Fantasia1940

Narrator (Deems Taylor):
[Introduction to "The Pastoral Symphony"] 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. Now, 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 setting is of Mount Olympus, the abode of the gods. And here, first of all, we meet a group of fabulous creatures of the field and forest, unicorns, fauns, 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, Bacchus, the god of wine, presiding over a bacchanal. 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 bow, shoots an arrow of fire that spangles the sky with stars.