Beethoven’s “Pastoral” (2/2)
Anton Schindler recounted how when he was walking with Beethoven in April 1823, the latter “often stopped, looking around in wonder and breathing in the fragrant air of that marvelous valley. Then, sitting on the turf, and leaning against an elm, he asked me if, among the birdsongs, I could distinguish that of the oriole. Everything was quiet. He spoke up again: ‘Here I wrote the ‘Scene by the brook’ and up there, the quails, the orioles and the nightingales and the cuckoos composed it before me.’ ”
A thunderstorm soon cuts short the “Joyous gathering of peasants”, with its popular sounds. “Listen to the gusts of wind gorged with rain, the dull growl of the basses, the shrill hissing of piccolos announcing the fearful storm that is about the break out,” Berlioz explains. “ The hurricane approaches and increases in intensity. A huge chromatic scale, starting in the upper instruments, plunges to the depths of the orchestra, picks up the basses on the way, drags them upwards, like a surging whirlwind that sweeps everything in its way.”
The Symphony ends in joy and serenity, the bucolic images for the first movement once again conjured up in this hymn of gratitude to nature.
To listen to the Third Symphony, as performed by the Orchestre de la Francophonie under the direction of Jean-Philippe Tremblay (CD 3)