The Princess is introduced with a Valse:
In the public park incident, a stirring little march:
leads to a more coquettish mood:
The third scene finishes as the pantomime began, with a colorful reminiscence of the opening themes.
Taylor’s next important work is Jurgen, a symphonic work for full orchestra, based on Cabell’s famous novel. His own statement of his aims in regard to it are as follows:
“Jurgen was originally planned as an orchestral suite that would follow as faithfully as possible the sequence of events in James Branch Cabell’s book. But when I started work on the music it became increasingly obvious that such a program was not only impracticable, but hardly to the point. It would take a cycle of suites to do adequate justice to the bewildering multitude of scenes, characters and episodes with which the pages of Jurgen are crowded. Moreover, the importance of Cabell’s romance as a work of art lies, not in its qualities as a diverting tale of amorous adventure, but in the vividness, the sardonic gusto, the humor and wisdom and pathetic beauty with which the tale is told.
“So, Jurgen, annotated in terms of music, has come to be concerned much more with the man Jurgen than with his deeds. In brief, I have tried to show Jurgen, facing the unanswerable riddle of why things are as they are; Jurgen ‘clad in the armor of his hurt’, spinning giddily through life, strutting, posturing, fighting, loving, pretending; Jurgen proclaiming himself count, duke, king, emperor, god; Jurgen, beaten at last by the pathos and mystery of life, bidding farewell to that dream of beauty, which he had the vision to see, but not the strength to follow.”