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private performances, typically for the French mid-Lent festival of , but Saint-Saëns was adamant that the work would not be published in his lifetime, seeing it as detracting from his "serious" composer image.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
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