Symphony No.6 in F major, Op.68, "Pastoral"
Awakening of happy feelings upon arriving in the country: Allegro ma non troppo.
Scene by the brook: Andante molto moto.
Peasants’ merry-making: Allegro –
Thunderstorm: Allegro –
Shepherds’ song, happiness and thanksgiving after the storm: Allegretto.
At the start of the 19th century, the city of Vienna was surrounded by villages and spa-towns, nestling amidst the rolling hills of the Danube valley. The Viennese would escape each summer to Baden, Heiligenstadt and Döbling, and Ludwig van Beethoven took particular solace in these rural retreats. The peace and solitude he found amidst nature gave him a blessed escape from the worries and conflicts of his life in the city, from awareness of his declining hearing, and, of course, from the political turmoil of the time – Vienna was bombarded and captured by Napoleon in November 1805, and again in May 1809. Beethoven seems to have seen in nature a revelation of a higher and better state of being, and numerous contemporaries have recorded how much the countryside meant to him. An innkeeper in Baden once had Beethoven reject a room in his hotel because there were no trees nearby and " I love a tree more than a man". Caught in a rainstorm, he once angrily refused an offered umbrella and simply strode on through the downpour. And there seems little doubt that he drew actual creative inspiration directly from the countryside. His servant Michael Krenn tells of him roaming the fields from 6 in the morning to 10 at night "sketch book in hand, waving his arms, completely carried away by inspiration" and when a friend was staying in Baden in 1817, Beethoven urged her, "do not forget that Beethoven has often lingered there; and when you wander through the silent pinewoods, remember that I have often made poetry, or, as they say, composed there". One of his sketchbooks, from 1803, shows him trying to write down the sound of a stream near Heiligenstadt in musical notation, and the three-bar fragment of music that resulted bears an unmistakable resemblance to the flowing figure for two cellos that runs through the Andante of the "Pastoral" Symphony. "The broader the stream", he observed, "the deeper the note".
Beethoven’s feeling for the countryside finally blossomed into this Symphony between the summers of 1807 and 1808 – astonishingly, at exactly the same time as he was writing the volcanic 5th Symphony. Indeed, both works were premiered in the same marathon concert on 22nd December 1808, the "Pastoral" actually being described as "Symphony No.5", and the C minor "No.6" on that occasion. Beethoven clearly wished to demonstrate his entire range; it is still extraordinary to think that these two great works, one a titanic drama of man against fate, the other a joyful and profoundly tranquil hymn to nature, were conceived and created simultaneously, from the same tremendous inspiration. Beethoven felt no reluctance in revealing the sources of his ideas; the title "Pastoral" is one of the few titles (unlike the "Emperor" concerto and "Moonlight" sonata) that Beethoven himself is known actually to have given to one of his works. He even gave titles to the individual movements, cheekily lifted from a forgotten work by the equally forgotten 18th century composer, J.H. Knecht. He knew exactly what he was doing, we can be sure – everything about the "Pastoral" breathes a relaxed but powerful confidence – but he unwittingly opened a musicological can of worms that was not successfully dealt with until the 20th century. Composers who naturally inclined towards musical scene-painting saw Beethoven as legitimising "programme" music; others saw the "Pastoral" as a regrettable lapse from Beethoven’s admired symphonic rigour. Of course, both interpretations simply limit understanding of the symphony – Beethoven himself anticipated and closed the whole debate by attending a subtitle to the "Pastoral", now rarely printed: "More an expression of feeling than a painting (mälerey)". If we simply bear this in mind it doesn’t matter whether we listen to the "Pastoral" as "simply this incredible structure in sound, Symphony in F major Op.68" (Leonard Bernstein) or sit back and enjoy the glorious scenery of the first, and greatest Symphonic Poem ever written.
- Allegro ma non troppo: Like the first movement of the 5th Symphony, a powerful and tightly constructed sonata-form movement built up from the shortest of themes and motifs. But the lively rhythms and bright scoring of the themes give the character of folk music, while the long-held pedal notes that underlie so much of the movement not only evoke rustic instruments such as the hurdy-gurdy but give the whole movement a sense of tremendous spaciousness and freedom.
- Andante molto moto: A huge sonata-form movement "on themes so free from tension that the hearer is drawn into a state of timeless contemplation" (Basil Lam). Nothing disturbs the tranquility of this scene by the brook, borne gently on by the flow of the stream (two muted cellos). At the very end of the movement, just where Beethoven would insert a cadenza were he writing a concerto, are solos for nightingale (flute), quail (oboe) and cuckoo (clarinet). Beethoven wrote the birds’ names in the score, but his later claim that he’d also incorporated the song of a yellowhammer elsewhere in the movement turned out to be a practical joke.
- Allegro: A thoroughly typical Beethoven scherzo with a distinctly rustic flavour; the composer pokes gentle fun at the wind-players of a village band – oboe and horn enter off the beat and the bassoonist is so sure he’s right that he belts out his utterly unimportant bass part at a ridiculous volume. The dance is cut short by:-
- Allegro: a sudden hush, a rumble of bass thunder and a shattering cloudburst, one of the most powerful descriptions of a storm in all music. Trumpets, trombones and piccolo enter for the first time in the symphony; as does the dark key of F minor. As the storm moves off, the sun re-emerges (F major) and a lovely, arcing phrase for oboe shines like a rainbow over the final rolls of thunder. A shepherd’s call is heard, first on clarinet, then on horn, launching:-
- Allegretto: an expansive and exultant rondo, moving, like the first movement, in such broad, leisurely paragraphs that every key-change seems like the opening-out of a new and more beautiful vista – "glorious as the fields refreshed by rain" (Tovey). Beethoven thought of this movement as a hymn, and as the symphony draws to a close the music actually becomes more hymn-like, with sotto voce strings and wind answering each other like a prayer and responses. The flow of the music resumes, and, with a final, muted horn-call, winds off into the blue distance.
R. G. Bratby 2001
Copyright Classical Notes.co.uk 2000
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