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 the Netherlands Bruegel, called The Fight Between Carnival and Lent from 1559 (the man with the stick in the jar beneath the figure on the barrel). The Rhenish variant, which is celebrated in the province of Limburg and has an overlap in the eastern part of North Brabant, is based on the carnaval celebrations in cities in the western German state of North Rhine - Westphalia. Especially Cologne, which in turn was based mostly on the carnival of Venice, has had a major impact on the nature of this carnaval. By the end of the 19th century, the carnaval in the Rhineland