Many musicians and writers on music in the eighteenth century were preoccupied with music’s expressive and representative powers.  Time and again, composers attempted to demonstrate that music was able, even without the help of words, to depict specific feelings and emotions, and even to narrate a sequence of events.  One Justin Heinrich Knecht advertised his 1784 symphony, Musical Portrait of Nature, in a music journal on the very same page on which the notice for the 13-year-old Beethoven’s first published works (three piano sonatas) appeared.  Knecht’s program, with its shepherds, streams, birds, thunderstorm, and clearing of the sky, is so similar to what Beethoven would have in his “Pastoral” that it is almost certain Beethoven knew Knecht’s work.  

Beethoven not only loved nature but, as many of his friends attested, worshipped it.  Haydn and Mozart were not known for roaming the Austrian countryside; Beethoven, for his part, spent long and happy hours in the woods.  He often retreated from Vienna to outlying areas where he admired Nature with a capital N as a true spiritual child of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the German Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”) movement.  

Beethoven became fascinated with the musical sounds of nature years before the composition of the “Pastoral” Symphony:  as early as 1803, he notated in one of his sketchbooks a musical rendition of the sound of water in a stream.  Even earlier, he made a musical reference to nature in the “Heiligenstadt Testament,” the tragic document in which Beethoven first wrote about his encroaching deafness in 1802 (the Testament was addressed to Beethoven’s two brothers but never sent).  “What a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard a shepherd singing and again I heard nothing.”  It is difficult not to think of this mention of the shepherd when listening to the “Shepherd’s Song” in the finale of the Sixth Symphony.  The love for the sounds of nature became inseparable from the pain of not being able to hear them.

The Sixth Symphony, composed almost simultaneously with the Fifth, then, has more in common with that work than one might think.  One similarity between the two works is the linkage of the last movements.  Just as the Fifth Symphony’s gloomy C-minor Allegro is connected to the finale without a pause, the last three movements of the “Pastoral,” the country dance, the storm, and the thanksgiving song, form an uninterrupted sequence, and in both cases, an earlier conflict seamlessly segues into a positive resolution.

The bird songs and thunderclaps are not the only examples where Beethoven employed sounds from the world around him.  His secretary, the often unreliable Anton Schindler, reported the following anecdote, relating to the third movement, which he could hardly have invented himself:

Beethoven asked me if I had not observed how village musicians often played in their sleep, occasionally letting their instruments fall and remaining entirely quiet, then awakening with a start, throwing in a few vigorous blows or strokes at a venture, but generally in the right key, and then falling asleep again; he had tried to copy these poor people in his “Pastoral” symphony.

Schindler then proceeded to point out those measures in which “the sleep-drunken second bassoon [repeats] a few tones, while contra-bass, violoncello, and viola keep quiet; on page 108 we see the viola wake up and apparently awaken the violoncello—and the second horn also sounds three notes, but at once sinks into silence again.”

More often than not, however, the symphony, as Beethoven himself pointed out, is ‟more an expression of feeling than painting.”   Beethoven may have been responsive to extra-musical inspirations, yet he was first and foremost a musician.  And he was never a more “absolute” musician than he was in his programmatic Sixth Symphony.

Notes by Peter Laki