Fantasia1940

Narrator (Deems Taylor):
[First Lines and Introduction to "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor"] How do you do? Uh, 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're 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. Now, there 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 a third kind, music that exists simply for its own sake. Now, 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 form 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 the players. Then the music begins to suggest other things to your imagination. They 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 in music by The Philadelphia Orchestra and its conductor, Leopold Stokowski.