Apples are so good and wholesome. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. The apple of my eye. As American as apple pie. Johnny Appleseed. Newton's observation that the apple draws the earth just as the earth draws the apple. What a wonderful fruit!
But this month's sightreading handout* is no Johnny Appleseed story. These exercises have overtones. They come from a well-known overture, that came from an opera, that came from a play about a Swiss mountain man and crossbow marksman in the early 1300's. He assassinated the local overlord from the oppressive Austrian Habsburg dynasty, leading to a revolution that made him a Swiss national hero. Although Hitler enjoyed the play (it was by a famous German playwright), he outlawed it in 1941 after another Swiss man attempted to assassinate him.
So who was that mountain man? And why is an assassin associated with an apple? You'll understand after sightreading these two exercises from the overture. The first one has been used in Looney Tunes cartoons to represent bucolic peacefulness or the dawn of a new day, while the second became the theme song for a 1950's TV western that only an intellectual would not recognize (according to a famous quote of the day). Get out your guitar, click the link, play the music and have fun figuring it out. Or are you too intellectual?