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Fantasia (1940)
How do you do?
My name is Deems Taylor, and it's my very pleasant duty to welcome you here... on behalf of Walt Disney, Leopold Stokowski... and all the other artists and musicians whose combined talents went into the creation of this new form of entertainment, "Fantasia" What you are going to see... are the designs and pictures and stories... that music inspired in the minds and imaginations... of a group of artists. In other words, these are not going to be... the interpretations of trained musicians, Which I think is all to the good. Tehre are three kinds of music on this "Fantasia" program. First there's the kind that tells a definite story. Then there's the kind, that while it has no specific plot, does paint a series of more or less definite pictures. Then there's third kind, music that exists simply for its own sake. The number that opens our "Fantasia" program, the "Toccata and Fugue," is music of this third kind-- what we call "absolute music." Even the title has no meaning... beyond a description of the from of the music. What you will see on the screen.. is a picture of the various abstract images... that might pass through your mind... if you sat in a concert hall listening to this music. At first, you're more or less conscious of the orchestra, so our picture opens... with a series of impressions of the conductor and players. Then the music begins to suggest other things... to your imagination. The might be... oh, just masses of color. Or they may be cloud forms... or great landscapes or vague shadows... or geometrical objects floating in space. So now we present... the "Toccata and Fugue in D minor" by Johann Sebastian Bach, interpreted in pictures by Walt Disney and his associates, and the music by the Philadelphia Orchestra... and its conductor Leopold Stokowski. You know, it's funny... how wrong an artist can be about his own work. Now, the one composition of Tchaikovsky's... that he really detested... was his "Nutcracker Suite" Which is probably the most popular thing he ever wrote. It's a series af dances taken out of a full-length ballet called "The Nutcracker"... that he once composed for the St. Petersburg Opera House. It wasn't much of a success and nobody performs it nowadays, but I'm pretty sure you'll recognize the music of the suite when you hear it. Incidentally, you won't see any nutcracker on the screen. There is nothing like to him but the title. Now we're going to hear a piece of music... that tells a very definite story. As a matter of fact, in this case the story came first... and the composer wrote the music to go with it. It's a very old story, one that goes back almost 2000 years. A legend about a sorcerer who had an apprentice. He was a bright young lad, very anxious to learn the business. As a matter of fact, he was a little bit too bright, because he started practising... some of the boss's best magic tricks... before learning how to control them. One day, for instance, when he'd been told by his master... to carry water to fill a cauldron, he had the brilliant idea... of bringing a broomstick to life to carry the water for him. Well, this worked very well at first. Unfortunately, however, having forgotten the magic formula... that would make the broomstick stop carrying the water, he found he' started something he couldn't finish. Mr. Stokowski. Mr. Stokowski. My congratulations, sir. Congratulations to you, Mickey. Gee, thanks. Well, so long! I'll be seeing you. Good-bye. When Igor Stravinsky wrote his ballet "The Rite of Spring"... I repeat, when Igor Stravinsky wrote his ballet "The Rite of Spring"... his purpose was in his own words. "to express primitive life." So Walt Disney and his fellow artists... have taken him at his word. Instead of presenting the ballet in its original form... as a simple series of tribal dances, they've visualised it as a pageant. as the story of the growth of life on Earth. And that story, as you're going to see it, isn't the product of anybody's imagination. It's a coldly accurate reproduction... of what science thinks went on during the first few billion years of this planet's existence. Science, no art, wrote the scenario of this picture. According to science, the first living things here... were single-celled organisms tiny little white or green blobs of nothing in particular... that lived undur the water. And then as ages passed, the oceans began to swarm... with all kinds of marine creatures. Finally, after about a billion years, certain fish, more ambitious than the rest, crawled up on land and became the first amphibians. And then several hundred million years ago, nature went off on another tack and produced the dinosaurs. Now, the name "dinosaur" comes from two Greek words... meaning "terrible lizard," and they were certainly that. They came in all shapes and sizes. From little crawling horrors about the size of a chicken... to hundred-ton nightmares. They were not very bright. Even thr biggest of them had only the brain of a pigeon. They lived in the air and the water as well as on land. As a rule, they were vegetarians, rather amiable and easy to get along with. Hoeever, there were bullies and gangsters among them. The worst of the lot, a brute named Tyrannosaurus Rex... was probably the meanest killer that ever roamed the earth. The dinosaurs were lords of creation for about 200 million years. And then-- Well, we don't exactly know what happened. Some scientists think that great droughts and earthquakes... turned the whole world into a gigantic dustbowl. In any case, the dinosaurs were wiped out. That is where our story ends. Where it begins is at a time infinitely far back... when there was no life at all on earth, nothing but clouds of steam boiling seas... and exploding volcanoes. So now, imagine yourselves out in space... billions and billions of years ago... looking down on this lonely, tormented little planet... spinning through an empty sea of nothingness. Before we get into the second half of the program, I'd like to introduce somebody to you, somebody who is very important to "Fantasia." He is very shy and very retiring. I just happened to run accross him one day at the Disney Studios. But when I did, I suddenly realized that he was... not only an indispensable member of the organization, but a screen personality whose possibilities nobody had ever noticed. So I'm very happy to have this opportunity to introduce to you the Soundtrack. All right, come on. That's all right. Don't be timid. Atta Soundtrack. Watching him, I discovered that every beautiful sound also created an equally beautiful picture. Now look. Will the Soundtrack kindly produces a sound? Go on! Don't be nervous. Go ahead! Any sound. Well, that isn't quite what I had in mind. Suppose we hear and see the harp. Now one of the strings. Say, the violin. Now one of the woodwinds. A flute. Very pretty. Now, let's have a brass instrument, the trumpet. All right. Now, how about a low instrument, the bassoon. Go on. Go on! Drop the other shoe, will you To finish, suppose we see some of the percussion instruments, beginning with the base drum. Thanks a lot, old man. The symphony that Beethoven called "The Pastoral" his sixth, is one of the few pieces of music... he ever wrote that tells something like a definite story. He was a great nature lover, and in this symphony he paints a musical picture... of a day in the country. Of course, the country that Beethoven described... was the countryside with which he was familiar. But his music covers a much wider field than that, and so Walt Disney has given the "Pastoral Symphony" a mythological setting. and that settings is of Mount Olympus, the abode of the gods. And here, first of all, we meet o group of fabulous creatures... of the field and forest-- unicorns, fawns, Pegasus the flying horse and his entire family, the centaurs, those strange creatures that are half man and half horse... and their girlfriends, the centaurettes. Later on, we meet our old friend Baccus, the god of wine, presiding over a baccchanal. The party is interrupted by a storm. and now we see Vulcan forging thunderbolts... and handing them over to the king of all the gods, Zeus. who plays darts with them. As the storm clears, we see Iris, the goddess of the rainbow... and Apollo, driving his sun chariot across the sky. And then morpheus, the god of sleep, covers everything with his cloak of night... as Diana, using the new moon as a bowl, shoots an arrow of fire that spangles the sky with stars. Now we are going to do... one of the most famous and popular ballets ever written-- the "Dance of the Hours"... from Ponchielli's opera "La Gioconda". It's a pageant of the hours of the day. We see first a group of dancers... in costumes to suggest the delicate light of dawn. Then a second group enters... dressed to represent the brilliant light of noon day. As these withdraw, a third group enters... in costumes that suggest the delicate tones... of early evening. Then a last group, all in black, the sommer hours of the night. Suddenly, the orchestra bursts into a brilliant finale... in wich the hours of darkness... are overcome by the hours of light. All this takes place in the great hall, with its garden beyond, of the palace of Duke Alvise, a Venetian nobleman. The last number in our "Fantasia" program... is a combination of two pieces of music... so utterly different in construction and mood that they set each other off perfectly. The first is "A Night on Bald Mountain"... by one of Russia's greatest composers, Modeste Moussorgsky. The second is Franz Schubert's world-famous "Ave Maria." Musically and dramatically, we have here a picture... of the struggle between the profane and the sacred. "Bald Mountain," according to tradition, is the gatherin place of Satan and his followers. Here on Walpurgisnacht, which is the equivalent of our own Halloween, the creatures of evil gather to worship their master. Under his spell, they dance furiously... until the coming of dawn and the sounds of church bells... send the infernal army slinking back... into their abodes of darkness. And then we hear the "Ave Maria," with its message of the triumph and hope of life... over the powers of despair and death. |
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