The love-gift of a fairy-tale.”
A tenderly lyric theme, sung by a muted solo violin, is used to express the spirit of these lines:
This melody is next given to the clarinets, and then again to the strings as its brief development leads to the second part of the first movement, The Garden of Live Flowers. Here Alice finds herself surrounded by talkative flowers, who, to quote the tigerlily, will speak “when there’s anybody worth talking to.” The music reflects the brisk chatter of the garden folk:
The second movement, Jabberwocky, is without doubt the masterpiece of the suite, for in it Taylor shows his skill as a tonal narrator, his humor, and his consummate mastery of orchestration. After a seven measure introduction, a solo clarinet establishes the “brillig” atmosphere with this motive:
The actual encounter with the Jabberwock is depicted by means of a fugue, started by the basses “burbling,” which an English writer described as sounding like “Bach gone wrong.”
The fight ends with a series of xylophone glissandos telling us how “through and through the vorpal blade went snickersnack!” Then the dying agonies of the Jabberwock, a bassoon cadenza: