Beethoven’s “Pastoral” (1/2)
“I love a tree more than a man: woods, trees and rocks give man the response he needs.” (Beethoven)
According to his contemporaries, Beethoven loved nothing more than to immerse himself in the beauties of nature. His servant Michael Krenn remembered that he could roam up and down the fields from dawn to nightfall, “sketchbook in hand, waving his arms, completely carried away by inspiration.” One of these notebooks, dated 1803, in fact contains a musical sketch of the sounds of the brook flowing near Heiligenstadt (close to Vienna), a passage that will be reworked in order to incorporate it in the Andante of the “Pastoral.”
Composed simultaneously, the Fifth Symphony and the “Pastoral” were premiered 22 December 1808. If the former depicts man grappling with Fate, the latter finds him facing Nature. Rather than drawing up a realistic portrait of the scenes conjured up, Beethoven seeks rather to extract their quintessence. “Pastoral Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life, (more an expression of feeling than painting)”, he wrote, in fact, on the title page of the first edition.
The first movement suggested the following images to Hector Berlioz: “The shepherds begin to move about nonchalantly in the fields; their pipes can be heard from a distance and close-by. Exquisite sounds caress you like the scented morning breeze. A flight or rather swarms of twittering birds pass overhead, and the atmosphere occasionally feels laden with mists. Heavy clouds come to hide the sun, then suddenly they scatter and let floods of dazzling light fall straight down on the fields and the woods.”
To listen to the Third Symphony, as performed by the Orchestre de la Francophonie under the direction of Jean-Philippe Tremblay (CD 3)