SYMPHONY NO. 6, IN F MAJOR, “PASTORALE,” OP. 68
I. Awakening of serene impressions on arriving in the country: allegro, ma non troppo II. Scene by the brookside: andante molto moto III. Jolly gathering of country folk: allegro; in tempo d’allegro Thunderstorm; tempest: allegro IV. Shepherd’s song; gladsome and thankful feelings after the storm: allegretto
When justly read, this symphony is indeed pastoral, light-hearted, something more than a fearsome length relieved only by the little ornithological passage in which nightingale, quail, and cuckoo are neatly imitated; at least, it is fair to suppose this; we have never heard the nightingale sing. Jean Cocteau, in his amusing little book full of aphorisms designed to make the bourgeois sit up, says that the nightingale sings badly. So we must not be unduly prejudiced by praise of the bird coming from Milton, Matthew Arnold, and other poetical enthusiasts. Then there is the thunderstorm—the tempest, to use the good country term that has come down from Shakespeare and before him. And how charming the first two movements! To borrow the Host’s characterization of Master Fenton, the symphony smells April and May.
This symphony—Sinfonia pastorale—was composed in the country round about Heiligenstadt in the summer of 1808. It was first performed at the Theater an der Wien, Vienna, December 22, 1808. The descriptive headings were probably an afterthought. In the sketchbook, which contains sketches for the first movement, is a note: “Characteristic Symphony. The recollections of life in the country.” There is also a note: “The hearer is left to find out the situations for himself.”
M. Vincent d’Indy in his Beethoven (Paris, 1911) devotes several pages to Beethoven’s love of nature. “Nature was to Beethoven not only a consoler for his sorrows and disenchantments; she was also a friend with whom he took pleasure in familiar talk, the only intercourse to which his deafness presented no obstacle.” Nor did Beethoven understand Nature in the dryly theoretical manner of Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose writings then were in fashion, for there could be no point of contact between the doctrines of this Calvinist of Geneva and the effusions of Beethoven, a Catholic by birth and by education. Nor did Beethoven share the views of many Romantics about Nature. He would never have called her “immense, impenetrable, and haughty,” as Berlioz addressed her through the mouth of his Faust. A little nook, a meadow, a tree—these sufficed for Beethoven. He had so penetrated the beauty of nature that for more than a dozen years all his music was impregnated by it.
His bedside book for many, many years soon after his passion for Giulietta Guicciardi was the Lehr und Erbauungs Buch of Sturm. Passages underscored show the truth of the assertions just made, and he copied these lines that they might always be in his sight: “Nature can be justly called the school of the heart; it shows us beyond all doubt our duty towards God and our Neighbor. I wish therefore to become a disciple of this school, and offer my heart to it. Desirous of self-instruction, I wish to search after the wisdom that no disillusion can reject; I wish to arrive at the knowledge of God, and in this knowledge I shall find a foretaste of celestial joys.”
Nature to Beethoven was the country near by, which he could visit in his daily walks. If he was an indefatigable pedestrian, he was never an excursionist.
M. d’Indy draws a picture of the little Wirthschaften in the suburbs of the large towns, humble inns “not yet ticketed with the pompous barbarism of ‘restaurant.’” They were frequented by the bourgeoisie, who breathed the fresh air and on tables of wood ate the habitual sausage and drank the traditional beer. There was a dance hall with a small orchestra; there was a discreet garden with odorous alleys in which lovers could walk between the dances. Beyond was the forest where the peasant danced and sang and drank, but the songs and dances were here of a ruder nature.
Beethoven, renting a cottage at Döbling, Grinzing, or Heiligenstadt, which then were not official faubourgs, could in a few minutes be in the forest or open country. He did not attempt to reproduce the material, realistic impression of country sounds and noises, but only the spirit of the landscape.
Thus in the Pastoral symphony, to suggest the rustic calm and the tranquillity of the soul in contact with Nature, he did not seek curious harmonic conglomerations, but a simple, restrained melody which embraces only the interval of a sixth (from fa to re). This is enough to create in us the sentiment of repose—as much by its quasi-immobility as by the duration of this immobility. The exposition of this melody based on the interval of a sixth is repeated with different timbres, but musically the same, for fifty-two measures without interruption. In an analogous manner Wagner portrayed the majestic monotony of the river in the introduction to Rheingold. Thus far the landscape is uninhabited. The second musical idea introduces two human beings, man and woman, force and tenderness. The second musical thought is the thematic base of the whole work. In the scherzo the effect of sudden immobility produced by the bagpipe tune of the strolling musician (the oboe solo, followed by the horn), imposing itself on the noisy joy of the peasants, is due to the cause named above; here, with the exception of one note, the melody moves within the interval of a fifth.
The storm does not pretend to frighten the hearer. The insufficient kettledrums are enough to suggest the thunder, but in four movements of the five there is not a fragment of development in the minor mode. The key of F minor, reserved for the darkening of the landscape hitherto sunny and gay, produces a sinking of the heart and the distressing restlessness that accompany the approach of the tempest. Calm returns with the ambitus of the sixth, and then the shepherd’s song leads to a burst of joyfulness. The two themes are the masculine and feminine elements exposed in the first movement.
According to M. d’Indy the andante is the most admirable expression of true nature in musical literature. Only some passages of Siegfried and Parsifal are comparable. Conductors usually take this andante at too slow a pace and thus destroy the alert poetry of the section. The brook furnishes the basic movement, expressive melodies arise, and the feminine theme of the first allegro reappears, alone, disquieted by the absence of its mate. Each section is completed by a pure and prayer-like melody. It is the artist who prays, who loves, who crowns the diverse divisions of his work by a species of Alleluia.
It has been said that several of the themes in this symphony were taken from Styrian and Carinthian folk songs. It is dedicated to Prince von Lobkowitz and Count Rasoumowsky. The work was published in 1809.