For listeners today, many of whom know all of Beethoven’s symphonies, it takes some historical imagination to appreciate how his contemporaries first received them. From our perspective, the startling brilliance of the Third, Fifth, and Ninth in particular may eclipse the other six symphonies and obscure how novel they all were when first performed. Beethoven continually challenged his audience’s expectations.
These challenges began with his First Symphony, with its “wrong key” opening. The Second Symphony was in no way a retreat, as later commentary often suggests; rather, Beethoven continued experimenting. The Third—the mighty “Eroica”—clearly marked a turning point in his compositional development because of its length, complexity, extra-musical program, and aesthetic ambition. People thought: What would—what could—Beethoven do next? One critic at the time offered the following opinion about the Fourth: “That the composer follows an individual path in his works can be seen again in this work; just how far this path is the correct one, and not a deviation, may be decided by others. To me the great master seems here, as in several of his recent works, now and then excessively bizarre, and thus, even for knowledgeable friends of art, easily incomprehensible and forbidding.”
Biographical and historical accounts often tend to skip over the Fourth, jumping ahead to the famous Fifth. Indeed, the Fourth is the least known and performed of all of Beethoven’s symphonies (of course, one of the nine has to be). It would probably turn up even less frequently were it not for the sake of comprehensiveness on recordings and in performance cycles such as The Philadelphia Orchestra is doing this season to belatedly celebrate the composer’s 250th birthday.
This relative neglect of the Fourth Symphony began in Beethoven’s own time. In 1814, when he was at the height of his popularity and success, a critic for the leading music journal in Europe commented that there were extended discussions available concerning most of his works, adding “the master’s [Fourth] Symphony in B-flat Major has certainly already been briefly and strikingly described several times, but has never been exhaustively reviewed. Does it deserve less than any of the others?” It seems that then, as now, the Fourth was overshadowed. As a perceptive critic remarked in 1811: “On the whole, the work is cheerful, understandable, and engaging, and is closer to the composer’s justly beloved First and Second symphonies than to the Fifth and Sixth. In the overall inspiration we may place it closer to the Second.”
Beethoven wrote the Fourth Symphony during the late summer and fall of 1806, while staying in the palace of Count Franz von Oppersdorff in Upper Silesia, far from the bustle of Vienna. The count’s private orchestra performed the Second Symphony for Beethoven, who soon agreed to write a new one. The Fourth was given a semi-public performance at Prince Lobkowitz’s palace in Vienna in March 1807 before its official premiere at a benefit concert in November. Over the coming years, Beethoven’s contemporaries became accustomed to how far the composer was expanding the boundaries of music; to them, the Fourth was viewed as Classical fare. One critic opined: “There are no words to describe the deep, powerful spirit of this work from his earlier and most beautiful period.”
Although Beethoven had not used a slow introduction in the Third Symphony, for the Fourth he returned to one (Adagio), as he had in his first two symphonies and as were often found in the later symphonies of Haydn, his former teacher. (The introduction in this case is particularly similar to Haydn’s Symphony No. 102, in the same key.) An example of the kind of feature some critics found “bizarre” was the jabbing dissonances that build up in the introduction before a rousing Allegro vivace, rich with melodies.
The second-movement Adagio is an expressive and relaxed rondo in E-flat major. The third movement (Allegro vivace) combines elements of scherzo and minuet, and has the trio section played twice, which creates a five-part structure instead of the usual three-part form. The symphony concludes with a dazzling perpetual-motion Allegro ma non troppo that nods again to Haydn.
Most of the familiar titles attached to Beethoven’s works were first applied by someone other than the composer. Critics, friends, and publishers invented the labels “Moonlight,” “Tempest,” and “Appassionata” for popular piano sonatas. Prominent patrons’ names—Archduke Rudolf, Count Razumovsky, Count Waldstein—became wedded to compositions they either commissioned or that were dedicated to them, thereby winning a sort of immortality for those who supported the composer.
Beethoven himself crossed out the heading “Bonaparte” from the title page of the Third Symphony, but later wrote in “Sinfonia eroica” (“Heroic Symphony”), and it is his only symphony besides the Sixth to bear an authentic title. To be sure, stories about “fate knocking at the door” in the Fifth and the choral finale of the Ninth have encouraged programmatic associations for those works, beginning in Beethoven’s own time. But in the end, it is the Sixth Symphony, the “Pastoral,” that stands most apart from his others, and indeed from nearly all of Beethoven’s instrumental and keyboard music, in its intentional, publicly declared, and often quite audible extramusical content. Beethoven’s full title is “Pastoral Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life.”
And yet the Sixth Symphony does not aspire to the level of musical realism found in a work like Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique or in Richard Strauss’s tone poems. Beethoven famously noted that the “Pastoral” contained “more an expression of feeling than painting.” He had earlier objected to some of the musical illustration in Haydn’s oratorios The Creation (1798) and The Seasons (1801), with their imitations of storms, frogs, and other phenomena. He might not have cared much for what the “New German School” of Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner would later advocate and create.
Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony belongs to a tradition, going back to the previous century, of “characteristic” symphonies. Indeed, the titles for the movements that Beethoven provided closely resemble those of Le portrait musical de la nature, written nearly 25 years earlier by Rhenish composer Justin Heinrich Knecht. (It is doubtful Beethoven knew the music of the piece, but he may have known the titles.) Scattered comments that Beethoven made in his sketches for the symphony are revealing: “The hearers should be allowed to discover the situations / Sinfonia caracteristica—or recollection of country life / All painting in instrumental music is lost if it is pushed too far / Sinfonia pastorella. Anyone who has an idea of country life can make out for himself the intentions of the composer without many titles / Also without titles the whole will be recognized as a matter more of feeling than of painting in sounds.”
Regardless of the musical and aesthetic implications that the “Pastoral” Symphony raises with respect to program music—a key issue for debate during the 19th century—the piece unquestionably offers eloquent testimony to the importance of nature in Beethoven’s life. He took walks often in Vienna’s parks and in the large field just outside the city walls. For part of each year, he moved to a suburban village or retreated to a spa. (“To stay in the city in summer is torture for me,” he once remarked.) As Beethoven wandered about, he would not only soak in nature but also compose. While he worked out his most detailed ideas for compositions in large-format sketchbooks at home, he typically carried around small pocketbooks as well. Artist August von Kloeber undertook a portrait of the composer in 1818 and later recalled observing Beethoven strolling around the country: “It was most interesting to see him, a sheet of music paper and a stump of pencil in his hand, stop often as though listening, and then write a few notes on the paper.”
Being amidst nature was crucial to Beethoven’s existence. In the summer of 1809, when Napoleon’s troops occupied Vienna for the second time, he was unable to leave the city and wrote to his publisher: “I still cannot enjoy life in the country, which is so indispensable for me.” Booming cannon fire caused particular distress to his ears. By the following May, he was eagerly anticipating leaving Vienna: “How delighted I will be to ramble for a while through the bushes, woods, under trees, through grass, and around rocks.”
The idea of Beethoven communing with birds and flowers may seem somewhat at odds with the eccentric genius shaking his fist at fate, but the two images are complementary sides of his personality, traits he powerfully evoked in the Fifth and Sixth symphonies. These works are so different in many respects and yet might be considered as twins, albeit unidentical ones.
Not only did both have the same period of genesis around 1808 and the same dedicatees (Count Razumovsky and Prince Lobkowitz), but they were also published within weeks of one another in the spring of 1809. They premiered together (in reverse order and with their numbers switched) at Beethoven’s famous marathon concert of December 22, 1808, at the Theater an der Wien. Despite their overall contrasting mood, there are notable points of musical convergence, such as the innovations in instrumentation (the delayed and dramatic introduction of piccolo and trombones in the fourth movements) and the splicing together of the final movements.
Beethoven’s descriptive movement titles for the “Pastoral” were made public to the audience before the premiere. The first movement, “Awakening of Cheerful Feelings upon Arriving in the Country,” engages with a long musical tradition of pastoral music. From the initial drone of an open fifth in the lower strings to the jovial coda, the leisurely and often repetitive pace of the movement is far from the intensity of the Fifth Symphony. The second movement, “Scene by the Brook,” includes the famous birdcalls: flute for the nightingale, oboe for the quail, and two clarinets for the cuckoo (Berlioz copied the effect for two of the birds in the pastoral third movement of his Symphonie fantastique).
This is Beethoven’s only symphony with five movements, and the last three lead one into the next. The third is entitled “Merry Gathering of Country Folk” and suggests a town band of limited ability playing dance music. The gaiety is interrupted by a “Thunderstorm” that approaches from afar as ominous rumblings give way to the full fury of thunder and lightning. The storm is far more intense than other well-known earlier depictions, such as by Vivaldi and Haydn. Just as the storm had approached gradually, so it passes, leaving some scattered moments of disruption before the “Shepherd’s Song—Happy and Thankful Feelings after the Storm” brings the work to its close. Regardless of Beethoven’s declared intentions, this music seems to function on both descriptive and expressive levels, which has helped to fuel arguments about program music ever since his time.
—Christopher H. Gibbs
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