Saint-Saëns’s The Carnival of the Animals, one 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. Parts of the piece sprang naturally from the explorations of the French baroque. The era of the claveçinists was full of evocations of birdsong: Couperin’s Le coucou and Rameau’s Le rappel des oiseaux are just a few examples of the former. We can find barking dogs and spring-happy birds in Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, donkey sounds in Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a priceless Duetto buffo di due gatti (the ‘Cat Duet’) attributed to Rossini, bird-calls galore in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, and a wood-bird in Wagner’s Siegfried – to say nothing of the swan in Lohengrin. Saint-Saëns was so worried about the harm this plaisanterie might do to his reputation as a serious composer, that after two private performances he placed it under lock and key where it remained until after his death. Only one movement survived this embargo: The Swan.