How delighted I shall be to ramble for a while through bushes, woods, under trees, through grass and around rocks. No one can love the country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees and rocks produce the echo which man desires to hear. — Beethoven Letters, No. 258
No work embodies Beethoven’s love of nature more than the Symphony No. 6, which Beethoven himself described as “Pastoral Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life: More the Expression of Feeling than Tone-Painting.”
The Pastoral Symphony does have some tone-painting but Beethoven tried to avoid being too literal. He wrote in the sketches “One leaves it to the listener to discover the situations” & “Each act of tone-painting, as soon as it is pushed too far in instrumental music, loses its force.”
Lewis Lockwood writes:
The intertwining of his love of nature, his religious faith, and his quest for a beloved are essential themes in Beethoven’s longing for personal salvation, a dream that remained unrealized in his daily life…
This multiple quest is a key to understanding the “Pastoral” Symphony as the central work in which these tendencies coalesced. I construe this work, then, as not merely a programmatic representation of the experience of being in nature, but also that it is something like Beethoven’s “dream-time,” a vision of the healing experience of Nature. Beneath the surface of the work lies his deep personal need for such healing; and both these levels of consciousness were rooted in his belief that all that is good in nature is a manifestation of God. — Beethoven’s Symphonies, p. 125
Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony is so different from the Fifth Symphony — in many ways its polar opposite — that the two works are often seen as a linked dialectical pair: composed and premiered in the same year, sporting consecutive opus numbers, yet almost deliberately antithetical.
On the face of it, the Sixth echoed something he had done before: follow an aggressively challenging work with a gentler and more popularistic one. The Fifth is ferocious and has no stated program. The Sixth is a sunny walk in the fields, equipped with a title: Pastoral, each movement with a subtitle relating to a day in the country. But again, it is a matter of degree, of the intensity of the contrast: the Sixth Symphony is the anti-Fifth. — Jan Swafford, Beethoven, p. 505.
The configuration of Beethoven’s oeuvre in pairs of works assists interpretation as an external sign of its dialectical nature. Through it the Beethoven of the middle period (Fifth and Sixth; Seventh and Eighth) transcends the closed totality of the oeuvre, as the very late Beethoven transcends it within the individual work. The truth of Plato’s dictum that the best writer of tragedies must also be the best writer of comedies lies in the insignificance of each work qua work. The solemnity of the Fifth and the dialect of the Sixth do not “complement” each other, but represent the self-movement of the concept. — Theodor Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, p. 21
#Beethoven250 Day 211
Symphony No. 6 “Pastoral” in F Major (Opus 68), 1808
Daniele Gatti conducts the Orchestre National of Radio France in a wonderfully performed and photographed video.
The 1st movement of the Pastoral is “The awakening of joyous feelings on getting out into the countryside” and immediately portrays a reduction of anxiety characteristic of transitioning from city to country. It is quiet, relaxed, often harmonically static but melodically lively.
The 2nd movement of the Pastoral is an andante “Scene by the brook” in which the rippling water flows in 12/8 time. Birds are suggested early on, but towards the end Beethoven explicitly identifies them in the score: nightingale (flute), quail (oboe), cuckoos (clarinets).
The birds in the coda of the 2nd movement of the Pastoral
are not random ones that Beethoven happened to hear but were chosen for their symbolic significance. The nightingale is surrounded by a whole aura of symbolism, including love and sweetness of tone. The cuckoo, likewise, is renowned as the harbinger of summer, while the quail has religious overtones of divine providence (based on the story in the book of Exodus). — Barry Cooper, Beethoven, pp. 190–1.
Also recall Beethoven’s “Song of the Quail” (Day 171).
The Pastoral has five movements — unusual for a symphony at this time — but the last three movements flow into each other without a pause. The centerpiece of these three movements is a storm whose arrival and dissipation are too gradual to require a movement break.
The 3rd movement 5-part Scherzo is a “Joyous gathering of country folk.” The party begins in 3/4 time but shifts to 2/4 for the foot-stomping peasant dance of the Trio. The final section is interrupted by ominous rumblings that signal a storm on the horizon.
About the storm in the Pastoral Symphony, Berlioz wrote:
I despair of being able to give an idea of this prodigious movement. It must be heard in order to form an idea of the degree of truth and sublimity descriptive music can attain in the hands of a man like Beethoven. Listen! — Listen to those rain-charged squalls of wind; to the dull grumblings of the basses; also to the keen whistling of the piccolo, which announces to us that a horrible tempest is on the point of breaking out. The hurricane approaches and grows in force; an immense chromatic feature, starting from the heights of the instrumentation, pursues its course until it gropes its way to the lowest orchestral depths. There it secures the basses, dragging them with it upwards; the whole shuddering like a whirlwind sweeping everything before it. Then, the trombones burst forth, the thunder of the kettledrums becomes redoubled in violence, it is no longer merely rain and win, but an awful cataclysm, the universal deluge — the end of the world. — Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies, p. 75
As the storm clears up and the sun peaks out and a rainbow forms, the Pastoral Symphony ends with 6/8 reconciliatory finale Allegretto “Shepherd’s song. Happy and thankful feelings after the storm,” in which the joys of nature are once again celebrated.
The ending seems to confirm the peace of nature and the peace of the soul that the work had promised from the beginning, the feeling for which the composer had been longing all his life. — Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven’s Symphonies, p. 143
#Beethoven250 Day 211
Symphony No. 6 “Pastoral” in F Major(Opus 68, 1st movement), 1808
A socially distanced first movement in a reduced orchestration.