Hardly another subject could have been more happy for the revelling in brilliant pranks and conceits of a modern vein of composition.  And in the elusive humor of the subject is not the least charm and fitness.  Too much stress has been laid on the graphic purpose.  There is always a tendency to construe too literally.  While we must be in full sympathy with the poetic story, there is small need to look for each precise event.  We are tempted to go further, almost in defiance, and say that music need not be definite, even despite the composer’s intent.  In other words, if the tonal poet designs and has in mind a group of graphic figures, he may nevertheless achieve a work where the real value and beauty lie in a certain interlinear humor and poetry,—­where the labels can in some degree be disregarded.

Indeed, it is this very abstract charm of music that finds in such a subject its fullest fitness.  If we care to know the pranks exactly, why not turn to the text?  Yet, reading the book, in a way, destroys the spell.  Better imagine the ideal rogue, whimsical, spritely, all of the people too.  But in the music is the real Till.  The fine poetry of ancient humor is all there, distilled from the dregs of folk-lore that have to us lost their true essence.  There is in the music a daemonic quality, inherent in the subject, that somehow vanishes with the concrete tale.  So we might say the tonal picture is a faithful likeness precisely in so far as it does not tell the facts of the story.

Indeed, in this mass of vulgar stories we cannot help wondering at the reason for their endurance through the centuries, until we feel something of the spirit of the people in all its phases.  A true mirror it was of stupidity and injustice, presented by a sprite of owlish wisdom, sporting, teasing and punishing[A] all about.  It is a kind of popular satire, with a strong personal element of a human Puck, or an impish Robin Hood, with all the fairy restlessness, mocking at human rut and empty custom.

[Footnote A:  On leaving the scene of some special mischief, Till would draw a chalk picture of an owl on the door, and write below, Hic fuit.  The edition of 1519 has a woodcut of an owl resting on a mirror, that was carved in stone, the story goes, over Till’s grave.]

It is perhaps in the multitude of the stories, paradoxical though it seem, that lies the strength.  In the number of them (ninety-two “histories” there are) is an element of universality.  It is like the broom:  one straw does not make, nor does the loss of one destroy it; somewhere in the mass lies the quality of broom.

In a way Till is the Ulysses of German folk-lore, the hero of trickery, a kind of Reinecke Fuchs in real life.  But he is of the soil as none of the others.  A satyr, in a double sense, is Till; only he is pure Teuton, of the latter middle ages.