The Farewell Symphony's paradoxical ending in an apotheosis of ethereality leads directly to a programmatic interpretation. As outlined in the Introduction, its authentic status as program music requires us to try to understand it in this sense; to regard it as a mere concatenation of notes (however remarkable), or an abstract poetic utterance (however satisfying), would be to ignore its historical and intrinsic significance. In any case, the symphony's programmatic aspect will foster our sense of its overall coherence; the story we tell about it will create a narrative thread, binding the movements together perhaps more powerfully, if also more subjectively, than their common thematic and tonal relationships, their drive towards long-postponed closure. Of course, the narrative must be compatible with our analysis; it must have an “objective correlative” (T. S. Eliot's phrase) “in” the work. On the other hand, it need not correspond in every detail: if the principle of multivalence has any validity at all, it applies not only within an analysis, but even more on the “higher” level of the relation between structural and hermeneutic understanding. (These topics are further adumbrated at the beginning and end of Chapter 7.)

RECEPTION

Programmatic works were common both in Haydn's milieu and his own output (see Chapter 7). To be sure, as far as we know for certain he composed only one symphony (No. 60, “II distratto”) on a program in the “strong” nineteenth-century sense of disseminating a work, and asking it to be understood, in association with a narrative (as in Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique) or a literary title or idea (as in many concert overtures and tone-poems).