Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68 (‘Pastoral’)

Program notes

About the Work

Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies are twins. He worked on them side by side, completed both in 1808, and introduced them to the world at the same concert, the long evening of his own music that he conducted at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna on 22 December 1808. They could hardly be less alike on the surface: one all struggle, the other a walk in the country.

Music about the countryside was nothing new. Composers before Beethoven had imitated storms and birdsong, and the “characteristic symphony” with descriptive titles was a familiar type. Beethoven accepted the tradition and was wary of it. He gave each of the five movements a title, and he added a famous caution: the symphony was “more the expression of feeling than painting”. What he wanted was not a picture of a brook but what it is like to sit beside one.

The country mattered to him. He left Vienna for the surrounding villages whenever he could and spent a great deal of time walking there. The Berliner Philharmoniker’s note on the symphony quotes him on another benefit: in the country, his failing hearing troubled him less.

The “Pastoral” is unusual in other ways. It has five movements, not four, and the last three run into each other without a break, so that the peasants’ dance is interrupted by the storm and the storm clears into the shepherd’s song. And it is remarkably unhurried. Where the Fifth compresses and drives, the Sixth repeats small figures over and over, as leaves or ripples repeat, and lets the harmony change slowly.

Kirill Petrenko, quoted in the orchestra’s note, puts the point this way: Beethoven wanted “first and foremost to show what we feel when we hear birds, or the fear we have when a storm comes”. He calls it a prefiguration of Romanticism.

What to Listen For

I. Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the countryside. The violins begin with a short, simple phrase and pause on it, as if taking a breath. Almost everything in the movement grows from that phrase and its little rhythmic cells, repeated dozens of times with constantly changing colour.

II. Scene by the brook. The murmuring of the water runs through the lower strings, with two muted solo cellos in the middle of the texture. Near the end the music halts for three birds, which Beethoven names in the score: a nightingale (flute), a quail (oboe) and a cuckoo (two clarinets).

III. Merry gathering of country folk. A rustic scherzo. In the middle section Beethoven affectionately mocks a village band: the oboe comes in off the beat, and the bassoon can manage only a few notes.

IV. Thunderstorm. The dance breaks off. Low strings rumble, raindrops patter in the violins, and the storm bursts. Beethoven saves instruments for this moment: the timpani and piccolo play only here, and the trombones enter for the first time.

V. Shepherd’s song: happy and thankful feelings after the storm. A clarinet and then a horn call across the valley, and the violins turn the call into a broad, swinging melody. The Berlin note hears in it not jubilation but humility. The tune returns in ever richer variations, and just before the end a muted horn recalls the opening call once more, followed by two firm closing chords.