<P> Ludwig van Beethoven felt a certain reluctance in writing program music, and said of his 1808 Symphony No. 6 (Pastoral) that the "whole work can be perceived without description--it is more an expression of feelings rather than tone - painting". Yet the work clearly contains depictions of bird calls, a bubbling brook, a storm, and so on . Beethoven later returned to program music with his Piano Sonata Op . 81a, Les Adieux, which depicts the departure and return of his close friend the Archduke Rudolph . </P> <P> Hector Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique was a musical narration of a hyperbolically emotional love story, the main subject being an actress with whom he was in love at the time . Franz Liszt did provide explicit programs for many of his piano pieces but he is also the inventor of the term symphonic poem . In 1874, Modest Mussorgsky composed for piano a series of pieces describing seeing a gallery of ten of his friend's paintings and drawings in his Pictures at an Exhibition, later orchestrated by many composers including Maurice Ravel . The French composer Camille Saint - Saëns wrote many short pieces of program music which he called Tone Poems . His most famous are probably the Danse Macabre and several movements from the Carnival of the Animals . The composer Paul Dukas is perhaps best known for his tone poem The Sorcerer's Apprentice, based on a tale from Goethe . </P> <P> Possibly the most adept at musical depiction in his program music was Richard Strauss, a German composer whose symphonic poems include Death and Transfiguration (portraying a dying man and his entry into heaven), Don Juan (based on the ancient legend of Don Juan), Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks (based on episodes in the career of the legendary German figure Till Eulenspiegel), Don Quixote (portraying episodes in the life of Miguel de Cervantes' character, Don Quixote), A Hero's Life (which depicts episodes in the life of an unnamed hero often taken to be Strauss himself) and Symphonia Domestica (which portrays episodes in the composer's own married life, including putting the baby to bed). Strauss is reported to have said that music can describe anything, even a teaspoon . </P> <P> Another composer of programmatic music is Nikolai Rimsky - Korsakov, whose colorful "musical pictures" include "Sadko", Op. 5, after the Russian Bylina, about the minstrel who sings to the Tsar of the Sea, the very famous "' Scheherazade", Op. 35, after the Arabian Nights entertainments (where the heroine is depicted by a violin and whose stories include Sinbad the Sailor) and any number of orchestral suites from his operas, including The Tale of Tsar Saltan (which also contains "Flight of the Bumblebee"), The Golden Cockerel, Christmas Eve, The Snow Maiden, and The Legend of The Invisible City of Kitezh . </P>

Of the following which piece serves as an example of program music