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.