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"Pastorale" Symphony

raw travesties atoned for and brought into keeping by the lovely phrase (on the violin) with which Beethoven has bound them together and made them one with the music which comes before and after them." But this "joke" view has not been shared by other critics of note. Teetgen writes poetically:—

"At last the brook is still, the trees rustle no more: we have already once said farewell to the soft babbling that long kept us spell-bound. Quail, cuckoo, and nightingale are alone still heard.—Beautifully imagined! as it were also saying 'farewell' to the sympathetic wanderer up the vale; who, only another human form of them, had stayed so long with them, loving them like their brother, enchanted by their song—enchanted in Nature's bosom."

An American critic dissects the passage more coldly:—

"Neither the nightingale, the quail, nor the cuckoo sings precisely thus. The nightingale does not imitate itself in the proportions of the musical scale; it only makes itself heard by inappreciable or variable sounds, and cannot be imitated by instruments of fixed intervals and absolute pitch. The quail has been well rendered as to its usual rhythm, but not in relation to its pitch and quality. As to the cuckoo, it gives the minor third, not the major."

At the conclusion of the opening movement of this symphony the flute is given a very dainty and characteristic ascending passage, the rest of the orchestra being

Beethoven, Pastorale Symphony.

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