The Carnival of the Animals

The Carnival of the Animals was written in February 1886 during a rest in a village in Austria, as a private joke for a Shrove Tuesday concert among friends, and it is full of jokes at other composers' expense — Offenbach's can-can slowed to a crawl for the tortoises, Berlioz and Mendelssohn quoted in the fossils, and pianists classed as a species requiring practice. Saint-Saëns thought it would damage his standing as a serious composer and forbade publication in his lifetime, allowing only The Swan to appear. The full score came out in 1922, a year after his death.