Notes provided by:  David R. Glerum, Music Director – WMFE-FM/NPR, Orlando, FL. (1990-2009); Music Director – WXXI-FM/NPR, Rochester, N.Y. (1980-1990)

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) – Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 (Pastorale):

1. Awakening of Cheerful Feelings upon Arriving in the Country (Allegro man non troppo)
2. Scene by the Brook (Andante molto moto)
3. Merry Gathering of Country Folk  (Allegro)
4. Thunderstorm (Allegro)
5. Shepherd’s Song – Happy and Thankful Feelings After the Storm (Allegretto)

In the year 1808 – a year in which Beethoven composed both the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies – a visitor to his door might have encountered a Dr. Jekyll or a Mr. Hyde. So complex an individual was Beethoven that it is unfair to see him only as a fist shaking always fighting against all odds man. To be sure, he was for the most part disagreeable, gruff, ill tempered, and up for a fight. Most of his works bespeak defiance and a fierce determination to overcome. Certainly, his Fifth Symphony is an expression of intense struggle, asserting Beethoven’s own heroic efforts to control his own destiny.

1808 was a particularly difficult period in Beethoven’s life. He argued with his brothers, experienced one disappointment in love after another, and despaired over Napoleon’s transformation from champion of the French Revolution to nothing more than a tyrannical emperor. A major component of Beethoven’s nature was to fight back. And fight back he did in works like his Symphony No. 5.

However, there is another side to Beethoven’s character, which we sometimes overlook. While not as recognized, it was perhaps just as characteristic and powerful. Beethoven’s profound connection to and love of nature was essential not only to his equilibrium but also to his compositional process. He preferred to compose or work out music in his head during frequent and regular long walks through the beautiful and lush countryside near Vienna. This is interesting in view of Beethoven’s stock response to anyone asking about the meaning of his music:  “That can only be answered at the piano.” Yet much of Beethoven’s work does suggest at least some extra-musical association. And as the composer became increasingly alienated from the world of men as his deafness worsened, he increasingly sought and found refuge in Nature.

In the Sixth Symphony, there are obvious literal manifestations of the pastoral world, e.g., instruments imitating cuckoos, nightingales, quail, murmuring brooks, ferocious thunderstorms, etc. But these imitations of natural noises served only as a point of departure for Beethoven. The composer wanted to make it very clear that the work is “more an expression of feeling than painting.” Indeed, the deeper meaning of the symphony has more to do with a pantheistic worship of the feelings that arose in him as he kept intimate company with the familiar fields and forests around Vienna. So while the Fifth Symphony was one response to the struggles and suffering of 1808, the Sixth was another.

Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony is the seemingly effortless creation of a man who felt completely at ease with nature and who often looked to it for solace. It is for this reason that when we listen to this symphony we feel something beatific. To Beethoven, God was present in every tree, in every flower, and in every brook; if God and Nature are not one in the same, at the very least they went hand in hand.  There is no shaking or pounding of the fist in this symphony from Beethoven. While the Fifth Symphony overcomes through struggle and transcendence, the “Pastoral” brings us a sense of deliverance and peace.

Perhaps the composer Hector Berlioz put it best in these remarks on Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6: “Ancient   poems, however beautiful and admired they may be, pale into insignificance when compared with this marvel of music. This great poem of Beethoven – these long phrases so richly colored – these living pictures – these perfumes – that light – that eloquent silence – that vast horizon – these enchanted nooks secreted in the woods – those golden harvests – those rose-tinted clouds like wandering flocks on the surface of the sky – that immense plain seeming to slumber under the rays of the midday sun…Yes, great and adored poets, you are conquered:  Inclyte sed victim [“You are glorious but vanquished’].”

I.   Awakening of Cheerful Feelings upon Arriving in the Country (Allegro man non troppo)

Opening with a theme thought to be Slavonic derived, this movement is a wonderful evocation of the beautiful country setting, probably near the Heilingenstadt region, and Beethoven’s feelings of joy whenever he visited. The movement makes use of gradual crescendo (building intensifying of volume) while a phrase is repeated over and over. Throughout is the exhilaration of discovering the delicious solitude of a day in the country.

II.  Scene by the Brook (Andante molto moto)

The soft murmuring of the strings provides us with the image of a calming and flowing stream. The perpetually gliding movement of the music conveys an ardent observer at his happiest and most relaxed. Listen for the unmistakable calls of birds in the woodwinds: the nightingale in the flute, quail in the oboe, and cuckoo in the clarinet.

III.  Merry Gathering of Country Folk  (Allegro)

This scherzo of a third movement is a sort of peasant hoedown with a lot of woodwind frolic and humor. At various points are passages recalling rustic bands Beethoven sometimes heard at taverns in the countryside outside Vienna.

IV.  Thunderstorm (Allegro)

A transitional movement, this highly effective tone poem interrupts the tavern music with a realistic storm. Before the storm breaks, Beethoven sets the stage masterfully by staging a hushed atmosphere of suspense. The ominous quiet breaks when the music starts to depict the first scurries of wind and the coming of rain.  Then Beethoven paints a roaring tempest with the highlight being heard in the growling of the lower strings. The wind screams in the high-pitched piccolo and we experience a full-fledged thunder and lighting storm. But the storm dissipates almost as suddenly as it began, leading directly into the finale.

V.  Shepherd’s Song – Happy and Thankful Feelings After the Storm (Allegretto)

With the tumult of the storm behind, we are back to the radiant peace that began the symphony. One feels again the miracle of the beautiful sky above, fresh-washed and full of sun. The movement opens with the solo clarinet, then the horn, softly and gratefully playing the shepherd’s song of thanksgiving. This was all part of the nature Beethoven loved and worshipped. The entire final movement is really a sort of ecstatic hymn of thanks to Nature, which the composer saw as a direct connection with some pantheistic god. As we understandably think of the defiant and heroic personality of Beethoven, the Pastoral Symphony reminds us of a man who responded with awe and humility to the powerful beauty of nature.

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) – The Rite of Spring:

      Igor Stravinsky is universally considered to be one the greatest and most influential composers of the twentieth century. He was a dynamic innovator in a number of styles employing strikingly original harmonies, orchestrations, polytonalities, and rhythms. His styles ranged from Romanticism to Impressionism to Neoclassicism to Serialism to Jazz and even to Hollywood. The composer Nicholas Nabokov has written, “Despite his many twists and turns, Stravinsky became the unquestioned leader of Western music [in our time]…. Stravinsky and Schoenberg remain the lonely founding fathers of the strangely eccentric and highly anarchic state of modern music.”

Stravinsky’s early ballets dazzled audiences so profoundly that Stravinsky soared to international fame. The Firebird (1910), Petrouchka (1911), and Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1913) splashed across the musical landscape thrilling listeners with music of audacity and thrusts of barbaric power. This was music that made people sit up and take notice of sounds altogether new. Where before had they heard this kind of music? Stravinsky challenged concert-goers: sometimes with brutal, pounding rhythms in ever-changing, irregular patterns; sometimes with tastes of wild melody repeated over and over again; and daringly with occasional episodes of harsh, grating dissonances. In Le Ménestrel, H. Moreno sniped, “This Sacre du printemps, or rather a Massacre du printemps”; in the New York Sun, W.J. Henderson attacked Stravinsky as a “cave man of music”; and Ernest Newman in The Musical Times opined, “His music used to be original. Now it is aboriginal.”

In the case of The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky even incited a virtual riot. Well, perhaps not on purpose, but that is exactly what happened when the work was given its infamous premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris on May 29, 1913, with Pierre Monteux conducting. The performance led to one of the most scandalous events in the history of music. It was a scene of pandemonium and emotions run-amok, with the majority of the audience believing they were the butt of a monstrous joke and therefore reacting either with derisive laughter or booing in disgust. Some responded with vicious hisses and rounds of catcalls; rude comments were made and blows were exchanged; the houselights were turned on and off. Stravinsky recalled, “The first bars of the prelude… at once evoked derisive laughter. I was disgusted. These demonstrations, at first isolated, soon became general, provoking counter-demonstrations and very quickly developing into a terrific uproar.” It should be noted that the audience was probably reacting at least as much to Impresario Diaghilev’s questionable decision of entrusting the choreography to the inexperienced Nijinsky, whose work even Stravinsky characterized as “a very labored and barren effort,” as to the score. However, Stravinsky did have his defenders, most notably Claude Debussy who fervently entreated the audience to back off, remain quiet, and give the music an honest listen (Debussy, having read through the piano duet version with Stravinsky before this first performance, declared that he was “stupefied,” and then “haunted” as by “a beautiful nightmare”). Even so, battle lines were drawn in the sand as the evening progressed to the point where half the audience bolted for the exits. At the end of the performance, Stravinsky became fearful for his safety, prompting him to crawl through a dressing-room window into the anonymity of the riotous street crowd.

Only a year later, Stravinsky presented The Rite of Spring in a Paris concert performance with a much different outcome. In his words, “the entire audience stoop up and cheered. A crowd swept backstage. I was hoisted to anonymous shoulders, carried out into the street this way, and up to the Place de la Trinité.”

Stravinsky often spoke of the ideas for pieces coming to him in the form of dreams and visions. In his Autobiography, he discusses the genesis of The Rite of Spring in 1910: “I saw in my imagination a solemn pagan rite; sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of Spring.” The ballet’s scenario, devised by Stravinsky and the designer Nicholas Roerich, relates a primitive tribe’s welcome to the spring, through rituals and games culminating in the sacrifice of a Chosen One. “What I was trying to convey, Stravinsky commented, “was the surge of spring, the magnificent upsurge of nature reborn.” The Rite’s atavistic musical roots stretch back to the earliest beginnings of human history, a time when people sought to impact natural occurrences with ecstatic dancing and occultish rituals and ceremonies. As such, The Rite of Spring affirms a belief in the power of primitive art to affect and control our destiny in a frequently perplexing and impenetrable universe.

The Rite of Spring is divided into two continuous parts: 1.) “The Adoration of the Earth,” which depicts the gradual emergence of spring and the celebration of the new season through pagan ceremonies and dances; and 2.) “The Sacrifice,” which depicts the selection of the chosen virgin whose sacrifice will fertilize the earth, and her frenetic dance of death. Although the ballet has no clearly defined plot, the titles of the various sections do indicate the content and thrust of both the ballet and the music.

 Part I, The Adoration of the Earth, contains Introduction, Harbingers of Spring (Dance of the Adolescents), Game of the Abduction, Round Dance of Spring, Games of the Rival Tribes, Entrance of the Sage, Kiss  of the Earth, Dance of the Earth.

 Part II, The Sacrifice, includes Introduction, Mysterious Circles of the Adolescents, Glorification of the Chosen One, Evocation of the Ancestors, Ritual of the Ancestors, Sacrificial Dance (The Chosen One).