Jessica Duchen guides us creature by creature through Saint-saëns’s perpetually popular musical menagerie

As the centenary of Saint-saëns’s death is marked at the Proms by a performance of his Carnival of the Animals, Jessica Duchen takes us on a creature-by-creature guide to this character-packed musical menagerie

Saint-saëns’s The Carnival of the Animals, a ‘Grande fantaisie zoologique’ no less, lands with all four paws in the territory of the most popular pieces ever created. Through its pages its creatures roar, twitter, swim, rattle, bray, scamper and practise their scales with such joy and relish that it could only have been created by a mind whose freshness and imagination was second-to-none.

Saint-saëns was unusual among composers for being a veritable polymath. He was an expert mathematician, zoologist, botanist, fossil hunter and amateur astronomer, and was intensely inspired by the world of nature, however Parisian he might seem at first hearing. On one occasion, he used the proceeds of some duos for harmonium and piano to commission a telescope constructed to his own specifications so he could examine the stars from his rooftop in the rue du Faubourg Saint-honoré.

As a child he was almost impossibly precocious – and fiercely schooled to make the most of it, raised for stardom by his mother and great aunt following his father’s early death. He composed his first piece aged three and gave his first piano recital two years later. Making his formal concert debut aged 11 (pictured left), he offered to play as an encore, from memory, any one of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas. Later Berlioz, on the jury of the Prix de Rome – which Saint-saëns had entered, but failed to win, being already too famous – quipped ‘he knows everything, but lacks inexperience’.

Berlioz may have had a point: Saint-saëns never had a chance to learn slowly. Everything came to him rather easily, to put it mildly, and his music’s bravado and confidence flows within its rigorous, well