The Carnival of the Animals and xylophone. From the beginning, Saint-Saëns regarded the work as a piece of fun. On 9 February 1886 he wrote to his publishers Durand in Paris that he was composing a work for the coming Shrove Tuesday, and confessing that he knew he should be working on his Third Symphony, but that this work was "such fun" (). He had apparently intended to write the work for his students at the École Niedermeyer, but it was first performed at a private concert given by the cellist Charles Lebouc on Shrove Tuesday, 9 March 1886. A second (private) performance was given
Carnival in Bern record show that the genre came to an end by the late 1530s. Having been banned during the 16th century, Bern had no carnival for a long time. Instead, residents traveled to Basel or the Lucerne to enjoy carnival. In the 1970s the idea of bringing carnival back to Bern began to grow, and was first initiated with a children's carnival. In 1982 the era of the modern carnival began. Now, the Bernese Fasnacht is the third largest carnival in Switzerland although the carnivals in Basel and Lucerne have a longer or "more extravagant tradition". Carnival in Bern runs for