Wait, wait, wait.
Camille! Your new shoes have arrived!
Shall I open the parcel?
No no! Leave it!
I’ll take it!
Little does she know...
The better.
For it was not SHOES I ordered…
[Panting]
Hee-haw, hee-haw, hee-haw
Camille! Come downstairs!
Franz Liszt and Gabriel Faure are here for dinner!
Come downstairs now!
Snap out of it, Camille!
Your reputation is EVERYTHING.
Serious composer face.
SERIOUS composer face.
How are the new shoes, Camille?
Just fine, darling.
Just fine.
It’s 1886
and by now 51 years old Camille Saint-Saens
is a serious public figure
A conservative composer of traditional music.
His publishers are expecting his long-awaited
Third Symphony.
And boy do they wait...
and wait...
and wait.
You see, procrastinator Saint-Saens
has a secret fetish for fun;
he’s getting side-tracked
by a totally different composition.
But image-obsessed Saint-Saens thinks it far too lowbrow
to publish for fear of damaging his professional reputation.
Hardly fitting for this darling of the French establishment.
The piece harks back to those days when Saint-Saens
was the number one backing band
for Paris’s trendiest church weddings
those days when he’d dazzle the city’s chic congregations
with insane organ improvisations.
Essentially, his new piece is all frivolity and fun.
It started out as a work for cello
to commemorate the retirement of his cellist
friend Charles Lebouc.
The piece represented a swan gliding elegantly through water
But the concept soon spiralled out of control.
Within days, he’d composed an entire suite of 14 movements,
each relating to a different animal.
A grand zoological fantasy.
You see, Saint-Saens was mad about the natural world:
breeding caterpillars, collecting fossils, studying geology
and nerding-out on astronomy, mathematics and archaeology.
That was HIS idea of fun.
Freaky man-child.
Saint-Saens intended its first performance at Lebouc’s fashionable salon
on Shrove Tuesday at the end of the Paris Carnival.
Better known to the Frenchies as Mardi Gras
So what better way to present the piece
than as a procession of these animals at a CARNIVAL?
He took the gimmick further:
he dressed up the eleven musicians in masks
representing the animals in the piece.
How humiliating.
but THIS was how Carnival of the Animals premiered:
at a private concert for the rarefied few with Lebouc on cello
and Saint-Saens himself at the piano.
The gig was SO successful and further performances followed.
Again, these were private affairs.
But, as word spread of this crazy whimsical piece,
Saint-Saens started to panic.
Enough was enough.
He banned publication and further performances until after his death.
Total killjoy.
But remember:
conservative man, traditional music,
serious image.
The piece opens with two trembling pianos.
They sweep the keys with a grand glissando
before a fanfare announces the start of the carnival.
A majestic theme ushers in the royal march of the lion, king of beasts.
Fierce chromatic scales deep down in the pianos imitate the lion’s roar.
roar
It’s then the turn of the hens and roosters.
Staccato piano emulates the cocks pecking at grain.
The strings impersonate their clucks and squawks.
And THERE’s a cock-a-doodle-doo.
It’s in the style of Baroque composer Jean-Phillipe Rameau
who wrote birdsong-inspired harpsichord pieces.
But Saint-Saens’ depiction is FAR more irreverent
and FAR less elegant, than Rameau's.
Next up: that well-known animal
much-beloved by pet-owners and schoolkids alike
We all know what it is!
The...erm...erm...dziggetai?
Yeah, you know the one –
that wild Mongolian donkey, Dziggetai.
Runs really fast?
Yeah...a bit of a leftfield choice by Saint-Saens
but it does give the two pianos a reason to play
feverishly fast octave runs.
It’s like two donkeys chasing each other at lightning speed.
Now the tortoises arrive.
Very...very...slowly.
They inch forward to the sound of the can-can
Infernal Galop written by another great 19th century composer:
Jacques Offenbach.
But this is no skirt-lifting, leg-flying dance
RATHER, Saint-Saen’s version is epically slowed down
to a lazy, drooping pace.
It’s your grandma doing the can-can,
or...well...simply one of nature’s slowest animals!
Saint-Saens continues the musical comedy with his elephant
It’s a waltzing piano with a big fat lumbering double bass.
The joke here is that the melody is from
Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream
and Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust.
Both are fairy-tale pieces played by the most delicate
and light-toned of instruments:
flute and violin.
Totally unsuitable for a double bass of course
– the heaviest and deepest of stringed instruments.
But totally suitable for representing an elephant.
Now Saint-Saens was a HUGE globetrotter.
If Instagram were a thing back then,
he’d be getting more likes than any lifestyle influencer.
He visited every continent except Australia and Antarctica.
Okay, we’ll forgive him Antarctica.
But we’ll also forgive him Australia because, in fairness,
Saint-Saens does include the kangaroo in his line-up.
The pianos represent their giant leaps with bouncing ‘grace notes’.
The chords get faster and louder as the kangaroos hop and skip.
Slower and softer when they stop to graze.
But now to a dimly-lit, spooky aquarium.
All is calm and tranquil but for the rippling water
as fish swim gently to and fro.
The pianos tinkle in this liquid soundscape.
What a hypocrite Saint-Saens was
for hating on Debussy’s experiments in impressionism!
But he also does something else pretty avant-garde.
Saint-Saens calls for a really unusual instrument
to give this movement its glistening sound.
It’s called a glass harmonica
and was invented by Benjamin Franklin
It’s played by rubbing wet, tuned glass disks.
Like when you get those annoying kids rubbing
the edge of their glasses at the dinner table.
This aquarium movement features in many films and videogames.
It even inspired Alan Menken’s music for the Disney film
Beauty and the Beast.
Menken paid tribute to what was originally a French fairy-tale
with music inspired by this great French composer.
‘Characters with Long Ears’ is what Saint-Saens
called the following movement.
Piercing high notes and low buzzing ones
might make us think of braying donkeys hee-hawing at each other.
But it’s been speculated
that these characters with the long ears are actually
music critics –
that Saint-Saens was taking a dig at them
and portraying them as jackasses.
Saint-Saens neither confirmed nor denied.
Ouch!
We then hear the pianos playing a deadly sombre chorale.
This is the forest from whose mysterious depths
a solitary cuckoo calls out in the clarinet.
Saint-Saens specified the clarinettist should be offstage
to create this distant sound effect.
The cuckoo’s persistent call is supposed to sound humorously absurd,
completely at odds with the solemn pianos.
Next, we hear an entire HOST of birds fluttering in the aviary.
A flute trills across a vast range of notes.
The piano pings, the strings flicker as other birds call out
and swarm the space inside the aviary.
It’s a bird-eat-bird world in there.
Now for what may be the most dangerous animal of all.
Pianists!
Yes, this movement sees Saint-Saens mercilessly lampoon
the choppy manner in which beginner pianists play their scales.
Depending on how you view them,
scales are either an essential musical alphabet for any pianist,
or...just a total pain to practise.
Saint-Saens instructs the pianists to play their scales
really awkwardly and out of time.
It’s a glimpse of all the hard work that few audiences ever get to see.
The pianists then start practicing finger exercises
in the style of Czerny and Hanon.
They’re a nightmare to play.
Trust me.
And the satire is only about to continue.
For the next movement is called ‘Fossils’.
Not actual fossils these, but musical fossils
– musical relics from Saint-Saens time.
So we hear Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,
which actually comes from an old French folk song.
And other nursery rhymes.
He even quotes his own composition, the Danse Macabre,
which he wrote some years previously.
The xylophone evokes the rattling of fossilised
skeleton bones coming alive.
Think: Night at the Museum.
Amongst this ridiculous hodgepodge of classic tunes,
we hear an old French anthem called Leaving for Syria
and even a bit from Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville.
Poor fossil Rossini!
Maybe it’s OK if he’s already dead?
And now for the best-known bit –
– the movement that started it all off:
the swan.
The cello plays a lush, legato – or smooth – melody.
It meanders like the graceful contours of the swan’s neck.
It’s played Andantino Grazio
– a slow, graceful tempo.
The rippling pianos suggest the majestic swan gliding
elegantly through the river foliage.
The rolling chords are its feet:
hidden beneath the water but paddling furiously.
It speaks volumes that this was the ONLY
movement from Carnival of the Animals that Saint-Saens did NOT ban.
This was NO joke –
nothing to be embarrassed about here.
So he permitted its publication.
And it became a staple of the cello repertoire,
sweeping the world when,
20 years later, Anna Pavlova danced to it for her ballet solo
‘The Dying Swan’.
The swan eventually glides away.
Ripples of water are left behind
in a fleeting moment of exquisite beauty.
The finale features the entire menagerie
rushing forward to take their bows.
Each theme returns and the animals go wild.
The work ends with six hee-haws
from those characters with the long ears
the donkeys having the last laugh.
Or is it really the jeering of those music critics?
Yet the truth is that
Saint-Saens had little to worry about from the critics.
Not that he’d ever know.
Because in accordance with his wishes,
the piece was only performed in public in 1922,
after his death.
So Carnival of the Animals revealed
a new side to this conservative composer
of traditional music with a serious image.
Because even in the most serious of us,
there lives a child who loves to play,
be naughty and joke around.
And Saint-Saens?
Well, he knew just
how to have fun after all.
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