The Swan withdraws almost everyone and leaves a single melodic voice with the two pianos. The Finale then restores the ensemble’s full spectrum. This contraction before the great return gives the last scene a greater sense of acoustic breadth than an increase in volume alone could provide.
That journey also explains why the fame of The Swan as a separate piece does not exhaust its function within the Carnival. Heard in its place, its lyrical calm follows the suite’s more agile and satirical images and prepares their return. The same melody can be a private moment of stillness in a recital and, in its original context, the quiet breath before the final parade.
The physical placement of the players now becomes significant as well. A chamber ensemble leaves individual voices more distinct: the strings’ brief interjections in Pianists sound like comments, while the return of the winds and unusual timbres in the Finale feels like the opening out of the same stage. The density of the ending is created through the meeting of these voices, rather than through the number of performers alone.
🪶 A Chapter in the Life of the Work
The Swan Leaves the Carnival First
On 9 March 1886, Mardi Gras, musicians gathered at the Salle Érard in Paris for the Shrovetide concert of the cellist Charles-Joseph Lebouc. Saint-Saëns’s zoological fantasy had been written for this occasion. The composer himself sat at one piano and Louis Diémer at the other; the performers also included the flautist Paul Taffanel and the clarinettist Charles Turban. Lebouc played the cello. Shortly before the suite’s explosive ending, the music would make room for the melody entrusted to his instrument.
A few days later, on 14 March, Le Messager published an account of the evening. The writer names the musicians, speaks of the gaiety and delicacy of the new composition and singles out Lebouc’s cello playing. The report is valuable precisely because it does not foresee the later fame of The Swan. It records a soloist within one particular ensemble performance, among friends and colleagues trying out a new musical fantasy.
The work continued to be heard within restricted circles. A few days after the first performance, it was presented to Émile Lemoine’s La Trompette society and, on 2 April 1886, in Pauline Viardot’s Paris salon, at a private gathering arranged for Franz Liszt, who was then in Paris and had expressed a wish to hear the new work. The early life of the Carnival was therefore not confined to a single secret evening. These later performances nevertheless remained within circles very different from the broad public circulation made possible by a printed score. Saint-Saëns gradually became more guarded about the dissemination of the complete suite.
Within this setting, The Swan followed a different path. In May 1887, Durand published it as a separate piece for cello and one piano, dedicated to Lebouc. The name of the musician who had organised the first concert now appeared on an edition that could travel far beyond that Parisian evening. The change of accompaniment had both practical and acoustic consequences: the piece could be presented in a normal two-player recital, whereas the original version required the two pianos of the Carnival.
The Swan thus began to reach listeners who had never heard Pianists, Fossils or the Finale. Its melody came to them without the sequence of satirical scenes that had surrounded it at the première. Separate performance does not erase its origins, yet it explains why the lyrical movement could be received as a complete, self-contained world. For those who knew only this form, it was natural to imagine a musical atmosphere quite different from the zoological fantasy that had produced it.
In the early twentieth century, the music also entered the theatre of dance. Michel Fokine used it for the choreography associated with Anna Pavlova, which became known as The Dying Swan. The stage work added the image of a final effort, of a body resisting stillness. That narrative belongs to the history of ballet: in the score of 1886, the title is simply Le Cygne, “The Swan”. Keeping the distinction allows both aspects of the music’s history to stand without assigning Saint-Saëns a story of death that he did not write.
The complete Carnival had to wait longer. In his will of 1911, Saint-Saëns authorised Durand to publish it after his death; the first complete printed score appeared in 1922. The fourteen-movement sequence was at last available in full printed form, including the two pianos required by the original scoring of The Swan. The piece that had first escaped from the carnival returned to its place between the brittle quotations of Fossils and the sound of the whole ensemble reassembling in the Finale.
This journey between concert, independent publication, dance stage and complete score explains why the same Swan can sound so different according to its surroundings. In a recital, it keeps all the available time to itself. Within the suite, its melody briefly interrupts the play of quotations; when it ends, the listener is only one breath away from the noisy return of the parade.
🎧 Listening Guide
The final journey becomes clearer when each movement is heard through a different kind of motion: repetition, recognition, flow and return.
- Pianists: ascending and descending scales show how an elementary exercise acquires comic character. The strings’ short interventions alter the setting without stopping the two pianos’ determined effort.
- Fossils: the xylophone’s dry sound provides a fixed point of reference. Between its returns, melodies pass through different instruments; recognising even one is enough to reveal the game with memory.
- The Swan: the cello melody sustains broad curves while the pianos continue moving beneath it. A second hearing may focus on changes of harmonic colour rather than following only the solo instrument.
- Finale: the opening trills recall the beginning of the suite. Later, brief returns of familiar characters emerge within the speed, until cries recalling Characters with Long Ears appear close to the ending.
🎶 Further Listening
Three complete performances of the Carnival reveal different relationships between the two pianos and the instrumental ensemble. Hearing the final four numbers without interruption makes it possible to feel the withdrawal of sound in The Swan and the parade’s return.
- Jean Sugitani and Michael Ertzcheid · Les Siècles · François-Xavier Roth, harmonia mundi, HMM 902614.15: the double Pleyel piano and period instruments illuminate the dialogue between the two keyboards and the strings. The 1928 instrument represents a fascinating interpretative choice, rather than a reconstruction of the 1886 première.
- Martha Argerich and Nelson Freire with a chamber ensemble: the two pianists’ instantaneous dialogue brings the paradox of Pianists into focus: perfect unanimity must momentarily sound awkward. The same agility keeps the quotations in Fossils clear.
- The Kanneh-Masons, Carnival, Decca, 2020: the family ensemble and accompanying narration strengthen the suite’s theatrical character. The contrast between the familiar solitude of The Swan and the collective celebration of the Finale acquires immediate narrative force.
📚 Further Reading
For closer study of the final movements, these sources offer three different points of entry: the musical text, the history of publication and the circumstances of the first performance.
- Ernst-Günter Heinemann, ed., Le Carnaval des animaux, Henle, HN 9939: the critical edition assists comparison of the manuscript with the first printed score, especially in the J’ai du bon tabac passage of Fossils.
- Camille Saint-Saëns, Le Cygne, extrait du Carnaval des animaux, Durand, 1887: this early independent edition shows precisely which movement acquired a published life before the rest of the suite and in which instrumental combination.
- Denis Herlin, notes on Le Carnaval des animaux in the booklet for Les Siècles / François-Xavier Roth, harmonia mundi: the letter of February 1886, testimony concerning the première and the path towards complete publication are brought together within a carefully documented historical account.
🔗 Related Works
These compositions open different paths out of the Carnival’s final movements: towards the sound of “bones”, the recognition of an operatic melody, comic self-observation and the theatrical use of an animal image.
- Camille Saint-Saëns — Danse macabre, Op. 40: the xylophone and thematic material offer the most direct key to Fossils, where the composer also turns his humour upon his own earlier music.
- Gioachino Rossini — The Barber of Seville: Rosina’s aria supplies one of the cultivated theatrical memories in the mosaic of Fossils, alongside popular songs.
- Erik Satie — Embryons desséchés: a later satire of a very different temperament, in which musical quotation and unexpected titles invite listeners to question the solemnity of the musical world.
- Sergei Prokofiev — Peter and the Wolf, Op. 67: the association of particular timbres with individual characters offers a later parallel to Saint-Saëns’s imagination, though here it serves a continuous narrative.
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky — Swan Lake, Op. 20: the image of the swan acquires a wholly different theatrical weight; comparison helps prevent the ballet’s dramatic narrative from being projected automatically onto Saint-Saëns’s lyrical miniature.
🎼 Closing Reflection
A carnival ends when the instruments fall silent, yet certain sounds continue to follow us. It may be a scale someone practised again and again, an old song remembered without knowing from where, or a cello line that briefly made the whole celebration fall quiet. In the final parade, all these memories find their place among the others once more.
📖 References & Sources
The analysis of movements XI–XIV draws on the chronology and instrumentation of the first complete score, evidence concerning the first performance, the cataloguing of the independent edition of The Swan and critical discussion of the manuscript variants in Fossils. Images suggested in the act of listening are distinguished from the composer’s historically documented intentions.
Scores and Editions
- Saint-Saëns, Camille. Le Carnaval des animaux: Grande fantaisie zoologique. Paris: Durand & Fils, 1922, plate D. & F. 10,154. First complete edition, published posthumously.
- Saint-Saëns, Camille. Le Carnaval des animaux. Edited by Ernst-Günter Heinemann. Munich: G. Henle Verlag, study score HN 9939.
- Saint-Saëns, Camille. Le Cygne, extrait du Carnaval des animaux: mélodie pour violoncelle et piano. Paris: Durand, 1887.
Primary and Historical Sources
- Saint-Saëns, Camille. Manuscript score of Le Carnaval des animaux, February 1886. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de la Musique, MS-2456 (1–14). Comparison with the first edition for bars 21–24 of Fossils follows Henle’s editorial study.
- Le Messager, 14 March 1886: contemporary report on Lebouc’s Shrovetide concert, as reproduced and documented by Denis Herlin.
Secondary and Institutional Sources
- Herlin, Denis. Notes on Le Carnaval des animaux, in the booklet for Saint-Saëns: Symphonic Poems – Le Carnaval des animaux – L’Assassinat du duc de Guise. Les Siècles, François-Xavier Roth. harmonia mundi, HMM 902614.15.
- G. Henle Verlag. “How do fossils behave? On a passage in Saint-Saëns’ Carnaval des animaux”, 2021: an examination of differences between the manuscript and printed edition.
- Bibliothèque nationale de France. Catalogue records for Le Carnaval des animaux, R 125, and the 1887 edition of Le Cygne.
- Palazzetto Bru Zane. Work entry for “Le Carnaval des animaux”: history of composition, first performance and later circulation.
Selected Discography
- Saint-Saëns, Le Carnaval des animaux. Les Siècles, François-Xavier Roth, harmonia mundi, HMM 902614.15.
- Saint-Saëns, Carnival of the Animals. The Kanneh-Masons, Carnival. Decca Classics, 2020.
Note on the editions: Variants in Fossils make it impossible to attribute every detail of the first complete posthumous edition to the composer with certainty. This analysis rests on the stable aural and structural features of the four movements and notes the specific textual question where it affects interpretation.