[Music illustration:  In der un-ge-heu-’ren Wei-te.]

[Sidenote:  Bald imitation bad art.]

[Sidenote:  Vocal music and delineation.]

[Sidenote:  Beethoven’s canon.]

The extent to which tone-painting is justified is a question which might profitably concern us; but such a discussion as it deserves would far exceed the limits set for this book, and must be foregone.  It cannot be too forcibly urged, however, as an aid to the listener, that efforts at musical cartooning have never been made by true composers, and that in the degree that music attempts simply to copy external things it falls in the scale of artistic truthfulness and value.  Vocal music tolerates more of the descriptive element than instrumental because it is a mixed art; in it the purpose of music is to illustrate the poetry and, by intensifying the appeal to the fancy, to warm the emotions.  Every piece of vocal music, moreover, carries its explanatory programme in its words.  Still more tolerable and even righteous is it in the opera where it is but one of several factors which labor together to make up the sum of dramatic representation.  But it must ever remain valueless unless it be idealized.  Mendelssohn, desiring to put Bully Bottom into the overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” did not hesitate to use tones which suggest the bray of a donkey, yet the effect, like Handel’s frogs and flies in “Israel,” is one of absolute musical value.  The canon which ought continually to be before the mind of the listener is that which Beethoven laid down with most painstaking care when he wrote the “Pastoral” symphony.  Desiring to inform the listeners what were the images which inspired the various movements (in order, of course, that they might the better enter into the work by recalling them), he gave each part a superscription thus: 

[Sidenote:  The “Pastoral” symphony.]

     I.  “The agreeable and cheerful sensations awakened by
     arrival in the country.”

     II.  “Scene by the brook.”

     III.  “A merrymaking of the country folk.”

     IV.  “Thunder-storm.”

     V.  “Shepherds’ song—­feelings of charity combined with
     gratitude to the Deity after the storm.”

In the title itself he included an admonitory explanation which should have everlasting validity:  “Pastoral Symphony; more expression of feeling than painting.”  How seriously he thought on the subject we know from his sketch-books, in which occur a number of notes, some of which were evidently hints for superscriptions, some records of his convictions on the subject of descriptive music.  The notes are reprinted in Nottebohm’s “Zweite Beethoveniana,” but I borrow Sir George Grove’s translation: 

[Sidenote:  Beethoven’s notes on descriptive music.]

     “The hearers should be allowed to discover the situations.”