Tír Na HiFi

I have had the opportunity to perform full cycles of the Beethoven symphonies several times in the past few years and, when you look at the full group, it’s the Sixth Symphony that stands out as an exception. It is literally an excursion: someone who usually lives in a large city takes the time to go into the countryside. It makes the piece extremely difficult in many aspects. We are very fortunate that Beethoven gave titles to the movements so, for instance, we know that the third movement is about the people on the land and folklore, and therefore it should feel rustic; and the final movement is about gratitude after a storm. These clear indications are unlike any other Beethoven symphony. How good it would be to have similar insights into, say, the Fourth, Fifth or Seventh Symphonies! Another, even more major aspect that makes the piece so special is that it is a relief from everyday life, an expedition and escape into the countryside or the woods.

The first movement sets the style, with continuous repetition of a very pleasant motif. The second movement then contains complicated repetitions of something very similar, which is most unusual from a compositional point of view. Beethoven started this repetitive technique in the Third and Fourth symphonies, especially in the Fourth, where he repeats the same musical material again and again, in different keys and different forms, but it’s still a repetition. Many people believe it was the American minimalists who invented this, but no, it was Beethoven. In this symphony it receives a meaning for the first time, especially in those first two movements. We learn that it is not man but nature that creates this ostinato. When I perform it, I always feel that, were we to do it in a normal, conventional manner, we might miss something. It feels to me that the composer is saying, ‘Let’s do something else this time!’

Both in live performances and in my recording of the work, I have separated up the wind players, sprinkling them amongst the strings. The idea originally came from the second movement, but I have used it throughout the piece. This way, the wind soloists are all surrounded by Beethoven’s nature music but, most importantly, they are able to listen to their colleagues in the string sections, and hear their phrasing constantly. Both symbolically and practically, this adds to the sense of a change of scene. This approach sometimes gets criticised, for instance when we had a tree placed on the platform of the Royal Festival Hall and arranged the players around it. I did this to help underline the point that this is not an ordinary symphony. Most of Beethoven’s works have the dual theme of tragedy and jubilation; and he was, of course, very preoccupied with ideas of freedom and liberation. The end of the Fifth Symphony is akin to the end of Fidelio, but this is a visionary, green symphony. It represents a different type of liberation, from beginning to end: a liberation by and through nature. The final happiness is a bit pantheistic, influenced perhaps by the philosophy of Spinoza.

Beethoven stepped out of the Classical tradition between his Second and Third Symphonies, but there is a relationship here with the ‘pastoral’ musical forms of the 18th century, a century that was just coming to its close. The Ninth Symphony is about the continuation of the French Revolution; and Beethoven found a way of putting into music what the crowd felt, the sense of freedom that came with storming the Bastille and throwing away the aristocracy and the feudal system. The aspiration of being freed involved overturning the social order. That was freedom in the city; this symphony is about the very different freedom we can experience by leaving the city altogether. The Ninth Symphony literally did change the world by being so grand, so jubilant: it steps out of the boundaries of music. In the Sixth Symphony Beethoven explores a simpler kind of freedom, one involving total harmonic happiness. The Pastoral Symphony happens inside us. There is an internal, mental exercise at work, as the simplicity of nature creates strong feelings – and Beethoven was interested in those feelings that nature awakens in us.

At the beginning of the finale, as the shepherds express their ‘happy and grateful feelings after the storm’, the song begins with a solo clarinet and then a solo horn, creating a sense of individuality. I like to continue that when the first violin line initially appears with the famous melody of the finale, with the concertmaster creating a kind of ‘naked melody’, with the remainder of the strings joining in gradually. If the full group plays from the first note, of course that can work too, but sometimes one person can say more than a group of people can. Whereas Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is about the liberation of the crowd, the Pastoral is more about the liberation of the individual. And this is a liberation that comes about through the strength and beauty of nature.

Symphony guide: Beethoven's Sixth ('Pastoral')

Beethoven's Pastoral is no musical cul-de-sac, writes Tom Service. It's a radical work, and in its final movement is music more purely spine-tingling and life-enhancingly joyful than almost anywhere else in his output.

This week, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, his Sixth. Well, it does what it says on the tin, doesn’t it? A sentimental romp through the Viennese countryside, a programmatic sideline to the central sweep of Beethoven’s development, a gentle counterpart to the fire and brimstone of the Fifth Symphony and the bacchanal of the Seventh.

But that’s only because history, and music history in particular, likes its battles to be epic, its progress to be heroic, and its most important leaps of imagination to be noisy, radical, and aggressive. It’s as if the Fifth Symphony is the “real” Beethoven – Beethoven as all-conquering hero – whereas the Pastoral is a sort of musical and biographical cul-de-sac. And whatever its veracity, the image of Beethoven the nature-loving hippy has proved a much less enticing idea for historians to appropriate than Beethoven storming the gates of revolution in a blaze of C major glory, as he does at the end of the Fifth.

Yet Beethoven wrote this F major Symphony in tandem with the Fifth. It was premiered at the same, over-ambitious concert in December 1808, and as the symphonic yin to the Fifth’s yang, the Sixth Symphony is just as “radical” as the Fifth – in some ways, more so. I think both pieces are experiments in symphonic extremity, because both are pushing completely different musical boundaries to their limits, and beyond. The realisation that Beethoven was composing both symphonies at the same time is simultaneously baffling and astounding – and it’s proof that there ain’t just one Beethoven. On one hand, there’s the scowling man-of-the-people fomenting musical revolution and purging his inner demons through proto-minimalist compression and white-hot energy (that’s the Fifth, by the way!), and on the other, there’s the composer content to luxuriate in an early kind of musique concrète by transcribing birdsong into a symphony, who has time to allow his imagination to flow and fly, apparently unfettered by the constraints of formal convention or symphonic concision (that’s the Pastoral). They’re both wildly different, but they’re still only two sides of the nine-sided coin that is Beethoven’s symphonies.

But in lieu of (m)any other metaphors to riff on, I want to show how Beethoven creates a new kind of symphonic rhetoric in the Pastoral, a universe in which lulling repetition rather than teleological development is what defines the structure, on the small and large-scales, and in which the patterns, continuities, and disturbances of the natural world that Beethoven knew (above all in music’s most violent storm, up to this point of world history, in the Pastoral’s fourth movement!) are transmuted into the discourse of a five-movement symphony.

Take the central section of the first movement, for example, a passage that’s dominated by a single rhythm – the one you’ve originally heard in the second bar of the piece. It’s like looking at a landscape that changes slowly with the lengthening of the shadows and the deepening of the light, in which time is virtually suspended. That’s a remarkable reversal of symphonic polarity: this place in the first movement of a big symphony is supposed to be full of driving drama and incident, not static contemplation. (Compare this central section with the hell-for-leather momentum of the similar place in the Fifth Symphony). That’s nothing, though, next to the slow movement, the Scene by the Brook (the movements’ titles are all Beethoven’s own), in which Beethoven starts to spin what becomes a nearly continuous stream of semiquavers over a hypnotically repetitious harmonic background and collection of melodic motives in the woodwind and strings – until, that is, the stream reaches a still pool, and a chorus of birds attract our attention, as wanderers through Beethoven’s symphonic stream-scape. The Scherzo’s dances would and could jollily repeat into the infinite were it not for the Storm, which interrupts these “Merry Dances of the Countryfolk”, and cuts across the rest of the symphony both dramatically and temporally. It’s a shocking slice of verticality across the horizontal languorousness of the rest of the symphony. Storms, by their very nature, are protean, non-repeating, violent explosions, and that’s what Beethoven’s music is like too, with some wild rhythmic and textural effects: the churning of four against five in the double-basses and cellos, and electric currents of piccolo, timpani, and trombone. Just as suddenly as it has arrived, this lacerating music subsides, and gives way, without a break, to the most deliriously repeat-laden music in the symphony in the final “Shepherd’s Song: Thankful Feelings after the Storm”.

And it’s in this movement where Beethoven achieves something more purely spine-tingling and life-enhancingly joyful than almost anywhere else in his output. It’s this place, the climax of the whole movement, and the symphony. This music is also a consummation of the symphony’s spirals of time and pattern: this is the last in the sequence of ever-more intense unfurlings of the movement’s main melodic idea, and Beethoven takes both extremes of orchestral register – high and low – to their utmost extreme, and then resolves a magnificently aching dissonance through a long, slow, descent in pitch, dynamic, and emotional intensity. It’s a moment that works expressively because of its sheer intensity, but which also is the apex of the symphony’s ever-intensifying interplay of cycles and repetitions. There’s more: this passage in the fifth movement rhymes with a similar one in the first movement: the climax of the opening movement is also the resolution of a similar (but not identical) dissonance through a stepwise melodic descent, and it occurs at a similar place in the structure, just before the coda. It’s as if all of these small-scale cycles of repetition are enclosed by an even bigger orbit of time. Orbits and time-flows … “Pastoral”? This music is “cosmic”, too! Now that’s radical.

Five key recordings

1. Bayerisches Staatsorchester/Kleiber: turns the “Pastoral” into the “Visceral” – the final movement isn’t so much a hymn as an earthy, elemental dance.

2. Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique/John Eliot Gardiner: a recording that thrills with the extremes of Beethoven’s vision of the natural world. Is there a more orchestra-shattering Storm on record?

3. Staatskapelle Dresden/Colin Davis: Davis’s approach lets Beethoven’s music sing, sonorously, deeply – and slowly!

4. Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra/Chailly’s modern-orchestra but historically-informed recording is one of the most vivid recent recordings.

5. Claudio Abbado/Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra: Abbado’s live recording from Rome is lyrically, almost improvisationally irresistible, but it’s also structurally brilliantly achieved.

Seán wrote:Hi Fergus, that is a lovely, throughly comprehensive and well written piece, thanks for sharing it.