Producing the Echo

Escapes to the country were also a frequent occurrence in Beethoven’s biography. Villages such as Mödling and Heiligenstadt, since swallowed by Vienna, or the slightly more distant spa town of Baden, or Gneixendorf amid vineyards east of Krems, provided opportunities for the composer to take his favored solitary walks. When war or illness prevented him from doing so, as during Napoleon’s siege of Vienna in 1809, depression inevitably followed. “Nobody,” he explained to his friend Therese Malfatti, “can love the country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees, and rocks produce the echo which man desires to hear.”

A year before Beethoven was cut off from the natural world by French troops, he composed his Sixth Symphony. In many ways, it marked a significant shift from the world of the preceding Fifth, with which it nonetheless shared its (somewhat abortive) premiere at the freezing Theater an der Wien on December 22, 1808. Yet, despite all differences, the two works chart journeys to triumph: abstract and fateful in the case of the Fifth, and of reconciliation with the natural world in the Sixth. The former is the stuff of trumpets and drums, the latter the spur to one of the sincerest acts of thanksgiving in the repertoire.

The preceding argument is similarly wordless, though there is a conversational quality to the way in which Beethoven launches the Symphony, as if someone had been caught mid-sentence. The gentle inclines of that initial phrase trigger a cycle of calls and responses, with the “awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the countryside” becoming a collective experience, even looking ahead to the Ninth Symphony. And yet, within this communal act, there is a wealth of musical interest too, with continuous motivic extrapolation and solo lines offering commentaries both pithy and profound, as well as excitement at new things always arising.

The subtitle of the second movement, Szene am Bach, proves problematic when it comes to framing the “Pastoral” Symphony as a representation of feeling more than painting. This is a veritable tableau, with a quail, a nightingale, and a cuckoo all making an appearance. Yet the cadenza-like nature of their overlapping songs, breaking the flow of the brook and its purling 16th notes, could also be seen to mark an interruption in musical proceedings, with the pause highlighting that distinction between pictorial-programmatic and intellectual concerns. Among the latter is the presence of the subdominant as the new home key, which provides a crucial role across the movements, not least at the end of the finale. But we might also turn away from cerebral things and simply enjoy Beethoven’s echo of nature.

That is certainly what the figures in the third movement are doing, even if this is not so much a dance as a suggestion of a dance—or dances. For none of the jigs is given primacy and, although material is, of course, developed, Beethoven favors collage-like techniques, thereby allowing him to introduce the sudden storm of the fourth movement. Sonic drama is enhanced by the presence of trombones and piccolo, with a final flash of lightening from the strings (looking to Verdi’s Otello). An oboe delivers a placatory chorale by Johann Crüger, likewise found in Brahms’s First Symphony, before the flute points to a glimmer of sunlight beyond, offering the first note of the finale.

Beethoven is at his most generous when giving thanks. There are the unbridled heroics of the end to Fidelio, the awe-inspiring universality of the last movement of the Ninth Symphony, and the sheer relief of the Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit (also in F major) from his A-minor String Quartet Op. 132. Yet the Allegretto with which he closes his Sixth Symphony is of another hue: restful satisfaction. Taught but entirely without tension, it is also summatory. The rippling brook returns, as do the singing birds. So too, of course, does the tonic—and its attendant subdominant— to conclude the symphonic act. But, as ever, it is newly minted, gleaming, rain-wet, in the light of the sun. Or, as the avid Beethovenian T. S. Eliot would write: “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”