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private performances, typically for the French mid-Lent festival of , but Saint-Saëns was adamant that the work would not be published in his lifetime, seeing it as detracting from his "serious" composer image.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 Italy. The carnival of Venice was for a long time the most famous carnival (although Napoleon abolished it in 1797 and only in 1959 the tradition was restored). From Italy carnival traditions spread to the Catholic nations of Spain, Portugal, and France. From France it spread to New France in North America (the mardi gras). From Spain and Portugal, it spread with Catholic colonization to the Caribbean and Latin America. In the early 19th century the weakened medieval tradition started to revive as well in the German Rhineland and Southern Netherlands. In 1823 the first modern carnaval parade took place