The Carnival of the Animals on 2 April at the home of Pauline Viardot with an audience including Franz Liszt, a friend of the composer, who had expressed a wish to hear the work. There were other private performances, typically for the French mid-Lent festival of , but Saint-Saëns was adamant that the work would not be published in his lifetime, seeing it as detracting from his "serious" composer image. He relented only for the famous cello solo "The Swan", which forms the penultimate movement of the work, and which was published in 1887 in an arrangement by the composer for cello and solo piano
Wyclef Jean Presents The Carnival called "The Carnival" "a stunning solo album that's light years beyond "The Score"". He also wrote "In his universalist embrace of music of all forms, Wyclef Jean makes a more powerful call for peace and unity than a thousand East Coast-West Coast "Stop the violence, y'all" intros put together.""The Carnival" was voted the sixteenth best album of the year in "The Village Voice"s annual Pazz & Jop critics poll for 1997. Christgau, the poll's creator, ranked it twentieth on his own list. In 2011, "Rolling Stone" ranked "The Carnival" the 69th best album of the 1990s. "The Carnival" debuted at