Beethoven: Symphony No.6 in F major, Op.68 (1808)    

Allegro ma non troppo
Andante molto moto (quasi Allegretto)
Allegro
Allegro
Allegretto

The title of this visionary work (Pastoral Symphony or Recollections of Country Life) was specifically set out by Beethoven in a letter to his publisher (Breitkopf & Härtel), dated 28 March 1809, which he then qualified by the remark “More an expression of feeling than of painting”. The titles of the individual movements were also submitted, but unaccountably changed by the publisher (without the composer’s consent) to those more familiar today (his original versions, over which he spent considerable time on the exact wording, are listed above). The symphony was first performed in one of those extraordinary mammoth concerts which at that time were not so outrageous as might seem today: apart from the Choral Fantasia, the fourth piano concerto, and four other items, the Theater an der Wien on 22 December 1808 also hosted the première of the fifth symphony! – which had been completed in tandem with No.6 during the preceding months. How strange then that his two most fundamentally opposite symphonies should have been created simultaneously – the one amongst the most rigorously symphonic of all his orchestral works, the other decidedly his most programmatic and relaxed.

So what might have led him to depart so radically from the norm established not only by the Fifth but by those which preceded it? The concept of musical pictorialism was in itself hardly unusual, yet up to this point it had had no real place in a symphony. Haydn’s two great oratorios, The Creation and The Seasons, were still very much the rage in Vienna, popularised as much as anything by their quite explicit passages of musical description. Add to this Beethoven’s own oft-expressed passion for the Outdoors – fuelled by endless hours of tramping through woods and fields near Dornbach, or between Heiligenstadt and Nussdorf (now mostly vineyards!) – and perhaps the Pastoral was indeed a phenomenon waiting to happen. Yet he made no attempt to hide his misgivings over what must have seemed a real hybrid of a conception, as evidenced in the “feeling/painting” comment quoted above, or such rejoinders dotted among his sketches for the symphony as “All tone painting loses its value if pushed too far in instrumental music” or “…anyone who has even just an idea of country life can imagine what the author [intends], without many headings”. Indeed, such labels in the sketches as “thunder” and “rain” never actually found their way into the score – although of course the three famous bird calls in the second movement survived: nightingale, quail, and cuckoo – with one further unidentified example (supposedly a Goldammer – goldfinch) portrayed throughout the development section, but most evocatively at the recapitulation, where it seems the whole forest has come alive with the wonder of natural sounds.

Maybe it is this very “wonder” which is truly at the heart of Beethoven’s conception, and perhaps reaches its most explicit expression in the “Storm” – the very movement which is extra to the normal symphonic pattern, but where one is most obviously made aware of the sheer elemental power of Nature, and Man’s powerlessness to combat its most extreme force. A symphony for all times and all places, then…? It is likely that Beethoven – a man of enormous humility, if not modesty – was entirely conscious of this work’s significance for posterity; and also of its likely influence on the next generation of German composers – notably Weber, Mendelssohn, and Schumann – as well as Berlioz, Liszt, and even Tchaikovsky. Of course he was in one and the same concert giving them all the first great “conflict symphony” as well, whose example would ultimately stretch beyond all of those, via Brahms into the twentieth century, with Mahler and Shostakovich.

But whilst we trace Beethoven’s dominating presence extending right up to our own time we must not lose sight of the fact that, on the threshold of the nineteenth century, he was still working with the tools and conventions of a previous era – and, of course, confronting them all head on! If we do not regularly have the advantage (or disadvantage, some might suggest…!) of instruments Beethoven himself would have been familiar with, at least we owe it to him to apply what we can learn from them in matters of phrasing, articulation, sound, and – above all – tempo: Beethoven’s metronome markings have always aroused controversy, for all manner of reasons. But can we honestly deny a natural reluctance to throw out the safety of the familiar, or to face the challenge to our own techniques? We have long ago entered a new era in the performance of older music, and with Beethoven this is founded on the necessity for a tempo giusto.  We know from his letters how much he valued Mälzel’s 1817 invention, and how it gave him that longed-for control over tempo which the vague conventional Italian designations could never provide. The result is that the Countryside we arrive in really does burst with joy and energy, and the brook is truly babbling and flowing rather than stagnant! – as they once did with an earlier generation of conductors, among them Leibowitz, Scherchen, and Erich Kleiber, eventually revived by Norrington. Yet in the end, for all the techniques and devices employed to evoke the images described – for example hurgygurdy drone basses in the first movement, rustic village band tunes in the third, pipes and horn calls to introduce the Shepherds’ Hymn – it is surely the internalising of these diverse elements into a personal paean of Religious/Pantheistic thankfulness which makes the Pastoral Symphony so unique and precious an expression of Man’s precarious sense of awe amid his natural surroundings.

© Alan George
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