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Updated: May 22, 2025
Worthy of especial mention are the delicious "Stars and Angels;" the delightful "A Carriage to Ride In;" "Good King Arthur," a captivating melody, well built on an accompaniment of "God Save the King;" "Birdie's Burial," an elegy of the most sincere pathos, quite worthy of a larger cause, if, indeed, any grief is greater than the first sorrows of childhood; the surprisingly droll "Barley Romance;" "The Broom and the Rod," with its programmatic glissandos to give things a clean sweep; and other delights like the "Rain Song," "The Tomtit Gray," "Mamma's Birthday," and "Christmas at the Door."
While the orchestration is scholarly and mellow, it is not in the least Wagnerian, either in manipulation or in lusciousness. The symphony is not at all programmatic. The Scherzo is of most exuberant gaiety. Imitation is liberally used in the scoring, with a delightfully comic effect as of an altercation. The symphony ends with a dashing finale that is stormy with cheer.
The symphonic poem, whether or not it originates in the overtures of Beethoven, is mainly your handiwork, since although you yourself were not sufficiently free of the classic formulas to create a symphonic form entirely programmatic, as Strauss has subsequently done, you nevertheless gave him the hint whereby he has profited most. The impressionists, too, seem to stem from you.
Hadley is not exactly guilty of the same fatal attempt in his "Lelewala," for the poem is chiefly a story of love and sacrifice; but Niagara comes in as a programmatic incident, and the author of the text has fallen lamentably short of his subject in certain instances. In other moments, he has written with genuine charm, and the music has much that is worth while.
Both pieces are programmatic in bent, and, with excellent wisdom, MacDowell has quoted upon the fly-leaf of the score those portions of the "Song of Roland" from which the conception of the music sprang. Each of the poems which he has selected for illustration has a burden of human emotion which the music reflects with varying success.
It was a somewhat programmatic plan to give a picture of contemporary life in all its various aspects and interrelations under the general title of the Heritage of Cain. This idea was probably derived from Balzac's Comedie Humaine. The whole was to be divided into six subdivisions with the general titles Love, Property, Money, The State, War, and Death.
It was in all sincerity that his publishers placed that decoration there. For there was a moment when Reger excited high hopes. At the time when he appeared, the cause of "absolute" music seemed lost. Musical modernity and the programmatic form had come to seem inseparable. The old classical forms were being supplanted by those of Wagner, Liszt and Strauss.
Even when he turned his back on the absolutists and wrote programmatic music, romantic suites that begin with Debussy-like low flutes and end with trumpet blasts that recall the sunrise music of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," ballet suites that seek to rival the "Carnaval" of Schumann and the waltzes in "Der Rosenkavalier," "Böcklin" suites that pretend to translate into tone some of the Swiss painter's canvases, he only intensified the general ill-will.
Other and former composers, no doubt, had dreamt of making the orchestra more concretely expressive, more precisely narrative and descriptive. The "Pastoral" symphony is by no means the first piece of deliberately, confessedly programmatic music. And before Strauss, both Berlioz and Liszt had experimented with the narrative, descriptive, analytical symphony.
His nearest approach to such diverting expedients as the bleating sheep and the exhilarating wind-machine of "Don Quixote" is in the denotement of the line: "And like a thunderbolt he falls" in his graphic paraphrase of Tennyson's poem, "The Eagle" an indulgence which the most exigent champion of programmatic reserve would probably condone.
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