Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 6 in F major, Opus 68 (Pastoral)

“How glad I am to be able to roam in wood and thicket, among the trees and flowers and rocks. No one can love the country as I do,” wrote Beethoven. “My bad hearing does not trouble me here. In the country, every tree seems to speak to me, say ‘Holy! Holy!’ In the woods, there is enchantment which expresses all things.”

Beethoven's thoughts on imitating Nature in music were scribbled in the sketches for his Sixth Symphony as early as 1803. “All painting in instrumental music is lost if it is pushed too far,” he scribbled. “Anyone who has an idea of country-life can make out for himself the intentions of the composer without many titles.” During the summer of 1808, he finished his Pastorale Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life, complete with programmatic titles for all five movements. 

Beethoven conducted the first performance at a typically massive all-Beethoven concert in Vienna on December 22, 1808. Besides the Sixth, the program included the Fifth Symphony, the concert aria Ah, Perfido, two movements from the C major Mass, the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Choral Fantasy. One listener complained: “There we continued, in the bitterest cold, too, from half past six to half past ten, and experienced the truth that one can easily have too much of a good thing--and still more of a loud…. Many a failure in the performance vexed our patience in the highest degree.”

Beethoven cautioned against taking the movement titles too literally. In a letter to his publisher, he described the Sixth as “an expression of feeling rather than a description.”

Nevertheless, Hector Berlioz, for one, imagined very specific activities when hearing the opening movement, “Awakening of Cheerful Feelings on Arriving in the Country.” “The herdsmen begin to appear in the fields,” he wrote, “their pipes are heard afar and near. Ravishing phrases caress one's ears deliciously, like perfumed morning breezes. Flocks of chattering birds fly overhead; and now and then the atmosphere seems laden with vapors; heavy clouds flit across the face of the sun, then suddenly disappear, and its rays flood the fields and woods with torrents of dazzling splendor.”    

Anton Schindler described being taken by Beethoven to a valley near Heiligenstadt. “Here I composed the ‘Scene by the Brook’ (second movement),” he said, “and the yellowhammers up there, the quails, nightingales and cuckoos round about, composed with me.”  Modern ornithologists maintain that Beethoven's “yellowhammer song” is incorrect, if anything resembling more the buzzing of insects.   

Schindler said that the third movement, “Merry Gathering of Country Folk,” was inspired by Austrian tavern bands. “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 Pastorale Symphony.”

Berlioz wrote of the fourth movement (“Thunderstorm, Tempest”): “Listen to those gusts of wind, laden with rain; those sepulchral groanings of the basses; those shrill whistles of the piccolo, which announce that a fearful tempest is about to burst. The hurricane approaches, swells; an immense chromatic streak, starting from the highest notes of the orchestra, goes burrowing down into its lowest depths, seizes the basses, carries them along, and ascends again, writhing like a whirlwind, which levels everything in its passage. Then the trombones burst forth; the thunder of the timpani redoubles its fury. It is no longer merely a wind and rain storm: it is a frightful cataclysm, the universal deluge, the end of the world.”

Berlioz called the finale (“Shepherd's Song, Happy Thankful Feelings after the Storm”) “a hymn of gratitude. Everything smiles. The shepherds reappear; they answer each other on the mountain, recalling their scattered flocks; the sky is serene; the torrents soon cease to flow; calmness returns, and with it the rustic songs, whose gentle melodies bring repose to the soul.”

Donald Francis Tovey cautioned against the interpretive excesses of Berlioz and others. “In the whole symphony,” he wrote, “there is not a note of which the musical value would be altered if cuckoos and nightingales, and country folk, and thunder and lightning, and the howling and whistling of the wind, were things that had never been named by man, either in connection with music or with anything else.”

Program Notes by Charley Samson, copyright 2022.