ACCOMPLISHED VOCALISTS. 87 



whenever I hear the golden-winged woodpecker's 

 (yellow-hammer's) nasal and monotonous voice, I re- 

 member how much Beethoven made of it in his Pas- 

 toral Symphony. In the summer of 1823, long after 

 the great composer had become " stone deaf," he was 

 walking with his friend Schindler on the wooded 

 border of a meadow not far from Vienna. " Seating 

 himself on the grass," says Schindler, " and leaning 

 against an elm, Beethoven asked me if any yellow- 

 hammers were to be heard in the tree above us. 

 But all was still. He then said, 'This is where I 

 wrote The Scene by the Brook,* while the yellow- 

 hammers were singing above me, and the quails, 

 nightingales, and cuckoos calling all around.' I 

 asked why the yellow-hammer did not appear in 

 the movement with the others; on which he seized 

 his sketchbook and wrote the following phrase : 

 n-, sv^ .j« m ' There's the little composer,' said 

 j (^f q ['-»pjg * * I : he, ' and you'll find that he plays 

 ^'^' a more important part than the 



others, for they were nothing but a joke.' " 



Well, the power of a musician's imagination to 

 transmute a few tones is illimitable, for the notes 

 above are not those of the yellow-hammer at all. 

 But, as I have already intimated, imagination is neces- 



* Die Scene am Bach, the second movement of the sixth (Pas- 

 toral) symphony. 



