Beethoven wrote the Symphony No. 6 during the same period as the Fifth, one of his most revolutionary and uncompromisingly serious works—the Sixth’s exact opposite. He premiered both in an 1808 extravaganza concert in Vienna that included his Coriolan Overture, two movements from his Mass in C, the Choral Fantasy, and the Piano Concerto No. 4 (Beethoven’s last performance of a concerto, as his deafness soon ended his career as a pianist). This sounds too good to be true, and it was. The under-rehearsed musicians couldn’t possibly cope with all this difficult modern music, and the performance fell apart at the Choral Fantasy. The Sixth Symphony, however, garnered friendly reviews and became an instant hit. Beethoven groused about the glitches, but was happy about the outcome: “In spite of the fact that various mistakes were made, which I could not prevent, the public nevertheless applauded the whole performance with enthusiasm.”
As its descriptive title makes clear, the Sixth is Beethoven’s paean to nature. “How delighted I will be,” he wrote, “to ramble for a while through the bushes, woods, under trees, through grass, and around rocks. No one can love the country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees, and rocks produce the echo that man desires to hear.” With this symphony, Beethoven brought that echo into the concert hall, but insisted the Sixth was a generalized “recollection of country life” rather than a parade of pictures—“more the expression of feeling than tone-painting.” He cautioned that “all painting in instrumental music is lost if it is pushed too far … anyone who has an idea of country life can make out for himself the intentions of the composer without many titles.”
Beethoven nonetheless scattered quite a few titles through the work’s five movements (his only symphony with so many and the second instance in which the final two movements are connected without pause). Officially subtitled “Pastoral Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life,” the work has a label for each of its movements. “Awakening of Cheerful Feelings upon Arriving in the Country” opens the piece with happy drones and a flowing depiction of country living, with none of the dramatic contrasts in mood that Beethoven normally builds into first movements. “Scene by the Brook” calls for flute, oboe, and clarinets to depict, respectively, a nightingale, quail, and cuckoo—an irresistible effect cribbed by Berlioz in the country scene of his Symphonie fantastique. “Merry Gathering of Country Folk,” which fills in for a scherzo, vividly anticipates the kind of village band scene Charles Ives would conjure a century later. “Thunderstorm” disrupts the revelry—first subtly, then tempestuously (forecasting more savage tempests by Wagner and Liszt)—giving the full orchestra a chance to show its more dramatic colors, including a treat for the timpanist. The storm passes as gradually as it emerged, making way for the “Shepherd’s Song—Happy and Thankful Feelings After the Storm,” which builds a soaring crescendo—one of Beethoven’s most ecstatic premonitions of Romanticism—then returns the symphony to the pastoral pleasantry with which it began.
Although Beethoven’s odd-numbered symphonies are conventionally considered his most epic and “serious,” the Seventh is in a special category; epic it certainly is, but it projects little of the colossal sense of struggle so fundamental to the Third, Fifth, and Ninth. In his classic book on Beethoven, J. W. N. Sullivan goes so far as to say that the Seventh is “the first work on a grand scale in which the conflict is taken for granted and ignored, and the fruits of victory enjoyed … The exultant note rises higher until, in the last movement, we are in the region of pure ecstasy.”
Wagner’s famous description of the Seventh as “the apotheosis of the dance” is itself the apotheosis of a long-standing tendency to view the work as a great experiment in rhythm. (The piece has, in fact, been choreographed numerous times and danced by such artists as Isadora Duncan.) The rhythmic propulsion of the Seventh exceeds even the energy of the Fifth. Berlioz heard in the first-movement Vivace a rowdy peasant dance. Wagner called the finale a “Dionysian orgy”; George Bernard Shaw claimed that the finale was wilder than any jazz.
So notorious was the Dionysian aspect of the work that some of Beethoven’s contemporaries wondered if he were drunk when he wrote it, leading Romain Rolland to later respond: “The work of an inebriated man indeed it was, but one intoxicated with poetry.” Even the austere slow movement has a dance-like, ritualistic quality—one that 19th-century writers likened to a procession in the catacombs.
Yet others view the symphony in calmer, more lyrical terms, indeed as another pastoral symphony. To Philip Hale, Wagner’s effusions were “hysterical”; to Sir George Grove, Berlioz’s peasant-dance analogy was “outrageous.” Vincent d’Indy summed up this point of view with the claim that “the rhythm of the piece has truly nothing of the dance about it; it would seem, rather, to come from the song of a bird.” Even Sullivan, who clearly appreciated the work’s dynamism, wrote that “the great introduction to the first movement seems to convey the awakening and murmuring of the multitudinous life of an immense forest. Much more than the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony do we feel here in the presence of Nature itself.”
Sir John Eliot Gardiner finds an important political motivation in Beethoven’s composition of the Seventh. Beethoven was committed to the liberating ideals advanced by the French Revolution. The influence is evident not only in the sweep and energy of the Seventh, but in specific references to French propaganda songs from the 1780s and ’90s. Gossec’s “Hymn to the Republic,” for example, propels the finale’s dotted rhythms. We think of Beethoven as inextricably German, but the French had a strong say as well.
The Seventh is certainly rich enough to support both views. Commentators of the time imply that Beethoven himself tended toward the Dionysian version when conducting the work. According to these accounts, Beethoven gyrated about on the podium, bending down deeply for diminuendos and leaping up for crescendos, his podium manner made all the more bizarre by his deafness. Commenting on the 1813 premiere in Vienna, Louis Spohr wrote that the performance gave “extraordinary pleasure … in spite of the often ridiculous conducting of Beethoven.”
Perhaps the best way to view the symphony is as a dance, but a dance for the elements. “My kingdom is the air,” Beethoven once said; in the Seventh, the most airborne of the symphonies, he showed us exactly what he meant.
—Jack Sullivan
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