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private performances, typically for the French mid-Lent festival of , but Saint-Saëns was adamant that the work would not be published in his lifetime, seeing it as detracting from his "serious" composer image.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
The Carnival Is Over de Oever van de Rotte". It is played in a cafe scene in the 1988 film "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Tom Springfield adapted the melody from the Russian folk song, and also wrote the lyrics, after a trip to Brazil, where he witnessed the Carnival in Rio. The melody is played repeatedly in an early episode of TV series "The Twilight Zone" – Season 1 Episode 3, entitled "Mr. Denton On Doomsday", first aired in 1959. The playing of "The Carnival Is Over", sung by The Seekers, has been sometimes used at the close of special events in Australia.