SYMPHONY No. 6, "PASTORAL": Op. 68
The "Pastoral" symphony, composed in the summer of 1808, is the first example of symphonic programme-music by a great master. Its illustrative purpose is frankly proclaimed by the descriptive titles which head the separate movements as follows:
1. AWAKENING OF JOYFUL IMPRESSIONS ON ARRIVING IN THE COUNTRY
(Allegro ma non troppo)
2. SCENE BY THE BROOK
(Andante molto moto)
3. MERRY GATHERING OF COUNTRY-FOLK
(Allegro)
4. THUNDER-STORM
(Allegro)
5. SHEPHERD'S SONG; GLAD AND THANKFUL FEELINGS AFTER THE STORM
(Allegretto)
Beethoven in the music of this symphony is avowedly a musical realist. In the "Scene by the Brook" he delineates the rippling of the water by weaving and shimmering of the strings; the songs of birds by imitative figures in the wood-wind (the nightingale: flute; the quail: oboe; the cuckoo: 2 clarinets), which he is at pains to label in the score; and in the "Thunder-storm" section, wind, falling rain, flashes of lightning, the growling of thunder, are suggested by means of easily recognized musical symbols. Yet that the composer was here a somewhat timorous "programmist" is indicated by the note which he wrote in the sketchbook containing ideas for the music of the "Pastoral": "The hearer is left to find out the situations for himself"—a recommendation which he afterwards thought better of—and by the deprecatory after-thought with which he accompanied the description of the symphony on the programme of the concert at which it was first performed (in Vienna, December 22, 1808): "More expression of feeling than painting [depiction]"—and this despite the verisimilitude of the storm and the phonographic warblings of the instrumental birds in a tone-poem whose naïve realism is as deliberate as it is beyond dispute![13]