BEETHOVEN'S INCIDENTAL MUSIC to Egmont, op. 84, is a paradigmatic illustration of a number of possible relationships between music and ideas. Even when the overture is played by itself, as it was in Beethoven's day too, the title invites us to hear it not as an abstract symphonic movement, but as relating somehow to Goethe's play. Eduard Hanslick's claim that the link between the overture and the play is loose and arbitrary (“lose und willkürlich”) is only true in the sense that we would be unable to deduce the plot of the play from the music alone. The F-major coda of the overture reappears at the end of the incidental music as Beethoven's response to Goethe's instructions for a “Siegessymphonie” (3.1:329), so we are presumably intended to hear the end of the overture as in some sense victorious. Each of the four entr'actes takes the audience from the mood at the end of one act to that at the beginning of the next, and towards the end of the play the music is supposed to express details of what is happening on stage more explicitly. Beethoven adopts Goethe's stage directions requiring “eine Musik, Clärchens Tod bezeichnend” (“music for Clärchen's death,” 3.1:320), and goes on to indicate the various functions of the music accompanying Egmont's vision: for example, a flute motif headed “bedauernde Empfindung” (“sorrow”) or a string passage marked “Egmonts Tod andeutend” (“suggestive of Egmont's death”).