Gradually the innocent play of the waters is heard again, though a gloomy pall hangs over.  The chant sounds once more before the end.

The third, “Pastoral,” scene we are most free to enjoy in its pure musical beauty, with least need of definite dramatic correspondences.  It seems at first as if no notes of gloom are allowed to intrude, as if the picture of happy simplicity stands as a foil to the tragedy of the solitary dreamer; for an early climax gives a mere sense of the awe of Alpine nature.

Still, as we look and listen closer, we cannot escape so easily, in spite of the descriptive title.  Indeed, the whole work seems, in its relation to the poem upon which it is based, a very elusive play in a double kind of symbolism.  At first it is all a clear subjective utterance of the hero’s woes and hopes and fears, without definite touches of external things.  Yet, right in the second scene the torrent is clear almost to the eye, and the events pass before us with sharp distinctness.  Tending, then, to look on the third as purest pastoral, we are struck in the midst by an ominous strain from one of the earliest moments of the work, the answer of the first theme of all.  Here notes of horns ring a monotone; presently a church-bell adds a higher note.  The peaceful pastoral airs then return, like the sun after a fleeting storm.

The whole of this third scene of Tschaikowsky’s agrees with no special one in Byron’s poem, unless we go back to the second of the first act, where Manfred, in a morning hour, alone upon the cliffs, views the mountains of the Jungfrau before he makes a foiled attempt to spring into the abyss.  By a direction of the poet, in the midst of the monologue, “the shepherd’s pipe in the distance is heard,” and Manfred muses on “the natural music of the mountain reed.”

The last scene of the music begins with Byron’s fourth of Act II and passes over all the incidents of the third act that precede the hero’s death, such as the two interviews with the Abbot and the glorious invocation to the sun.

From Tschaikowsky’s title, we must look for the awful gloom of the cavernous hall of Arimanes, Byron’s “Prince of Earth and Air.”  The gray figure from most ancient myth is not less real to us than Mefistofeles in “Faust.”  At least we clearly feel the human daring that feared not to pry into forbidden mysteries and refused the solace of unthinking faith.  And it becomes again a question whether the composer had in mind this subjective attitude of the hero or the actual figures and abode of the spirits and their king.  It is hard to escape the latter view, from the general tenor, the clear-cut outline of the tunes, of which the principal is like a stern chant: 

[Music:  (Wood, strings and horns)]

The most important of the later answers lies largely in the basses.

[Music:  (Low wood) (Rhythmic chords in strings)]

There is, on the whole, rather an effect of gloomy splendor (the external view) than of meditation; a sense of visible massing than of passionate crisis, though there is not wanting a stirring motion and life in the picture.  This is to speak of the first part, Allegro con fuoco.