It has been said authoritatively that this overture (composed in 1903) follows no definite programmatic plan; that the spirit which animates it is adequately suggested by the title. Euterpe, it will be recalled, was the fourth daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne. Her province among the Muses has been admirably stated by Thomas Heywood, that seventeenth-century Englishman of amazing literary fecundity and erudition. [26] "Euterpe," he wrote in 1624, "is called the goddess of pleasantness and jollities, said to be delighted in all sorts of pipes and wind instruments, and to be both their inventresse and guidress.... This is the consequence and coherence betwixt Clio[27] and Euterpe, according to Fulgentius: we first in Clio acquire sciences, and arts, and enterprises, and by them honour and glorie: that obtained, in Euterpe we find pleasure and delectations in all such things as we sought and attained.... For Euterpe imports to us nothing else but the joy and pleasure which we conceive in following the Muses and truly apprehending the mysteries of discipline and service."
SYMPHONIC POEM, "CLEOPATRA" [28]
The narrative of Plutarch, rather than the play of Shakespeare, has served as the dramatic and poetic basis of this musical embodiment of the tragic history of Antony and Cleopatra. The composer has gone for his basic material to Plutarch's Life of Antony, from which, according to an authorized exposition, "those situations having the most direct reference to Cleopatra have been chosen for musical suggestion, although the action of the tragedy is not literally followed." Those phases of the tale selected by the composer for particular delineation appear to relate—in the order of their place in the score—to the voyage of Cleopatra up the River Cydnus in her barge (that barge which, "like a burnished throne, burnt on the water"); the martial approach of Antony; the passion of the lovers; Antony's melancholy end, and the burial of the pair in one grave.
The music (it was composed in 1904) opens with a passage suggestive of Cleopatra's voyage upon the Cydnus—a tonal paraphrase of Shakespeare's picture of that wonderful floating pageant: the barge whose poop
"was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,