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private performances, typically for the French mid-Lent festival of , but Saint-Saëns was adamant that the work would not be published in his lifetime, seeing it as detracting from his "serious" composer image.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
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark journalist said: "If Kraftwerk were the Elvis Presley of synth-pop, then Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark were its Beatles." In 2008, American publication "The A.V. Club" noted that McCluskey and Humphreys were "often labeled as the 'Lennon-McCartney of synth-pop'." In a 2008 piece on OMD, "The Quietus" magazine editor John Doran called them "the only Liverpool band to come near to living up to the monolithic standards of productivity and creativity set in place by the Beatles", and asserted: "Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark are not one of the best synth bands ever: they are one of the best bands