Programme
To Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, December 22, 1808.
- Agreeable sensations upon visiting the country.
- Scene at a brook’s side.
- Merry gathering of country people.
- Thunder and storm.
- Happy and grateful emotions after the storm.
More emotional than descriptive.
Expression rather than representation of feeling.
Programme
To a Prize Symphony, by Joachim Raff, performed in Vienna, 1863.
- D major. Allegro.
- Portrait of the German character,—its capability of elevation, proneness to Reflection, Gentleness and Valor, as contrasts that blend with and permeate one another in manifold ways—overpowering proneness to meditation.
- D minor. Allegro molto vivace.
- In the open air, in the German grove, with the sound of horns, Away to the fields, with the songs of the people.
- D major. Larghetto.
- Gathering round the domestic hearth, transfigured by love and the Muses.
- G minor. Allegro-dramatico.
- Ineffectual struggle to establish the unity of the fatherland.
- D minor. Lament. D major. Allegro trionfale.
- Opening of a new and elevated era.
[19] Although our recitative is formed after the recitative of the ancient drama, yet the latter, according to all accounts, appears to have been very different from our opera recitative, and to have had greater resemblance to the monotonous recitation of the Romish Liturgy, which seems to be a relic of ancient art.
APPENDIX
STRUCTURE OF THE VOCAL ORGANS
The larynx is a sound-giving organ belonging to that class of wind instruments called reed instruments, although it differs in various respects from all artificial arrangements of the kind. The sound or tone-generating apparatus of the larynx consists of tense, elastic membranes, the so-called chordæ vocales, which are enclosed in a sounding case composed of movable cartilaginous plates, and may be stretched by a certain apparatus of muscles in very different and exactly measurable degrees. They are made to vibrate audibly by a current of air impelled with various degrees of force and at will by the lungs in expiration through the narrow chink (glottis) formed by the fine edges of the chords. Thus the lungs correspond to the bellows of the organ; the trachea, at the top of which the vocal instrument is placed, answers to the conduit (Windrohr), and the cavity of the throat in front of the instrument with its two avenues, the mouth and the nostrils, to the resonance pipe (Ansatzrohr).