Fantasia subtitles

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(INSTRUMENTS TUNING)
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(INSTRUMENTAL MEDLEY)
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(CROWD MURMURING)
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(TUNING CONTINUES)
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How do you do?
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My name is Deems Taylor,
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and it's my very pleasant duty

to welcome you here
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on behalf of Walt Disney,

Leopold Stokowski
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and all the other artists and musicians

whose combined talents
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went into the creation of this
new form of entertainment, Fantasia.
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What you are going to see
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are the designs

and pictures and stories
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that music inspired
in the minds and imaginations
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of a group of artists.
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In other words,

these are not going to be
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the interpretations of trained musicians.
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Which I think is all to the good.
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Now, there are three kinds of music

on this Fantasia programme.
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First is the kind that tells
a definite story.
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Then there's the kind that,

while it has no specific plot,
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does paint a series of, more or less,
definite pictures.
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Then there's a third kind,
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music that exists simply
for its own sake.
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Now, the number that opens

our Fantasia programme,
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the "Toccata and Fugue,"

is music of this third kind,
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what we call absolute music.
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Even the title has no meaning beyond
a description of the from of the music.
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What you will see on the screen is a
picture of the various abstract images
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that might pass through your mind
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if you sat in a concert hall

listening to this music.
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At first, you're more or less

conscious of the orchestra.
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So our picture opens

with a series of impressions
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of the conductor and the players.
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Then the music begins to suggest
other things to your imagination.
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They might be, oh,
just masses of colour.
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Or they may be cloud forms
or great landscapes
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or vague shadows or geometrical
objects floating in space.
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So now we present
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the "Toccata and Fugue in D minor"

by Johann Sebastian Bach,
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interpreted in pictures

by Walt Disney and his associates,
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and the music
by the Philadelphia Orchestra
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and its conductor Leopold Stokowski.
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(SONG BEGINS)
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(SONG ENDS)
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You know, it's funny how wrong
an artist can be about his own work.
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Now, the one composition of
Tchaikovsky's that he really detested
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was his "Nutcracker Suite,"
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Which is probably the most
popular thing he ever wrote.
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It's a series of dances
taken out of a full-length ballet
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called The Nutcracker

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that he once composed

for the St. Petersburg Opera House.
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It wasn't much of a success

and nobody performs it nowadays,
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but I'm pretty sure you'll recognize the
music of the "Suite" when you hear it.

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Incidentally, you won't see

any nutcracker on the screen.
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There is nothing like
to him but the title.
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(SONG BEGINS)
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(SONG ENDS)
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(SONG BEGINS)
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(SONG ENDS)
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(SONG BEGINS)
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(SONG ENDS)
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(SONG BEGINS)
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(SONG ENDS)
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(SONG BEGINS)
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(SONG ENDS)
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(SONG BEGINS)
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(SONG ENDS)
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And now we're going to hear a piece of
music that tells a very definite story.
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As a matter of fact, in this case,

the story came first
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and the composer wrote the music

to go with it.
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It's a very old story,

one that goes back almost 2,000 years.
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A legend about a sorcerer

who had an apprentice.
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He was a bright young lad,

very anxious to learn the business.
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As a matter of fact,

he was a little bit too bright
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because he started practicing

some of the boss's best magic tricks
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before learning how to control them.
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One day, for instance,
when he'd been told by his master
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to carry water to fill a cauldron,

he had the brilliant idea
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of bringing a broomstick to life
to carry the water for him.
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Well, this worked very well at first.
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Unfortunately, however,
having forgotten the magic formula
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that would make the broomstick

stop carrying the water,
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he found he'd started something
he couldn't finish.
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(SONG BEGINS)
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(SONG ENDS WITH A FLOURISH)
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(PANTING)
Mr. Stokowski. Mr. Stokowski.
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(WHISTLES)
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-My congratulations, sir.
-(CHUCKLES)
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Congratulations to you, Mickey.
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Gee, thanks. (LAUGHS)
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Well, so long. I'll be seein' ya.
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-Goodbye.
-(APPLAUSE)
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When Igor Stravinsky wrote his ballet,

The Rite of Spring...
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(CHIMES CLATTERING)
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(CROWD MURMURING,
CHUCKLING)
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I repeat,
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when Igor Stravinsky wrote his ballet,
The Rite of Spring,
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his purpose was, in his own words,

"to express primitive life."
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And so Walt Disney and his fellow
artists have taken him at his word.
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Instead of presenting the ballet

in its original form,
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as a simple series of tribal dances,

they've visualized it as a pageant,
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as the story of the growth

of life on Earth.
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And that story,

as you're going to see it,
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isn't the product

of anybody's imagination.
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It's a coldly accurate reproduction

of what science thinks went on
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during the first few billion years
of this planet's existence.
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Science, no art,
wrote the scenario of this picture.
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According to science,

the first living things here
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were single-celled organisms,
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tiny little white or green blobs

of nothing in particular
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that lived under the water.
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And then, as ages passed,

the oceans began to swarm
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with all kinds of marine creatures.
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Finally, after about a billion years,
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certain fish, more ambitious

than the rest,
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crawled up on land and became

the first amphibians.
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And then,
several hundred million years ago,
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nature went off on another tack

and produced the dinosaurs.
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Now, the name "dinosaur"

comes from two Greek words
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meaning "terrible lizard."
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And they certainly were all of that.
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They came in all shapes and sizes,
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from little crawling horrors

about the size of a chicken
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to hundred-ton nightmares.
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They were not very bright.
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Even the biggest of them

had only the brain of a pigeon.
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They lived in the air and the water
as well as on land.
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As a rule, they were vegetarians,
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rather amiable
and easy to get along with.
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However, there were bullies

and gangsters among them.
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The worst of the lot,

a brute named tyrannosaurus rex,
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was probably the meanest killer

that ever roamed the Earth.
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The dinosaurs were lords of creation

for about 200 million years.
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And then... Well,
we don't exactly know what happened.
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Some scientists think that
great droughts and earthquakes
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turned the whole world

into a gigantic dustbowl.
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In any case,
the dinosaurs were wiped out.
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That is where our story ends.
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Where it begins is at a time

infinitely far back,
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when there was no life at all on Earth,
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nothing but clouds of steam,
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boiling seas and exploding volcanoes.
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So now,
imagine yourselves out in space
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billions and billions of years ago,
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looking down on this lonely,

tormented little planet,
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spinning through
an empty sea of nothingness.
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(SONG BEGINS)
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(SONG ENDS)
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And now we'll have
a 15-minute intermission.
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(LIGHT AUDIENCE CHATTER)
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(INDIVIDUAL
INSTRUMENTS PLAY)
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-(CHATTER)
-(INSTRUMENTS TUNING)
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(PLAYING JAZZ MUSIC)
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Oh, yeah. (CLEARS THROAT)
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-(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
-(CHUCKLES)
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Before we get into
the second half of the programme,
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I'd like to introduce somebody to you,
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somebody who's very important

to Fantasia.
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He is very shy and very retiring.
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I just happened to run across him

one day at the Disney studios.
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But when I did, I suddenly realized
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that here was not only an indispensable
member of the organization,
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but a screen personality whose

possibilities nobody around the place
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had ever noticed.
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And so I'm very happy to have
this opportunity to introduce to you
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the soundtrack.
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TAYLOR: All right. Come on.
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That's all right. Don't be timid.
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Atta soundtrack.
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Now, watching him, I discovered

that every beautiful sound
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also creates
an equally beautiful picture.
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Now look. Will the soundtrack

kindly produces a sound?
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Go on, don't be nervous.

Go ahead. Any sound.
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(UNPLEASANT SOUND)
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TAYLOR: (CHUCKLES) Well, that
isn't quite what I had in mind.
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Suppose we hear and see the harp.
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(MIMICS HARP)
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TAYLOR: Now one of the strings,

say, oh, the violin.
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(MIMICS VIOLIN)
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TAYLOR: And now... Now,
one of the woodwinds, a flute.
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(MIMICS FLUTE)
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TAYLOR: Very pretty.
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Now, let's have a brass instrument,
the trumpet.
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(MIMICS TRUMPET)
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TAYLOR: All right. Now, how about
a low instrument, the bassoon?
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(MIMICS BASSOON)
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TAYLOR: Go on. Go on.

Drop the other shoe, will you?
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(VERY LOW NOTE)
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TAYLOR: Well, now to finish,
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suppose we see some of
the percussion instruments,
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beginning with the base drum.
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(IMITATES DRUM)
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(CYMBALS CLASHING)
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(IMITATES SNARE DRUM)
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(DRUMROLL)
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(DINGS SOFTLY)
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(TAYLOR LAUGHS)
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Thanks a lot, old man.
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The symphony that Beethoven
called the "Pastoral,"
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his sixth, is one of the few pieces
of music he ever wrote
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that tells something like a definite story.
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He was a great nature lover,

and in this symphony
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he paints a musical picture

of a day in the country.
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Now, of course,
the country that Beethoven described
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was the countryside

with which he was familiar.
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But his music covers
a much wider field than that,
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so Walt Disney has given the "Pastoral
Symphony" a mythological setting.
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And that setting is of Mount Olympus,

the abode of the gods.
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And here, first of all,
we meet a group of fabulous creatures
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of the field and forest,
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unicorns, fauns, Pegasus,
the flying horse,
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and his entire family, the centaurs,

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those strange creatures

that are half-man and half-horse.
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And their girlfriends, the centaur-ettes.

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Later on, we meet our old friend,

Baccus, the god of wine,
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presiding over a baccchanal.
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The party is interrupted by a storm.
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And now we see Vulcan

forging thunderbolts
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and handing them over to the
king of all the gods, Zeus.
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who plays darts with them.
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As the storm clears, we see Iris,

the goddess of the rainbow.
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and Apollo, driving
his sun chariot across the sky.
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And then Morpheus, the god of sleep,
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covers everything

with his cloak of night,
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as Diana, using the new moon as a bow,
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shoots an arrow of fire

that spangles the sky with stars.
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(SONG BEGINS)
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(SONG ENDS)
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Now we are going to do
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one of the most famous
and popular ballets ever written,
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The Dance of the Hours

from Ponchielli's opera La Gioconda.
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It's a pageant of the hours of the day.
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We see first a group
of dancers in costumes
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to suggest the delicate light of dawn.
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Then a second group enters
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dressed to represent

the brilliant light of noon day.
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As these withdraw, a third group enters
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in costumes that suggest

the delicate tones of early evening.
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Then a last group, all in black,

the sombre hours of the night.
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Suddenly, the orchestra bursts

into a brilliant finale
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in which the hours of darkness

are overcome by the hours of light.
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All this takes place in the great hall

with its garden beyond,
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of the palace of Duke Alvise,

a Venetian nobleman.
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(SONG BEGINS)
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(SONG ENDS)
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The last number
on our Fantasia programme

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is a combination of two pieces
of music so utterly different
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in construction and mood

that they set each other off perfectly.
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The first is
"A Night on Bald Mountain,"
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by one of Russia's greatest composers,

Modeste Moussorgsky.
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The second is Franz Schubert's

world-famous "Ave Maria."
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Musically and dramatically,

we have here a picture
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of the struggle
between the profane and the sacred.
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"Bald Mountain," according to tradition,
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is the gathering place

of Satan and his followers.
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Here on Walpurgis Night, which is

the equivalent of our own Halloween,
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the creatures of evil gather
to worship their master.
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Under his spell, they dance furiously
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until the coming of dawn

and the sounds of church bells
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send the infernal army slinking back

into their abodes of darkness.
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And then we hear the "Ave Maria,"

with its message of the triumph
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and hope of life over the powers

of despair and death.
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(SONG BEGINS)
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(SONG ENDS)
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(BELLS TOLLING)
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(BELLS CONTINUE TO TOLL)
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(SONG BEGINS)
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(CHORUS VOCALIZING)
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(WOMAN SINGING)
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(CHORUS VOCALIZING)
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