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
Who Wrote The Dead Sea Scrolls? Hartmut Stegemann. "Qumran und das Judentum zur Zeit Jesu" 84 (1994): 175-94 as basing "his support of the Essene hypothesis of factors of hierarch, initiation rites, community of goods, ritual baths, a common meal and views on marriage as well as calendar." They then refer to the alternative estimate of Golb, "that the scrolls came from Jerusalem to a fortress in Qumran during the siege of Jerusalem around 70 CE Who Wrote The Dead Sea Scrolls? Who Wrote The Dead Sea Scrolls?: The Search For The Secret Of Qumran is a book by Norman Golb which intensifies the debate over