The dividing line between program music and absolute music is a thin one, but Beethoven proved himself a master of both in his Sixth Symphony. Although the work has been produced with scenery, with characters who move about on stage, and as part of the cinema classic Fantasia, Beethoven took care to advise that the symphony is “more an expression of feeling than painting.” Each listener should let his imagination work its own spell. After all, wrote Beethoven, “composing is thinking in sounds.” Hence, he continues, the Pastoral Symphony is “no picture, but something in which the emotions aroused by the pleasures of the country are expressed, or something in which some feelings of country life are set forth.”

Beethoven’s own love for the pleasures of the country are well-known. In a life of almost constant turmoil, anxiety and stormy relationships, the periods he spent in the woods outside Vienna offered his tortured soul precious solace and peace of mind. To quote the composer again: “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… My bad hearing does not trouble me here.… In the woods there is enchantment which expresses all things.”

The idea of depicting nature in tone was not new with Beethoven, of course. Many composers both before and especially after him were inspired to create some of their best music in such fashion, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons being one of the most popular examples. The repertoire of Pastoral Symphonies alone is quite impressive, including one by Vaughan Williams (No. 3), Wilfred Josephs (No. 5), Gretchaninov (No. 2), Glazunov (No. 7) and Don Freund. Although not a symphony in the Beethovenian sense, one of the numbers in Handel’s Messiah is entitled “Sinfonia pastorale.”

The Pastoral Symphony received its first performance in Vienna as part of that incredible marathon concert of December 22, 1808 at the Theater an der Wien, an all-Beethoven concert that also included the Fifth Symphony, Fourth Piano Concerto, Choral Fantasy and some vocal and choral music. It is dedicated to two of Beethoven’s most ardent patrons, Prince Lobkowitz and Count Razumovsky.

The symphony’s opening places us immediately in relaxed, beatific surroundings. The day is sunny, warm and abounding in nature’s fragrances and gentle breezes. But aside from conjuring nature imagery, the music is remarkable for its motivic writing – virtually the entire movement is built from tiny musical cells found in the first two bars. Phrases and sentences are often formed from these motivic ideas repeated again and again. “Fragments keep repeating themselves in a sort of naive joy at their own beauty and charm, with subtle variations of tonality and instrumental colour, like the play of light and shade in nature itself,” writes Edward Downes.

The second movement invites contemplation. To Donald Francis Tovey, this is “a slow movement in full sonata form which at every point asserts its deliberate intention to be lazy and to say whatever occurs to it twice in succession, and which in doing so never loses flow or falls out of proportion. The brook goes on forever; the importance of that fact lies in its effect upon the poetic mind of the listener basking in the sun on its banks.” Near the end of the movement we hear instrumental effects simulating the calls of the nightingale (flute), quail (oboe) and cuckoo (clarinet).

The Sixth is the only symphony in which Beethoven departed from the traditional four-movement format. The remaining three movements are played without interruption. Rough, peasant merry-making and dancing are portrayed, but the boisterous festivities suddenly stop when intimations of an approaching storm are heard. There is not much time to take cover; a few isolated raindrops fall, and then the heavens burst open. Storms have appeared frequently in musical compositions (in Verdi’s Otello and Rigoletto, Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, Strauss’s Alpine Symphony, Berlioz’ “Royal Hunt and Storm” from The Trojans, etc.), but few have surpassed Beethoven’s in power and fury. Timpani, piccolo and trombones, all hitherto silent in the symphony, now make their entrances.

With the tempest over, a shepherd’s pipe is heard in a song of thanksgiving for the renewed freshness and beauty of nature. Timpani and piccolo withdraw, but the trombones, whose sonority was traditionally associated with sacred music until well after Beethoven’s era, are retained. The joyous hymn is taken up by the full orchestra as if, to quote Edward Downes again, “in thanks to some pantheistic god, to Nature, to the sun, to whatever beneficent power one can perceive in a universe that seemed as dark and terrifyingly irrational in Beethoven’s day as it can in ours. That a man of sorrows and self-centred miseries like Beethoven could glimpse such glory and, by the incomparable alchemy of his art, lift us to share his vision – even if only for a few moments – is a miracle that remains as fresh as tomorrow’s sunrise.”

In 1973, Mario Bernardi was on the podium for the NAC Orchestra’s first performance of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, and the ensemble’s most recent interpretation of the Symphony took place in 2015 under the direction of Matthias Pintscher.

By Robert Markow