It must all be approached in a different way from other symphonic music. The minstrel is not even the peasant in court costume, as Dvôrák once was called. He is the peasant in his own village dress, resplendent with color and proud of his rank.
We cannot enjoy the music with furrowed brow. It is a case where music touches Mother Earth and rejuvenates herself. Like fairy lore and proverbs, its virtue lies in some other element than profound design. For any form of song or verse that enshrines the spirit of a people and is tried in the forge of ages of tradition, lives on more surely than the fairest art of individual poet.
The stream is the great figure, rising from small sources in playful flutes, with light spray of harp and
strings. The first brook is joined by another (in clarinets) from a new direction. Soon grows the number and the rustle of confluent waters. The motion of the strings is wavelike, of a broader flow, though underneath we scan the several lesser currents. Above floats now the simple, happy song, that expands
with the stream and at last reaches a glad, sunny major.
Still to the sound of flowing waters comes the forest hunt, with all the sport of trumpets and other brass.
It is descriptive music, tonal painting if you will; but the color is local or national. The strokes are not so much of events or scenes as of a popular humor and character, which we must feel with small stress of each event. The blowing of trumpets, the purling of streams, the swaying of trees, in primal figures, all breathe the spirit of Bohemia.
The hunt dies away; emerging from the forest the jolly sounds greet us of a peasant wedding. The