DAILY DOSE OF BEETHOVEN (September 22, 2020)
Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony: The Paradoxical 2nd Movement
The second movement of the Sixth Symphony is marked by Beethoven simply as "By a Brook." On the one hand, it might seem to be more descriptive and literal than the first movement. The image of a brook is concretized in constant eighth and running sixteenth notes that keeps flowing (Beethoven had even made sketches for the sound of flowing water, and wrote under them: "the more water the deeper the sound"). Running through the movement are trills that remind us of birds, that eventually break out into a dialogue of specific bird songs.
Yet, the movement is over twelve minutes long and goes through several key changes. It seems as though it were recounting stories, although we have no idea which ones. Or, are they stories? We would do well to remember two things:
1. The woods in Bruhl and outside Heiligenstadt were where Beethoven composed his major works: He would sit in the fork of a favorite tree for hours, inspired by nature, and compose the greatest works mankind had ever known.
2. Although Beethoven continued to visit these woods, at the time he was composing this symphony, he was mentally summoning the sounds of the forest from memory. He could no longer hear them. Perhaps the fleeting snatches of melody do not represent stories so much as poetic inspiration--"feelings more than painting."
In tour April 20, 2020 post, we discussed how in the introduction to the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony, Beethoven shared his compositional method with his audience. Perhaps he is doing the same here, but in a completely different way. He wrote to friends "when you walk through these woods, remember that I have often "gedichte" (made poetry) here, or as they say, composed." ( Beethoven preferred the term tone-poet to composer.)
Near the end, the orchestra goes silent to make way for a trio of bird songs--those of the Nightingale, Quail, and Cuckoo, as represented by a flute, oboe, and clarinet. You can't help but smile when you hear it, but is it a literal representation, or a joke?
On the one hand, Beethoven, sitting in his favorite spot, may have heard an interaction between these birds that only needed the help of a composer to put them into counterpoint. On the other, he once visited the spot where he composed the movement with the rather humorless Anton Schindler, who asked Beethoven why he had not included the call of the Yellow Hammer since they had also been present. Beethoven drew an upwards arpeggio of nearly two octaves (impossible for a bird, but similar to a phrase played by the bassoon an others during the movement), and said to him "There's the little composer, and you'll find he plays a more important part than the others, for they are nothing but a joke." We can only imagine what else Beethoven said with a straight face, for Schindler later reported that Beethoven had used the Yellow Hammer call to open his Fifth Symphony!
Did you ever attend a lecture on a serious subject by a brilliant speaker who suddenly breaks into a joke, informs you that that is what he is doing, and it takes you a minute to figure it out? That's Beethoven!
Does it represent nature or man's creativity? Both! Human creativity is natural, and it is fueled by the way The Creator is reflected in nature. When roaming the woods, Beethoven would sing: "Gott allein ist unser Herr."
You can find this feathered forest trio at 12:34 in this recording:
https://youtu.be/HRwU0JaykJQ?list=TLPQMjIwOTIwMjDM1bZ4ygLaeA