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Updated: June 27, 2025
He sought to make a new departure, and, compared to the grandeur of his own composition, "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony appeared like a simple Pleyel Sonata." To facilitate the reading of his astounding score, he wrote it in three kinds of ink red for strings, green for the wood-wind, and black for the brass instruments.
He remarked to Mr. Philip Hale that it was "too full of horns"; and in his own copy of the score, which I possess, he has made in pencil numerous changes in the instrumentation, much to its improvement; he has, for instance, in accord with his expressed feeling, reduced the prominence of the horns, allotting their parts, in certain important instances, to the wood-wind, trombones, or trumpets.
It has been played by the Boston Symphony, and consists of a brilliant Allegro; an Adagio of deep sincerity and beautifully varied color, a period wherein the brass choir, heavily scored, chants alone, and the division of the theme among the wood-wind over the rushing strings is especially effective; a very whimsical Andante with frequent changes of tempo, and soli for the English horn in antiphony with the first oboe; and a madcap Presto that whisks itself out in the first violins.
As an illustration, the opening of the third act may be quoted, in which Elisabeth is represented by the wood-wind by the clarinets and bassoons in the hour of her deep affliction and abasement, and by the flutes and hautboys when her soul has finally cast off all the trammels of earth and Wolfram by the violoncello.
He increased the variety and usefulness of the instruments of percussion, forming out of them a new family of instruments to balance the families of the strings, brass, and wood-wind.
He bought some music paper and started to write a score; that is to say, he wrote a number of long and short notes on the lines, some for the violins, of course, others for the wood-wind, and the remainder for the brass instruments. He sent his work to the Conservatoire. But nobody could play the music, because it was not music, but only notes.
The 'cellos intone the Mélisande theme as Pelléas tells her that he has never seen anyone so beautiful as she; the theme of Ecstasy follows in the strings, horns, and wood-wind, forte; the theme of The Shadows returns as Pelléas again invites her into the darkness beneath the trees; there is a dolorous hint of the Mélisande theme as she says that she is happy, yet sad.
Yet the wood-wind, brass and even the string instruments subsist in a measure on the heritage transmitted by the masters of the past. I often feel that violin teaching to-day endeavors to develop the esthetic sense at too early a stage.
While he began to write more than a dozen dancing women swept into the room from behind the silk hangings in a concerted movement that was all lithe slumberous grace. Wood-wind music called to them from the great deep window as snakes are summoned from their holes, and as cobras answer the charmer's call the women glided to the center and stood poised beneath the punkah.
He springs from his couch, tears the bandages from his body; the blood streams from his wound; he staggers to the middle of the stage as he hears Isolde's voice and sinks into her arms as she enters. The love-motive is heard in the wood-wind like a long dying breath as, breathing the word "Isolde," he expires.
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