For the ordinary listener to a symphony the one great difficulty lies in “making sense” out of it as a whole. He enjoys certain themes and is, perhaps, able to follow their devious wanderings, but he retains no comprehensive impression of the symphony as a complete thing, and he may even never conceive it as anything more than a series of interesting or uninteresting passages of music. Now, it is obvious that an art of pure sound, if it is to have any significance at all, must have complete coherence _within itself_, and that the longer the sounds go on the more necessary does this coherence become. This is, of course, the problem of all music. Even opera must have a certain musical coherence, for it cannot depend entirely on being held together by the text and action; even the song must make musical sense in addition to what sense (by chance) there is in the words. Give what glowing, what romantic, even what definite title you will to a piece of programme music,--call it “The Hebrides,” or “Death and Transfiguration,” or descend to such a title as “A Simple Confession,”--you must still give your music coherence in itself. As a matter of fact, the titles of pieces of programme music do not lessen the composer’s responsibilities in the least, and there is no fine piece of such music in existence that does not obey the general laws of form as applied to music. The title is, after all, merely a suggestion, an indication, an atmosphere. Schumann’s “The Happy Farmer” is merely jolly; it is not even bucolic, and you hunt for the farmer in vain; “Träumerei” is made rhythmically vague in order to create the illusion of reverie, but has, nevertheless, complete musical coherence; “Tod und Verklärung” of Strauss contains no evidence of sacrificing its form to its so-called “subject,” and the Wagnerian _leit-motif_ is suggestive and not didactic.