BEETHOVEN CONTEMPLATES NATURE
Then and Now: Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony
IF YOU WERE TO DRIVE twenty-five minutes due north from central Vienna, you would eventually arrive at a small suburban park, cut in two by the Schreiberbach River. In all honesty, it would be kind to call the Schreiberbach a river, its really more of a glorified creek, that runs through paved nature paths, middle class homes, and a small community playground. The area is surrounded by thin trees and a steep, woodsy hill to the east. This river, which splits not only a park but two suburban municipalities, Nussdorf and Grinzing, is the setting in which Ludwig van Beethoven apparently wrote the second movement of his Sixth Symphony in 1808, among the trees and streams. In his 1839 biography of Beethoven, Anton Schindler penned a lengthy and likely overly romantic portrait of the composer at work:
“While crossing this valley, overhung here and there with tall elm trees, Beethoven would frequently pause and let his enraptured gaze wander over the spectacular scene before him. Once he sat down on the grass and, leaning against an elm, asked me if there was a yellow-hammer singing in the topmost branches of the trees. Then he said, ‘It was here that I composed the “Scene by the Brook,” and the yellow-hammers up there, the quails, the nightingales, and the cuckoos composed along with me.’”
This scene, captured in a painting by Franz Hegi entitled “Beethoven composing the Pastoral Symphony” adds to this lush account. The painting, which was suspiciously created in the same year as Schindler’s biography, can almost be viewed as a 19th century inspiration board in the way that pictorial depictions of the symphony surround Beethoven. A shepherd with his flock foreshadows the Hirtengesang (Shepherd’s Song) of the fifth movement, Beethoven rests near the babbling brook of the second, and the “merry country people” of the third movement reside in the distant village. The diverse, almost tropical flora that surrounds a deadpan Beethoven has little resemblance to the thin elms and birches that now live by the creek. But this gloriously romantic portrait by Schindler, and artistic realization by Hegi, is almost entirely made-up, like most of Schindler’s biography. Though Beethoven’s “Scene by the Brook” does end with a series of bird calls in the woodwinds, this almost Snow White image of birds and animals helping Beethoven write his symphony is kind of ridiculous. It further binds the mythical relationship between the composer and their inspiration. Beethoven needed to be out in the natural world to express such a thing. And the bird calls inevitably flew from on high to the pen of the man himself!
It is true, however, that Beethoven did have a deep, meaningful, and significant relationship with the natural world. Writing to his close friend, the Austrian pianist Therese Malfatti in the summer of 1810, he is practically dizzy with the thoughts of “rambling for a while through the bushes, woods, under trees, through grasses and around rocks. No one can love the country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees and rocks produce the echo which man desires to hear.” Indeed, getting outside for a long walk through the parks around Vienna was a daily activity for the composer. Beethoven often used this time to sort out musical problems frustrating him back at the writer’s desk.
One could also say that nature, on more than one occasion, saved him from himself. Take for example the fall of 1802, still coming to grips with his ever failing ability to hear as well as other physical ailments, he fled to the small country town of Heiligenstadt, just south of Grinzing. In his so-called Heiligenstadt Testament, Beethoven writes how he truly believed that an escape to the country would heal him in some way. In one of his more distraught passages, one that is practically suicidal in tone, he writes “Thus I take my farewell of thee — and indeed sadly — yes, that fond hope which I entertained when I came here, of at any rate healed up to a certain point, must be entirely abandoned.” The letter, which makes countless allusions to the healing power of nature, is, in all intents and purposes, a suicide letter. It goes as far as to instruct his two brothers how to divide his “small fortune” in the case of his death. In the end, to at least some degree, the stay in Heiligenstadt eventually saw him through this dark period, one of many to come.
His Sixth Symphony, entitled Pastoral-Symphonie at its premiere in 1808, is in turn a deeply personal love letter to the countryside and to the natural world. Unlike the music of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, whose music seems to capture the raw spirit of the natural world untouched by man, the Pastoral Symphony is more concerned with mans place in it. The Sixth in many ways looks forward to the end of the 19th century with the music of Gustav Mahler, where distant polka bands and church bells from a nearby village intertwine with the stillness from a dense grove of trees. The symphony, as Beethoven noted in the program book for the 1808 concert, is “more the expression of feeling than painting,” the human experience of nature rather than a musical paint-by-numbers of things one would find on a long hike. It is a reactionary response to one of the most important loves of Beethoven’s life.
THE Pastoral Symphony is a masterclass in musical restraint; a composer holding his cards close to his chest for just the right moment. Unlike the other eight symphonies of Beethoven, this work is not a journey from darkness to light, from minor keys to major keys. Even in symphonies which live in a major tonality, there is still a degree of tension in the large scale harmonies, dipping here and there into minor areas. The Pastoral frolics in the major mode for well over twenty minutes before the first minor tonality is ever introduced. Arnold Schoenberg noted this in his 1946 essay Criteria for the Evaluation of Music that not only are minor chords almost entirely absent, but that for the most part, the only chords used are the basic building blocks of tonal music, the tonic (I), the dominant (V), and the subdominant (IV). So not only is this, to put it simply, a piece that lives alongside Bob Ross in a happy natural space, but these bright harmonies progress slowly, easing any sort of tension in the music. The slow harmonic movement rests easy. It “lives in the moment, man.”
The Sixth is also atypical in the way in which it begins, quietly, and stays that way for, again, about twenty minutes. This would have been a bit of a surprise for an audience in 1808 who was used to an attention grabbing bang to begin a symphony. It is similar in many ways to his G Major Piano Concerto which begins with an quietly introspective solo piano fragment. (Parenthetical Fun Fact: This piano concerto, as well as the Fifth Symphony, were both premiered on the same marathon concert as the Pastoral, all three pieces beginning with the same rhythm: a eighth note rest followed by three eighth notes).
The musical cards, so to speak, against Beethoven’s chest are smacked down on the table during the fourth movement, “Thunder and Storm.” What precedes the storm is a cheerful series of country dances which is suddenly interrupted with a quietly rumbling D-flat in the basses, one of the last notes expected in this F Major dance. The tension which has been all but absent thus far now appears with an ominous, buzzing intensity. To this point, Beethoven has not only restricted his loud dynamics and his minor harmonies, but also some of the instruments on stage. When the thunder finally breaks through a mist of distant rumblings, we have a blazing f minor chord now with timpani hammering away, and later, piccolo and trombones. The highest and lowest ends of the orchestra have been expanded and turned up a notch. The musical sky has been violently ripped open. There is a wonderfully dirty smudge in the low strings when the storm arrives, with the double basses playing sixteenth notes against cellos playing sixteenth note quintuplets. Beethoven’s remarkable ability to musically constrain himself for well over half of the symphony is what makes this monster of a movement so effectively terrifying.
Simon Rattle, the British conductor, has said that he views the storm and the placid thanksgiving movement which follows as having “nothing really to do with the weather.” Rather “it has to do with terror. Real terror, psychological terror.” The beauty of nature as Beethoven depicts it during the previous three movements is free of blemishes. Man communes with nature and both are at peace. But the storm that disturbs this tranquillity is as much a part of nature as the blissful brook and singing birds. When this movement was animated in Walt Disney’s Fantasia, the storm essentially kicks all the humans out of the fields and meadows they have been running around in all day. The storm, in some sense, is a warning. Rattle places the idea of the storm in a modern context: “…it seems like half the globe is traveling, trying to get to safety, what the storm means has changed for us. Part of what makes the piece so devastating an beautiful is the feeling of the fragility of human life.”
The relationship we as humans have with the earth is now a very different story than it was at the beginning of the 19th century. Far from observing nature as a way to escape urban centers, our selfish encroachments into the natural world has led to a grim reversal, in which massive forest fires, droughts, floods, hurricanes, and all the downstream effects that accrue over time are a looming presence over our lives. There have been attempts to contextualize Beethoven’s Pastoral into the world of the climate crisis. As one of the myriad celebrations of Beethoven’s 250th birthday in 2020, the UN World Climate Conference created the Beethoven Pastoral Project, aiming to “draw attention to the theme of ‘mankind and nature’, …and to deal actively with today’s urgent questions of environmental protection and global sustainability.” Centered in Bonn, Beethoven’s hometown which, as it would happen, also houses the UN’s Climate Change Secretariat, the project invited artists from around the world to develop and create their own musical responses to the Sixth Symphony. The final products, deemed “their Pastorals” were performed virtually on Earth Day as well as the United Nations World Environment Day. Some of the creations were documented in a film “The Sound of Nature,” which spotlighted classical musicians in India, a composer from Australia, an indie band in Iceland, and a pop solo artist from Ethiopia. I’m always weary of these types of initiatives, though appreciative of the UN’s effort power-up the Artist Bat Symbol in the case of a global catastrophe. Hopefully this and similar projects can contextualize what can be at times mind numbing statistics and figures. But we would all rather see the UN make inroads towards pushing governments towards more regulatory action against oil and gas companies. I’d be happy to write whatever anthem you want after reeling in Exxon-Mobil.
As a composer who attends a fair amount of contemporary music concerts, the topic of climate change in new music is certainly well represented. But there have been notable and effective additions to the catalog of post-Pastoral Symphony tone poems. John Luther Adams’ 2014 Pulitzer Prize winning piece Become Ocean contemplates the rise in global sea levels and how, as the composer writes “we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean." The piece operates, like the Beethoven, on a long series of nearly immobile chords. Adams stretches time and timbre to an almost suffocating level, with three overlapping spacial ensembles cascading over the other.
The Australian composer Brett Dean’s aptly titled Pastoral Symphony is a fifteen minute depiction of man’s encroachment on nature. With the use of electronics, Dean turns a series of serene pre-recorded and orchestrated bird calls into a frenetic dash, as the sounds of bulldozers hover in the distance. This month, a new mammoth, fifty minute orchestral cantata by Dean and his frequent collaborator, the librettist Matthew Jocelyn, about evolution and the creation of the world will premiere in England. In This Brief Moment is “not a history lesson or manifesto” as the composer puts it, but rather, “our opportunity to marvel at what has been, what that has become, and what might well be lost.” A small snippet from the libretto reads “What is is, But once was not nor once no more shall be.”
THE MIDDLE CLASS HOMES and small apartments that line the Schreiberbach River encircle a modest statue of Beethoven. The teal colored bust rests in this suburban park were Beethoven was, at the very least, inspired to write the Pastoral Symphony, if not the spot where he gracefully rested his head along the brook. To him, this area was “the country,” a place to escape the urban world. He would hardly recognize the parking lots and banks and bars and highways that now dot the area. The urban has overtaken over the world of shepherd songs and bird calls.
The balance that the symphony attempts to realize, that of man’s place in the natural world, has slipped over the past two centuries. Indeed, the “Thunder and Storm” is no longer a natural occurrence but one that is intentional, brought on in the name of human convenience and progress. I’m reminded of the German Jewish philosopher and essayist Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Paul Klee’s mono-print Angelus Novus (New Angel), written during the height of the Second World War. “Where we perceive a chain of events,” the “Angel of History” which floats above time and space “sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
