Camille Saint-Saëns
The Carnival of the Animals / Le Carnaval des Animaux / Great Zoological Fantasy / Grande Fantaisie zoologique
Complete arrangement for wind quintet – flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon (contrabassoon ad libitum)
The Carnival of the Animals was composed in 1886 in the seclusion of a small Austrian village, where Camille Saint-Saëns had retreated after a concert tour through Germany. The composer had promised his students such a humorous piece as early as 1865, when he taught at the École Niedermeyer.
The Carnival was conceived as a surprise for a Mardi Gras concert given by the French cellist Charles Lebouc. Numerous quotations from the musical literature are woven in with wit — Offenbach's can-can, fittingly used for the tortoises, or the elephant's entrance set to the music of the Dance of the Sylphs from Berlioz's "The Damnation of Faust" and Mendelssohn's "A Midsummer Night's Dream". Fearing he would no longer be taken seriously as a composer, Saint-Saëns forbade public performance of the work a few years later. The only exception was "Le Cygne" (The Swan), the showpiece written for the cellist Lebouc. In his will, Saint-Saëns finally released the entire work for performance.
The arrangement for wind quintet came about at the request of numerous musicians who had already performed my arrangement of Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" for wind quintet and were hoping for a second work that would pair well with it and suit children's concerts.
For the elephant, the use of a contrabassoon is recommended. For the braying of the donkeys (No. 8, "Characters with Long Ears"), a piccolo may be used instead. Since there are no pianists (No. 11), the musicians could instead be introduced as young talents practising on their wind instrument ahead of an important exam.
For copyright reasons, Loriot's German text can only be referenced here, not reproduced. It can be found in the volume "Möpse und Menschen", published by Diogenes Verlag.