"How do you do?" "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." "So now we present... the Tocatta 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." "You know, it's funny how wrong an artist can be about his own work." "Now, the one composition of Tchaikovsky's that he really detested... was his Nutcracker Suite... which is probably the most popular thing he ever wrote." "Incidentally, you won't see any nutcracker on the screen." "There's nothing left of him but the title." "And now we're going to hear a piece of music that tells a very definite story." "It's a very old story." "One that goes back almost 2,000 years." "A legend about a sorcerer who had an apprentice." "He was a bright young lad very anxious to learn the business." "As a matter of fact, he was a little bit too bright... uh, because he started practising some of the boss's best magic tricks... before learning how to control them." "Mr. Stokowski." "Mr. Stokowski." "My congratulations, sir." "Congratulations to you, Mickey." "Gee, thanks." "Well, so long." "I'll be seein' ya." "Bye." "When Igor Stravinsky wrote his ballet, The Rite of Spring... his purpose was, in his own words, to "express primitive life. "" "So Walt Disney and his fellow artists have taken him at his word." "Instead of presenting the ballet in its original form... as a simple series of tribal dances, they have visualized it as a pageant-- as the story of the growth of life on Earth." "It's a coldly accurate reproduction of what science thinks went on... during the first few billion years of this planet's existence." "So now imagine yourselves out in space... billions and billions of years ago... looking down on this lonely, tormented little planet... spinning through an empty sea of nothingness." "Uh, before we get into the second half of the programme..." "I'd like to introduce somebody to you-- somebody who's very important to Fantasia." "He's very shy and very retiring." "I just happened to run across him one day at the Disney studios." "But when I did, I realized... that here was not only an indispensable member of the organization... but a screen personality." "And so I'm very happy to have this opportunity to introduce to you... the soundtrack." "Come on." "Don't be timid." "That a soundtrack." "Now, watching him, I discovered that every beautiful sound... also creates an equally beautiful picture." "Now, look." "Will the soundtrack kindly produce a sound?" "Go on, don't be nervous." "Go ahead." "Any sound." "Well, that isn't quite what I had in mind." "Uh, suppose we see and hear the harp." "Uh, now one of the strings-- say, the violin." "And now-- now one of the woodwinds-- a flute." "Very pretty." "Now let's have a brass instrument-- the trumpet." "Oh, all right." "Now, uh, how about a low instrument-- the bassoon?" "Go on." "Go on." "Drop the other shoe, will you?" "Well, now to finish, suppose we see some of the percussion instruments... beginning with the bass drum." "Thanks a lot, all of ya." "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." "Now we're going to do one of the most famous and popular ballets... ever written-- "The Dance of the Hours"... from Ponchielli's opera La Gioconda." "It's a pageant of the hours of the day." "All this takes place in the great hall... with its garden beyond... of the palace of Duke Alvise, a Venetian nobleman." "The last number in our Fantasia programme... is a combination of two pieces of music so utterly different... in construction and mood that they set each other off perfectly." "The first is "A Night on Bald Mountain"... by one of Russia's greatest composers, Modeste Mussorgsky." "The second is Franz Schubert's immortal "Ave Maria. "" "Musically and dramatically, we have here... a picture of the struggle between the profane and the sacred."