CONCERT OVERTURE, "EUTERPE" [25]
It has been said authoritatively that this overture (composed in 1903) follows no definite programmatic plan; that the spirit which animates it is adequately suggested by the title. Euterpe, it will be recalled, was the fourth daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne. Her province among the Muses has been admirably stated by Thomas Heywood, that seventeenth-century Englishman of amazing literary fecundity and erudition. [26] "Euterpe," he wrote in 1624, "is called the goddess of pleasantness and jollities, said to be delighted in all sorts of pipes and wind instruments, and to be both their inventresse and guidress.... This is the consequence and coherence betwixt Clio[27] and Euterpe, according to Fulgentius: we first in Clio acquire sciences, and arts, and enterprises, and by them honour and glorie: that obtained, in Euterpe we find pleasure and delectations in all such things as we sought and attained.... For Euterpe imports to us nothing else but the joy and pleasure which we conceive in following the Muses and truly apprehending the mysteries of discipline and service."