The concert the Oregon Symphony is presenting this weekend has been given the title “A Pair of Sixth Symphonies”. The first of the pair is by a Czech composer who many have heard of, Bohuslav Martinu, but whose works most likely have remained unknown to the vast majority of concert goers. I’ll talk about his Sixth Symphony “Fantaisies Symphoniques” in the next day or so, as I get more time to absorb it in rehearsals and my own practicing.
What I’d like to talk about presently is Beethoven, and his Sixth Symphony. More specifically, I’d like to talk about how he opens this work, which has earned the sobriquet of “Pastoral”. Here it is performed by the New York chamber orchestra The Knights.
It’s an amazing way to open a symphony, isn’t it? Especially if you compare it with the five that precede it. The First Symphony opens with a dominant seventh chord that resolves to the wrong key – surprise! The Second Symphony opens with loud chords, in the style of many a Haydn symphony, followed by a serene melody in the woodwinds – yawn. The Third Symphony ‘Eroica’ (which we’ll be performing next week) opens with two powerful cannon shots from the orchestra, followed by a restless melody in the cellos with a propulsive accompaniment by the rest of the strings – touché! The Fourth Symphony begins with a sotto voce pizzicato in the strings, followed by an ominous line over a held pedal point – fraught with tension. The Fifth Symphony – do I even have to talk about that one? And then we get to the Sixth. It opens without fanfare, with no drama of any kind. It feels open, relaxed, warm. The sound caresses rather than rankles. Beethoven remarked about the programmatic content of the Sixth Symphony that it was ‘mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerey’ (‘more the expression of feeling than painting’). He set out to give a musical portrait of what it felt like to walk the countryside outside of Vienna rather than to describe the scenery of that same countryside. And to me, that is the genius of the piece. Because, while the inner movements do get a bit more narrative than descriptive (the Scene at the Brook, and The Storm), this first movement does everything with sound – not in the imitative sense, but in the psycho-acoustical sense. Beethoven makes the sounds that his eyes saw as the countryside, and we then feel the 19th century breezes in the soft, tall grass in a field somewhere outside of Vienna. That is the power of music.
- An NPR story about the symphony.
- Buy tickets to this weekend’s Oregon Symphony concerts.