Beethoven had mixed feelings about the Pastoral Symphony
Why BeethovenIn today’s Spectator, I write about my childhood aversion to the Pastoral Symphony – only to discover much later that Beethoven was also ambivalent about the work.
… ‘Considered in the totality of Beethoven’s output, the Pastoral is a cuckoo in his catalogue. Had it never been written, our view of him would not change. It was composed alongside the Fifth Symphony and Fourth Piano Concerto and premièred together in an overlong concert in December 1808. Both the other works reflect nervous times, Napoleon hammering at the gates of Vienna.
‘The Sixth, however, is sheer escapism, a springtime day evoked in deep midwinter and telling a story, which Beethoven never normally does…’
Read on here.
Oh dear… (rolling eyes)
Well, what does Beethoven know, anyway?
After the Second, all the symphonies are rather unexpectedly different from the others.
We like that he wasn’t writing the same symphony nine times.
Beethoven seems to be engaging in the same sort of hedging that modern composers do.
At every new music concert or premiere I can pretty much bet the program notes will contain some comment from the composer along the lines of, “This piece is like _______, but not really.”
Well, the Pastorale” Symphony was my least favorite of the nine (possibly influenced by the fact that that was the one part of Fantasia I loathed as a child and still find yucky), until I had the chance to play it and came to appreciate what an ingenious bit of scoring and organization it represents, and that bumped it up several notches. Ironically the Symphony No. 7 was my top favorite of the nine … until I had the chance to play IT. That bumped it down several notches. Eventually I became a contrarian of almost Lebrechtian proportions and concluded that it was the even numbered Beethoven symphonies that were the best ones.
Strange reasons for the comments about Bruno Walter however, and myopic ones about the orchestra in his Columbia stereo recordings. Some perhaps most members were Hollywood studio professionals to be sure, plus I suspect some LA Philharmonic types, and according to Zubin Mehta, sometimes that Columbia Symphony was the LA Philharmonic pure and simple, but to mash that up so that Walter is tainted with some sort of stereotyped Hollywood studio mogul crassness seems bizarre and weird and again, myopic/provincial. This is the same orchestra as in most of Stravinsky’s stereo recordings, meaning it is also the same orchestra as in Robert Craft’s Webern and Schoenberg recordings (which by the way were made because both Stravinsky and Bruno Walter generously agreed to shorten their own sessions so Craft could take over). What Hollywood excesses so you associate with them? Same musicians, some of America’s best. Same everything.
You prefer the even numbered symphonies. How odd.
Yep. And the even numbered violin sonatas too. Curiouser and curiouser!
One of the things I really admire about Beethoven is how pretty much each of his symphonies stands out on their own and doesn’t feel too similar to the others. I’ve always liked the Pastoral for that as being among the more distinct ones, though I can see how it feels escapist as it feels less deep than some of his symphonies – but that’s not a bad thing when he wrote the likes of 3 and 9 as well.
So what? He wrote it, he published it, it’s beautiful and people love it! End of story.
Its the most beautiful of all 9!!!
I confess the 6th is probably my favorite Beethoven symphony, and probably the only one that I’ll go out of my way to hear in concert.
I find it very interesting that one of the most important music critics of the past 50 years points out that the assessment of a conductor’s character can influence how the music is perceived. I agree. It is challenging to know that the Maestro (Walter in this case) has feet of clay and was a “sex pest who kept a mistress on tap”, while simultaneously appreciating the musician.
A world-renowned Music Director has been doing exactly the same thing, at work, for years. For some who have knowledge of it, it is almost impossible to separate his conducting skills from the assessment of his character (or lack thereof). For others, including many orchestra musicians of the old school, his personal behavior is irrelevant. Who is right? And why is this particular individual allowed by the organization’s leadership (to maintain that they do not know strains credulity to the breaking point) to behave in such a way?
Questions that may not find an answer anytime soon.
Sometimes one can get a little too wound up…..
“Hey Glenn, take a stab at it and see what you can do with the Liszt transcription of the Beethoven Symphony 6 Pastoral.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_8Y_8qthEI
truly horrible
A matter of opinion of course. The first dozen comments of 383 posted are below:
Love him or hate him, when Glenn Gould plays ANYTHING, by any composer, you are absolutely certain of one thing: It is NOT going to be boring!.
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Andrew Marcus
Andrew Marcus
5 years ago
Beethoven wrote the Symphony.
Liszt transcribed it for piano.
Gould added choral.
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Roy Brown
Roy Brown
6 years ago
If I were destined to spend the rest of my life alone on a desert island and could choose only one recording, I would choose this. It is mesmerising, beautiful, and ultimately in the glorious final movement it is transcendent. What joy!
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Nick
Nick
4 years ago
This is my favorite performance of any work by anyone.
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Galantski
Galantski
3 years ago
This is such a transcendent performance. It’s a pity that Gould only recorded this and the Fifth, but we can be grateful for them.
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David T
David T
7 years ago
His musicality always makes listener feel comfortable with clear sound and well-refined rhythm & phrasing. He doesn’t exaggerate music with rubato or bravura. He tries to show the clear essential part of the piece. But it always makes me fee listening to the best of the opus.
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Simon Artymowycz
Simon Artymowycz
4 years ago
I absolutely love that he goes outside the norm of the written tempo. What a poet.
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fred houpt
fred houpt
7 years ago
One of my favorite of the entire Gould output. Artistically so heartfelt and insightful. I love it.
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Armando Moreno Fierros
Armando Moreno Fierros
3 years ago
Hace varios años me enteré que existían éstas transcripciones de Lizt. Y las encontré en una tienda musical en México la 6a la 7a la 8a y 9a Sinfonías de Beethoven.
Siempre tuve la curiosidad de saber quién lo podría tocar bien, por el grado de dificultad tan grande que implican éstas transcripciones tan fantásticas de Lizt. Me da un gusto enorme que sea Glen Gould. Su dominio y conocimiento de el piano, su gran capacidad mental, su musicalidad. A quien interpretara lo interpretaba con gran respeto de lo escrito y con una dosis de genialidad insuperable. Tenemos el privilegio de escuchar la fusión de 3 genios Beethoven, Lizt y Glen Gould.
Atte. Armando Moreno.
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Gwen M
Gwen M
6 years ago
I’ve had to sit quietly at the end of this, words fail me…. there was no end of GG’s talent. This is truly a magnificent and stunning performance and of sheer incandescent beauty.
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alexandre luis
alexandre luis
3 years ago
I’ve heard a lot of versions of this score, but what Gould did here is simply out of this world.
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John Geiger
John Geiger
3 years ago
I never knew this recording existed. What a treasure! Thank you for posting!
Bruno Walter’s recording of the Pastoral
with the Columbia Symphony is the finest
recording ever made of the work !
My parrot quite likes the opening, and will sometimes improvise on it, especially when he hears running water; he rearranges some of the motifs in inventive ways Beethoven hadn’t imagined and has a wonderful time. He has heard both the fifth symphony and the fourth piano concerto, and they simply do not speak to him. So I’m quite glad Beethoven wrote the piece, myself.
Engaging and thought-provoking reading. It serves to prove several points:
–Connotations and personal experiences influence the perception of great works.
–Compelling interpreters of great works do not need to be good people.
–Descriptive music will be so with or without a written program. (The Fifth Symphony has no written program but is even more programmatic than the Sixth Symphony.)
–Any attempt to define Norman Lebrecht’s depth of thinking based on his daily blogs is about as valid as understanding Shakespeare from a single line of a sonnet.
Thanks for this. I respectfully disagree, as a composer who teaches the piece in a graduate composition seminar. The piece begins in an unsettled way – the fermata right at the start, followed shortly by the weird cresc-decresc that’s like a coach approaching and then passing by a mile marker; the shift from pastoral evocation to literal birdsong, a rift that opens wide into the storm movement…
The Fifth and Sixth Symphonies are a binary pair. Considering what he had recently gone through personally, and what he was going through while he was working on them, Beethoven couldn’t have composed the one without the other. There is more to the Sixth than most give it credit for.
Nothing you have said in the article, or that Beethoven himself said, implies that he had “mixed feelings” about the pastoral. This is projection of your own feelings, pure and simple.
I thought I heard once that Beethoven was very depressed at the time he wrote #6, so much so that he considered suicide, but decided against it because he felt he had to keep writing music.
If and only if you were to show me proof he didn’t like the Sixth, I’d believe it; otherwise, I find it too hard to believe he’d dislike a piece that he’d produced with such care at such an emotional climax in the drama of his life.
The 4th piano concerto? . . . the “Empress”? . . . I can’t say it ever made me think of Napoleon hammering at the gates of Vienna . . . . I love the “Pastoral” Symphony. I prefer its first two movements not be done too slowly, but that’s just a preference.
Some thoughs about Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony:
-It has more repeat passages than the other symphonies, which is sometimes painful in piano transcriptions.
-A predecessor of the “symphonic poem”, but surely better than other “poems” that would sometimes plague music in the late 19th C.
-Wonderful recordings: Toscanini 1939, Furtwängler 1944, Abbado in the mid 80’s (Wiener Phil). I have some prejudices against the Columbia Symphony after Stravinsky’s statement that the commercial recordings show interpretations that were never played but pasted together from multiple ‘false starts’.
Confronted by a music critic’s adverse review of one of his works, Beethoven retorted “You wretched scoundrel! What I shit is better than anything you could ever think up!”. Sadly, we don’t have any fossilised specimens of Beethoven’s ordure to conduct a comparison with this Spectator review.
Regading this SD topic, it’s is one of those pointless threads – there’s nothing of value in any of these postings. All we are talking about is subjective opinions whether the Pastoral is good, bad, awful, better than the Seventh, not as good as the Fifth or better than the Ninth.
For what it’s worth, which is nothing, the Pastoral was one of my earliest encounters with classical music. I must have been about eight years old when my father bought a ‘modern’ HMV record player to replace our wind-up gramophone. This leading-edge technological miracle plugged into the back of a wireless and enabled one to play not only the old 78s but also the new-fangled LPs and ‘45s’ – and it worked on electricity so that you didn’t need to crank a handle before playing each record. Most of his collection of 78s consisted of operatic arias and choruses and his first LP was excerpts from The Bartered Bride, followed in short order by Dvorak’s New World Symphony conducted by Nicolai Malko and Beethoven’s Pastoral, conducted by Toscanini. I was mesmerised by all of these. Then came Toscanini’s NBC recordings of Beethoven’s 4th, 5th and 7th. At that time I would never have dreamed of ranking these Beethoven symphonies in order of inventive quality and was unable to rank Toscanini against other conductors as I hadn’t heard any others at that stage.
Today I have dozens of Beethoven symphony recordings and several complete sets, including Böhm, Cluytens, Walter and János Ferencsik. There’s plenty to discuss about the merits of the different interpretations of these works but I have never doubted that Beethoven knew exactly what he was doing and did it supremely well. Whether or not one likes any of his works is a matter of personal opinion but fabricating pseudo-objective criteria upon which to assess their relative value is risible, to say the least.
Criticising the Pastoral as ‘sheer escapism, a springtime day evoked in deep midwinter and telling a story, which Beethoven never normally does…’ is debunking its greatest virtue. As for ‘telling a story’, it no more does so than does Smetana’s ‘From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields’ or Schubert’s Tragic Symphony. In any case, I believe that Beethoven himself took great pains to point out that the work was simply about his feelings on being in the countryside. I don’t know quite what ‘telling a story, which Beethoven never normally does…’ really means. Never normally? Fidelio does, so does Prometheus, so do King Stephen, Egmont and The Ruins of Athens. If ‘never normally telling a story’ applies to abstract works, then what about his ‘Les Adieux’ sonata? I guess that on the same grounds the Symphonie Fantastique is an irredeemable travesty.
For my part, I couldn’t care less even if it was inspired by Beethoven’s ear trumpet, his chamber pot or a quarrel with his landlord – I stand with the hundreds of thousands who, over more than two centuries, have judged it to be one of the supreme masterpieces within the classical repertoire.
I’m not sure if your article mainly serves as a plug for your upcoming book, Why Beethoven,but I did enjoy reading it. I like your writing, in truth. I felt like when I read your first novel, as I was reminded how good of a writer you are and a how much a tiny part in me wishes you’d focus exclusively on publishing books( fiction mainly) instead of gossip columns. I say this with all due respect. In regards to recordings of the 6th, per usual, I was pleasantly surprized by the recording with Dimitris Mitropoulos (with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra). Perhaps one day we will talk about this conductor’s true importance in helping audiences ‘get’ different composers. Perhaps, anything’s possible. The thing is, as a conductor, i.e. the composer’s ‘wife’, I dissagree with putting too much emphasis on my ‘hubbie’s’ personal life/history in trying to ‘explain’ his musical intentions. Neither should one it seems be basing their interpretations on his writings to various people, as all B’s letters had an agenda, similarly to my other ‘husband’s’ writings. Meaning, dead composers’ writings and sayings must be taken with a grain of salt in regards to explaining the compositions’s importance or meaning. But again, another large topic to discuss another time. Perhaps, everything’s possible.