Some say that Honegger had no business to summon a locomotive engine for inspiration. No doubt this music of Honegger’s is “clever,” but cleverness in music quickly palls. Louis Antoine Jullien years ago in this country excited wild enthusiasm by his Firemen’s Quadrille, in which a conflagration, the bells, the rush of the firemen, the squirting and the shout of the foreman, “Wash her, Thirteen!” were graphically portrayed.

But there is majestic poetry in great machines, even in railway engines. One of Turner’s most striking pictures is the one depicting a hare running madly across a viaduct with a pursuing locomotive in rain and mist. What was the most poetic thing of the Philadelphia exposition of 1876? The superb Corliss engine, epic in strength and grandeur. Walt Whitman, Kipling, and others have found inspiration in a locomotive; why reproach a composer for attempting to express “the visual impression and the physical sensation” of it? One may like or dislike Pacific 231, but it is something more than a musical joke; it was not merely devised for sensational effect.

When Pacific 231 was first performed in Paris at Koussevitzky’s concerts, May 8 and 15, 1924, Honegger made this commentary:

“I have always had a passionate love for locomotives. To me they—and I love them passionately as others are passionate in their love for horses or women—are like living creatures.

“What I wanted to express in the Pacific is not the noise of an engine, but the visual impression and the physical sensation of it. These I strove to express by means of a musical composition. Its point of departure is an objective contemplation: quiet respiration of an engine in state of immobility; effort for moving; progressive increase of speed, in order to pass from the ‘lyric’ to the pathetic state of an engine of three hundred tons driven in the night at a speed of one hundred and twenty per hour.

“As a subject I have taken an engine of the ‘Pacific’ type, known as ‘231,’ an engine for heavy trains of high speed.”

Other locomotive engines are classified as “Atlantic,” “Mogul.” The number 231 here refers to the number of the “Pacific’s” wheels 2—3—1.

“On a sort of rhythmic pedal sustained by the violins is built the impressive image of an intelligent monster, a joyous giant.”

Pacific 231 is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, double bassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, bass tuba, snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, tam-tam, strings.

The locomotive engine has been the theme of strange tales by Dickens, Marcel Schwob, Kipling, and of Zola’s novel, La BÊte humaine. It is the hero of Abel Gance’s film, RouÉ for which it is said Honegger adapted music, and the American film, The Iron Horse.