Stories of Symphonic Music

Table of Contents

PREFACE

Most concert-goers have observed, at performances of modern orchestral works of a descriptive character, the efforts of many persons in the audience to extract from programme notes and analyses information as to the dramatic or pictorial or poetic meaning of the music to which they were listening. A search for enlightenment under such conditions necessarily leads to disappointment, since it is either pursued distractedly while the music is actually in progress, or during the brief and unpropitious leisure of an intermission. The design of this book is to offer in compact and accessible form such information as will enable the intending concert-goer to prepare himself, in advance, to listen comprehendingly to those symphonic works of a suggestive or illustrative nature, from Beethoven to the present day, which are part of the standard orchestral repertoire, and such others as seem likely to become so—to serve, in effect, as a guide to modern orchestral programme-music. For convenience of indication, the designation "tone poems," as used in the sub-title, is employed in its broadest significance to characterize all modern delineative music for orchestra in the freer forms, whether it be a symphonic poem by Liszt, a "legend" by d'Indy, a suite by Charpentier, a "sketch" by Debussy, or the precise thing described by Strauss as a Tondichtung.

No exclusively musical analysis of the works discussed is attempted, since it is aimed merely to give the concert-goer such information concerning their illustrative purpose as will enable him to place himself in an intelligent attitude towards their performance. Nor has the author indulged in speculative "interpretations" of any sort regarding the poetic content of these works; he has confined himself in every case to setting forth only such facts and clews as have been ascertained or justifiably inferred.

An exhaustive cataloguing of modern programme-music has not been attempted. It has been thought worth while to include only such works of importance as the American concert-goer is likely to find upon the programmes of symphony concerts in this country. Thus such submerged or moribund or otherwise negligible music as Schumann's forgotten overture, "Julius Cæsar," Berlioz's overture to "Waverley," Rubinstein's character-pictures, "Faust" and "Ivan IV.," Liszt's "Hamlet," Beethoven's "King Stephen" and "Battle of Vittoria," have been permitted to remain unexpounded. [1]

A book such as this must necessarily be largely of the nature of a compilation, since, in the case of the older works in the concert-repertoire, it must make use of information already obtained and recorded. It is believed, however, that it may supply a want hitherto unfulfilled in that, particularly, it assembles in convenient shape information concerning important contemporary works which exists, at present, only in a scattered and more or less unavailable condition.

In justification of its purpose, the author may be permitted to say that he considers it absurd and illogical that the concert-goer should, as some assert, be asked to listen to a piece of descriptive music in ignorance of its literary or pictorial or dramatic basis. He heartily agrees with Mr. Ernest Newman, who has written with unsurpassed acumen and force concerning programme-music and its principles, when he asserts that "if the poem or the picture was necessary to the composer's imagination, it is necessary to mine; if it is not necessary to either of us, he has no right to affix the title of it to his work; ... if melody, harmony, and development are all shaped and directed by certain pictures in the musician's mind, we get no further than the mere outside of the music unless we are familiar with those pictures." A title, it is true, is sometimes sufficient as a spur to the hearer's imagination—as in the case, for example, of such broadly impressionistic music as Claude Debussy's "The Sea," the various movements of which bear these subsidiary titles: "From Dawn till Noon on the Sea"; "Frolics of Waves"; "Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea." But what would the hearer, unacquainted with the subject which provoked it, make of Debussy's "Prelude to 'The Afternoon of a Faun,'" did not the appended sub-title—"Eclogue of S. Mallarmé"—direct him to the source of the composer's inspiration, the fantastic and singular poem of the French symbolist? Even in the case of descriptive music based upon an exceedingly familiar subject, the title alone may be insufficient. In the case, for instance, of Edward MacDowell's symphonic poem, "Lancelot and Elaine," the composer offers his listener merely the title. He has said, indeed, that he "never would have insisted that this symphonic poem need mean 'Lancelot and Elaine' to every one." Yet if he intended this music, as it is known that he did, to describe certain definite and particular incidents in the story of Lancelot and the Maid of Astolat—as the tournament, Lancelot's downfall, his interview with Guinevere, the passing of the funeral barge—it obviously could not, without a sacrifice of psychological and dramatic consistency, coincide with any other sequence of happenings which the uninstructed listener might choose to substitute. To tell the hearer that he is at liberty to interpret a piece of avowed and detailed descriptive music according to any "programme" which may happen to occur to him, is, in principle, precisely like playing for him on the piano a new and unknown song, and telling him that he may fit to it any words he chooses.

It cannot be too positively insisted upon that, as Mr. Newman has pointedly observed, a piece of eloquent delineative music cannot be equally understood and appreciated by the man who knows and the man who does not know its programme. Mr. Newman concedes, of course, the fact that such a work as Tschaikowsky's overture, "Romeo and Juliet," would undoubtedly "give intense pleasure to any one who listened to it as a piece of music, pure and simple." "But I deny," he continues, "that this hearer would receive as much pleasure from the work as I do. He might think the passage for muted strings, for example, extremely beautiful, but he would not get from it such delight as I, who not only feel all the musical loveliness of the melody and the harmonies and the tone color, but see the lovers on the balcony and breathe the very atmosphere of Shakespeare's scene. I am richer than my fellow by two or three emotions in a case of this kind. My nature is stirred on two or three sides instead of only one. I would go further and say that not only does the auditor I have supposed get less pleasure from the work than I, but he really does not hear Tschaikowsky's work at all. If the musician writes music to a play and invents phrases to symbolize the characters and to picture the events of the play, we are simply not listening to his work at all if we listen to it in the ignorance of his poetical scheme. We may hear the music, but it is not the music he meant us to hear"—which is simply a more telling and vivid statement of a truth which Berlioz enunciated more than three score and ten years ago in a prefatory note to his Symphonie fantastique: "The plan of an instrumental drama, being without words, requires to be explained beforehand. The programme (which is indispensable to the perfect comprehension of the dramatic plan of the work) ought therefore to be considered in the light of the spoken text of an opera, serving to ... indicate the character and expression."

It should be said, in conclusion, that these elucidations—if they may hopefully be regarded as such—are addressed, not to the professional student of music, but to the intelligent concert-goer who desires to listen understandingly, and with adequate appreciation, to those works which are intended not merely to appeal to his perception of beautiful sound and beautiful form, but which set before him, for the education of his heart or the delight of his spirit, some notable and intense impression of the human drama or the visible world.

The writer is indebted for the information accumulated in the following pages to so many sources—biographies, autobiographies, scores in print and in manuscript, and enlightenment personally and most helpfully supplied by the composers of various contemporary works—that he finds it difficult to avow them with adequate particularity. He has consulted (to name but a few such authorities) Riemann's Musik-Lexikon, the "Oxford History of Music," Apthorp and Champlin's "Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians," Fétis' Biographie Universelle des Musiciens, Grove's "Dictionary of Music and Musicians," Schumann's "Music and Musicians," Wagner's Prose Works, and—for records and details not generally accessible—the exceedingly valuable programme-notes prepared for the concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, during the last six years, by Mr. Philip Hale, and, before him, by Mr. W. F. Apthorp.

L. G.

DIXVILLE NOTCH, NEW HAMPSHIRE, SEPTEMBER, 1907.

STORIES OF
SYMPHONIC MUSIC

THE ORCHESTRA AS POET, PAINTER, AND DRAMATIST

"How can an orchestra, without the aid of voices or pantomime or scenery, tell the story of Don Quixote, paint a picture of the sea, or describe the visions of a dying man?" asks an intelligent but somewhat puzzled layman. "I have always thought of instrumental music," he goes on to say, "as the art of arranging tones according to more or less binding laws of design and effect; and yet I hear constant talk nowadays of the 'expressive capacity' of music, its ability to paint pictures, tell stories, enact dramas. What, briefly, is meant by the 'expressive (or pictorial or descriptive) capacity' of music?" Perhaps it may be possible to tell him—"briefly," as he requests.

Music in the old days—the days before Beethoven, let us say—was, outside of the church and the opera-house, primarily an art of pure design. The musician of those days was concerned mainly with the arrangement of tones according to certain well-defined rules and conventions, to the end of producing a euphonious and beautiful pattern of sound. The symphonies of Mozart, the early symphonies of Beethoven, had no other aim than to be beautiful. Music was then, as has been aptly said, a species of "sensuous mathematics." The musician who, in the year 1797, set out to compose a symphony, proceeded according to very definite rules. He must invent what was called a "first theme," usually rather vigorous and assertive in character, and a "second theme," of contrasting character—usually of a gentler and more feminine quality. These themes were then developed at length—presented in different keys, altered as to rhythm, harmony, and instrumentation, in whatever manner was made possible by the composer's skill and the fertility of his invention. Finally, the two themes were recalled in their original state, and the first movement of the symphony was at an end. The composer had accomplished a complete musical organism in what was called, among his craft, "sonata form." He might then proceed with the other movements of his symphony, which must also be constructed according to certain specific laws. Always he must proceed according to rule. His "second theme," for example, must be sounded in a key which bore a hard-and-fast relationship to the key of his "first theme"; and if his symphony began, let us say, in F major, it must end in F major, or in some closely related key. It would never for a moment have occurred to him—this excellent eighteenth-century music-maker—to begin a serious composition in F major and end it, say, in C-sharp minor: that would have seemed an aberration of the most preposterous kind.

Our eighteenth-century instrumental composer, then, was a builder of tonal edifices of a very plain and solid kind, which must be proportioned and fashioned strictly according to rule. Moreover, his constructive material, so to speak, was of the sparest. His range of harmony was extremely small, his melodic patterns were simple in outline and of limited expressiveness, his rhythms were square-cut and obvious, his orchestral technique of the most meagre order. There were, it is true, composers prior to the nineteenth century who wrote a crude kind of orchestral programme-music [2]— music which aimed to describe scenes and events, to picture aspects of nature and definite states of mind. Karl von Dittersdorf (1739-1799) composed a number of symphonies descriptive of Ovid's "Metamorphoses"—"The Downfall of Phaëton," "Acteon's Transformation into a Deer," "Andromeda's Rescue by Perseus," "Phineus with his Friends in the Mountains." Justin Heinrich Knecht (1752-1817) anticipated certain features of the "Pastoral" symphony in his "Tableau musical de la nature," composed when Beethoven was fourteen years old; and Haydn gave to certain of his multiple symphonies naively indicative titles—"The Hunt," "The Morning," "Fire." But such manifestations of the "programmatic" tendency bore little relation to the really serious and important musical art of the period. The symphonist of Haydn's day little dreamed of a time when men of his trade would erect tonal structures of strange and fantastic shape, from materials whose rarity and richness were beyond his conception; and that within these gorgeous and curiously wrought structures, dramas of human passion and emotion, comedies and tragedies, would be enacted for other men to see and to be moved thereby.

Yet that is what happened. As the years went by musicians began to discern that the art in which they were working contained singular and unsuspected possibilities. They began, by laborious and slow experiment, and by unconscious inspiration, to evolve new harmonies, more subtle and complex than the old, which thrilled them oddly; their melodies took on a freer, more pliant, more expressive character; their rhythms became more varied and supple, their instrumentation richer, fuller, more complex. Then it dawned upon them that this art of theirs, which had been but a kind of inspired and innocent pattern-weaving, might be made to express definite emotions, moods, experiences, even many things in the material world, without the aid of scenery, singers, or singing-actors. They found that certain combinations and sequences of tones could be made to convey to the hearer certain more or less definite feelings and ideas: that minor harmonies, in slow and grave rhythms, suggested grief or depression; and that, conversely, harmonies in the major mode, in rapid and energetic movement, suggested gaiety, or jubilation, or relief. And then, of course, there were directly imitative effects which might be employed to suggest an aspect of nature or to aid in the telling of a story—the songs of birds, the whistling of wind, the crash of thunder, the rhythmic tramping of armies, the trumpets and drums of martial conflict, the horn fanfares of the chase; for all these things suggested easily and naturally their analogies in tone.

But it soon became evident to the composer that no matter how intense and vivid his music might be, it could be made to express, unaided, only general emotions, moods, passions. He could say—as does Chopin, for example, in the funeral march in his B-flat minor sonata—"I am sad"; but he could not say why he was sad; he could not say, "I am sad because my mother has died," or "because my country has been vanquished." So, to supply this need—to make it possible for his music to speak both eloquently and concretely—the composer called in the aid of the written and associated word, and the miracle was accomplished. Upon the score of his symphony or his "tone-poem" he wrote, for example, the title "Don Quixote"; this title he made known to his audience; and the hearers, with this clew, were thus made aware that they were listening to an expression in tones—tones of a kind unimagined by Haydn or Mozart, tones of marvellous poignancy and vividness—of the dreams and longings and passions and griefs of a particular person whose story they intimately knew: the definite emotions and events of a definite drama, rich in comedy, pathos, tenderness, and human fascination.

This, then, is the miracle of modern "programme-music"; this is why we say of it that it is capable of voicing comedy or tragedy, pathos or ecstasy; this is why, in brief, we may speak of its "expressive capacity."

The growth of the art in this direction has been as steady as it has been amazing. Music, with Haydn and Mozart (it is always to be remembered that we are discussing here only symphonic music) was, as has been said, largely a weaving of tonal arabesques, innocent of meaning or definite expression. The great Beethoven came, and transformed its naïve tones into new and powerful sonorities, developing, expanding, discovering, until he had endowed it with a novel and unfamiliar eloquence. Schubert followed him, adding new effects of harmony, new and unparalleled ways of grouping tones, and filling the art with a fresh and wonderful exuberance, making it sing with a new tenderness and ecstasy. He left it a richer, a more amply expressive medium than he had found it. Came Berlioz, a master of orchestral utterance, of orchestral delineation. He made of music the handmaid of romance and passion as he found them in the world's dramas and poems and novels. Franz Liszt, a man of fervid imagination and intrepid individuality, added still other notes to the instrument—enlarged its compass, increased its sonority. Under him the symphony renounced its strict allegiance to the classic forms and became frankly a medium of dramatic and poetic expression. He made a thing which he called a "symphonic poem," in which the music was conceived and evolved, not in accordance with those classic rules of form of which we have spoken, but in accordance with the outlines of a chosen poem or a drama; so that he was able to illustrate in music, with the aid of title or descriptive text, the story of Hamlet or the Divine Comedy or Orpheus or Tasso or Prometheus. Wagner, though his field was not the concert-room, but the opera-house, so enlarged the possibilities of tonal speech as to make of it virtually a new language. His genius yielded, with magical fertility, a bewildering wealth of novel harmonic, melodic, and orchestral ideas—ideas which have been appropriated to the music of the concert-hall by all those who have followed him.

And so we come to the music of our own time, which is but a logical and inevitable result of a century of growth and evolution. What, above all, is characteristic of it? First, its devotion to a "programme"—to a literary or dramatic or pictorial subject. Our modern tone-poet—as we aptly call him—having found ready to his hand an art which can convey with extraordinary vividness moods of longing and despair, ecstasy and jubilation, must make it still more specific and articulate. He writes a huge orchestral work and calls it, let us say, "Death and Transfiguration," presenting with it an elaborate poem descriptive of the agonies and hallucinations, the memories and visions, of a dying man. He then invites us to find in his music a description, which he produces by means of every harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, and orchestral device at his command, of the subject which he has set before us. To achieve his end—to express all those varied emotions of anguish, terror, longing, despair, aspiration, triumph—he stops at nothing: he heaps dissonance upon dissonance, he writes in several keys at once, he assaults our ears with what would have seemed to the placid soul of Haydn the pandemonium of a mad-house. Yet, if he be a genius, we are swayed and enthralled. We even derive a double pleasure from this new kind of art-work, which is at once music and drama.

Such, in brief, is the method of the modern "tone-poet." He is, as has been said, both musician and dramatist, symphonist and poet. Nor is this all: he can be a painter as well, and can, by the aid of suggestion and the broad analogies of his tonal palette, limn for us with his instruments such an exquisite and magical picture of the dawn as Charles Martin Loeffler paints in his orchestral fantasy after Verlaine, "La Bonne Chanson"; or such a portrait as is limned by Strauss, in his "Don Quixote," of the crack-brained and lovable knight of Cervantes. Music, to-day, can annotate the art of the painter—as witness the symphonic commentary by the Swiss composer, Hans Huber, on certain paintings by Böcklin; it can be sportively delineative of personalities—as witness Sir Edward Elgar's orchestral characterization of the peculiarities of various of his friends; it can be portentously metaphysical, as in Strauss's formidable "Also Sprach Zarathustra": it has become, in brief, "a tongue of all life."

BANTOCK

(Granville Bantock: born in London, August 7, 1868; now living in Birmingham, England)

TONE-POEM, "THE WITCH OF ATLAS" [3]

This tone-poem is noteworthy, aside from its intrinsic quality, for the completeness with which it fulfils the obligations imposed by logic and consistency upon the writer of programme-music. Here is an orchestral work inspired by certain portions of Shelley's poem—a musical illustration of various passages which in themselves contain the imaginative essence of that extraordinary fantasy. But the composer has not been content merely to tell us that his music is a tone-poem "after Shelley"; he has gone further: he has quoted as a preface to the score the precise passages in the poem which suggested his music; and opposite each passage he has placed a key-letter, which refers to a duplicate printed at the beginning of the corresponding illustrative passage in the music. That is to say, he has enabled us to follow him throughout the entire course of his musical exposition, not dubiously and by guesswork, but with certitude and intelligent comprehension. We are not put to it to decide whether, for example, the mellifluous andante passage for four horns, in the middle section of the work, is intended as an illustration of the lines in the poem descriptive of the "green and over-arching bower" inhabited by those who had received the Witch's panacea, or of the lines which celebrate the radiance of her beauty: we know precisely what it is intended to represent, and are in a position not only to feel its effect as sheer music, but to appreciate its expressive force.[4]

Prefaced to the score are these excerpts from Shelley's poem; they are quoted here together with an indication of the character of the music which introduces each corresponding section of the tone-poem:

PRELUDE, "SAPPHO"[7]

This is an orchestral preface to nine fragments from Sappho set to music for contralto and orchestra, and "indicating," says the composer, "emotional moods of the Greek poetess as an introduction to her songs." The verses set to music by Mr. Bantock are (1) the famous Hymn to Aphrodite, and the fragments beginning as follows: (2) "I loved thee once, Atthis, long ago";[8] (3) "Evening, thou bringest all"; (4) "Stand face to face, friend"; (5) "The moon has set"; (6) "Peer of Gods he seems"; (7) "In a dream I spake"; (8) Bridal Song—"O fair, O lovely!" (9) "Muse of the golden throne." [9]

The Prelude is constructed of themes taken from certain of the songs to which it serves as an introduction. It opens with harp-chords, in the manner of an improvisation, derived from the setting of the ninth Fragment:

"Muse of the golden throne,
O raise thy strain...."

This is repeated; then follows, after some intervening measures, an expressive phrase sung by violins, 'cellos, horn, and bassoon, which, in the setting of the fifth Fragment, accompanies the words:

"I yearn and seek, I know not what to do,
And I flutter like a child after her mother."

There is a crescendo, leading to a fortissimo proclamation by the trumpet of a theme from the ninth Fragment ("Muse of the Golden Throne"), followed by the impassioned theme (for violins and trumpet) which, towards the close of the fifth Fragment, underscores the lines:

"Yea, Eros shakes my soul, yea, Eros,
A wind on the mountain falling on the oaks."

This leads directly into a climactic outburst for full orchestra, on a theme borrowed from the sixth Fragment:

"Dare I to love thee?"

A languishing passage follows (strings, wood-wind, and horns), taken from the setting of the words (in the sixth Fragment):

"Sight have I none, nor hearing, cold dew bathes me,
Paler than grass I am, and in my madness
Seem as one dead."

There is a brief crescendo, then the conclusion, of gradually subsiding intensity. The music is almost note for note that of the seventh Fragment:

"Delicate Adonis is dying; what shall we do?
Beat your breasts, maidens, and rend your tunics!
Ah, for Adonis!
The Dawn shall see thee no more,
Nor dark-eyed Sleep, the daughter of Night,
Ah, for Adonis!" [10]

(Ludwig van Beethoven: born in Bonn, December 16, 1770; died in Vienna, March 26, 1827)

SYMPHONY No. 3. "EROICA": Op. 55

On the score of the MS. of Beethoven's "Eroica Symphony" in the Bibliothek at Vienna appear these words:

"Sinfonia grande
Napoleon Bonaparte...."

and thereby hang many tales.

Anton Schindler,[11] the close friend and biographer of Beethoven, wrote at length in his famous Life of the symphonist concerning the origin of the Eroica. In the autumn of 1802, says Schindler, Beethoven resumed a plan which he had formed of doing homage to Napoleon, the hero of the day, "in a grand instrumental work," and set about its execution. "But it was not till the following year that he applied himself in good earnest to that gigantic composition, known by the title of Sinfonia Eroica, which, however, in consequence of various interruptions, was not finished till 1804.... The original idea of that symphony is said to have been suggested by General Bernadotte, who was then French ambassador at Vienna, and had a high esteem for our Beethoven....

"In his political sentiments Beethoven was a republican; the spirit of independence natural to a genuine artist gave him a decided bias that way. Plato's Republic was transfused into his flesh and blood, and upon the principles of that philosopher he reviewed all the constitutions in the world. He wished all institutions to be modelled upon the plan prescribed by Plato. He lived in the firm belief that Napoleon entertained no other design than to republicanize France upon similar principles, and thus, as he conceived, a beginning would be made for the general happiness of the world. Hence his respect and enthusiasm for Napoleon.

"A fair copy of the musical work for the First Consul of the French Republic, the conqueror of Marengo, with the dedication to him, was on the point of being despatched through the French embassy to Paris, when the news arrived in Vienna that Napoleon Bonaparte had caused himself to be proclaimed Emperor of the French. The first thing Beethoven did on receiving this intelligence was to tear the title-leaf off the symphony (on it were written the words 'Napoleon Bonaparte') and then fling the work itself, with a torrent of execrations against the French Emperor—against the new 'tyrant'—upon the floor, from which he would not allow it to be lifted. [12]

"It was a long time before Beethoven recovered from the shock, and permitted this work to be given to the world.... I shall only add that it was not till the tragic end of the great Emperor at St. Helena that Beethoven was reconciled with him and remarked that, seventeen years before, he had composed appropriate music to the catastrophe, in which it was exactly predicted musically, but unwittingly—alluding to the Dead March in the symphony."

When the symphony was first performed in public under Beethoven's direction, at the Theater an der Wien, April 7, 1805, it was announced on the programme as "A new grand Symphony in D-sharp by Herr Ludwig van Beethoven, dedicated to his excellence Prince von Lobkowitz." In October of the following year the symphony was published with this title and motto:

Sinfonia Eroica.... Composta per festeggiare il Sovvenire di un grand Uomo

("Heroic Symphony.... Composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.")

Interpreters innumerable have attempted to read the meaning of this baffling symphony, with its funeral march followed perplexingly by a gay scherzo and an energetic and jubilant finale. For Adolph Marx (1799-1866) the dirge pictured a battle-field at night, covered with the silent bodies of the dead; the scherzo told of the rejoicings of the homeward-bound soldiers; in the finale was the consecration of victory by Peace. Berlioz found the scherzo and finale akin to the rites celebrated by Homer's warriors over a dead hero. Still another elucidation, in which the license of the interpreter is more than a little stretched, found the first movement to convey "a grand idea of Napoleon's determination of character." The second movement is "descriptive of the funeral honors paid to one of his favorite generals," the "winding up" of which represents "the faltering steps of the last gazers into the grave"; while the finale offers "a combination of French revolutionary airs"! But no one has viewed this symphony more sympathetically or more consistently than did Wagner in an article contributed to a series of papers "On the poetic contents of Beethoven's tone-works," published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, in 1852.

"The designation 'heroic,'" he wrote, "is to be taken in its widest sense, and in no wise to be conceived as relating merely to a military hero. If we broadly connote by 'hero' ('Held') the whole, the full-fledged man, in whom are present all the purely human feelings—of love, of grief, of force—in their highest fill and strength, then we shall rightly grasp the subject which the artist lets appeal to us in the speaking accents of his tone-work. The artistic space of this work is filled with all the varied, inter crossing feelings of a strong, a consummate individuality, to which nothing human is a stranger, but which includes within itself all truly human, and utters it in such a fashion that, after frankly manifesting every noble passion, it reaches a final rounding of its nature, wherein the most feeling softness is wedded with the most energetic force. The heroic tendency of this art work is the progress towards that rounding off."

For him the first movement "embraces, as in a glowing furnace, all the emotions of a richly gifted nature in the heyday of unresting youth ... yet all these feelings spring from one main faculty—and that is Force ... we see a Titan wrestling with the Gods."

In the second movement—the Funeral March—"this shattering force" reaches the "tragic crisis" towards which it was rushing. The tone-poet clothes its proclamation in the musical apparel of a Funeral march. Emotion tamed by deep grief, moving in solemn sorrow, tells us its tale in stirring tones.

"Force robbed of its destructive arrogance—by the chastening of its deep sorrow—the Third Movement shows in all its buoyant gaiety. Its wild unruliness has shaped itself to fresh, to blithe activity; we have before us now this lovable, glad man, who paces hale and hearty through the fields of Nature."

The finale shows us the man entire [that is to say, as Wagner somewhat ponderously explains, a combination of the two sides hitherto shown—the "deeply, stoutly suffering man," and the "gladly, blithely doing man"] harmoniously "at one with self, in these emotions where the memory of Sorrow becomes itself the shaping force of noble deeds.... The whole, the total Man now shouts to us the avowal of his Godhood."

OVERTURE TO "CORIOLANUS": Op. 62

This overture, composed in 1807, was published in the following year. The original manuscript is inscribed: "Overtura (Zum Trauerspiel Coriolan), composta da L. v. Beethoven." The "tragedy" here indicated for which it was written is not the "Coriolanus" of Shakespeare, but the "Coriolan" of Heinrich Joseph von Collin, a contemporary of Beethoven, who filled the post of Secretary at the Austrian Court. In their main outlines, the plays of Collin and of Shakespeare are alike, with, however, this prime difference—the Coriolanus of Shakespeare is slain, while the death of Collin's hero is self-inflicted. According to Wagner, this overture is a tone-picture of the scene—"the most decisive of all"—between Coriolanus, his mother, and wife, in the enemy's camp before the gates of his native city. But the most pointed and illuminating guide to the contents of Beethoven's music will be found in these brief sentences written in elucidation of the overture by Mr. H. E. Krehbiel: "One may forget both plays [Collin's and Shakespeare's] while listening to Beethoven, and go back to Plutarch and the Greek tragic poets for the elements of the music. They are the monumental ones illustrated in the 'Prometheus' of Æschylus and the 'Œdipus' of Sophocles. Like Prometheus, Œdipus, Ajax, and Pentheus, Coriolanus becomes insolent in his pride and goes to destruction. He is noble, kind, good, courageous, but vainglorious in his pride of ancestry, position, and achievement; and he falls. The elements in his character to which Beethoven has given marvellously eloquent proclamation are his pride, which leads him to refuse to truckle to the plebeian tribunes; his rage which had stomach for the destruction of Rome, and his tenderness which makes him yield to the tears of mother and wife and brings death to him. The moods are two; the first is published in the stupendous unisono C of the introduction and the angry principal subject; the second, in the gentle and melodious second theme. The overture dies with mutterings in the depths; with pride unbroken."

SYMPHONY No. 6, "PASTORAL": Op. 68

The "Pastoral" symphony, composed in the summer of 1808, is the first example of symphonic programme-music by a great master. Its illustrative purpose is frankly proclaimed by the descriptive titles which head the separate movements as follows:

1. AWAKENING OF JOYFUL IMPRESSIONS ON ARRIVING IN THE COUNTRY

(Allegro ma non troppo)

2. SCENE BY THE BROOK

(Andante molto moto)

3. MERRY GATHERING OF COUNTRY-FOLK

(Allegro)

4. THUNDER-STORM

(Allegro)

5. SHEPHERD'S SONG; GLAD AND THANKFUL FEELINGS AFTER THE STORM

(Allegretto)