by Julia Grella O’Connell, D.M.A., Director of Education and Community Engagement

The theme of the pastoral – the artistic depiction of idealized rural life – first appeared in ancient Greek drama. The Roman poet Virgil wrote a series of poems in the first century B.C., the Eclogues, which complicate the theme by investing in the land and those who work it a mythical virtue and suggesting that, no matter how beautiful the countryside or how merry its denizens, a sense of melancholy is never far away. The trope of the pastoral has persisted in the arts of the Western world ever since, even – and perhaps especially – as Western culture has grown ever more complex and fragmented, and its people ever more distant from the land.

British-born composer Anna Clyne has long been interested in creating mimetic sound pictures of the natural world, notably in her 2022 duet for cello and birdsong, “In the Gale,” written for Yo-Yo Ma and recorded in a forest thicket. Clyne draws attention to the complexities of the pastoral tradition in her 2019 piece “Restless Oceans,” composed for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. In spite of the setting of the piece’s premiere, arguably worlds away from from simple country life, Clyne calls forth the pastoral tradition with heavily accented rhythms reminiscent of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” (itself a pastoral of supreme irony) and lyrical melodies in the flute, oboe, and the voices of the musicians themselves to equate the tempestuous changes of the natural world with the emotional resilience of the human heart. The work’s title is taken from Audre Lorde's poem “A Woman Speaks,” which uses time and the cosmos as metaphors for the strength and vision of Black womanhood: “if you would know me/look into the entrails of Uranus/where the restless oceans pound.”  

Richard Strauss wrote his first horn concerto in 1883 at the age of eighteen. His father, Franz Strauss, was principal French horn of the court orchestra at Munich and considered to be the finest horn player in all of Germany. When asked about his starry reputation, the elder Strauss categorically declared, “I do not prove it; I admit it.” Richard Wagner, though he knew the elder Strauss hated his music, chose him to play in the premieres of many of his operas, explaining, “When he plays his horn one can say nothing, for it is so beautiful.” It is natural then that the young Richard Strauss should have chosen the horn as the solo instrument for one of his earliest concertos. Nevertheless, the elder Strauss deemed the piece “totally unplayable.”

Strauss indicated in the full title of the concerto, “Konzert für Waldhorn mit Orchester oder Klavierbegleitung” (Concerto for Natural Horn with Orchestra or Piano Accompaniment) that his preference was for this valveless ancestor of the modern horn. The Waldhorn (literally “forest horn”) was descended from the traditional hunting horn, and thus the young Strauss self-consciously evokes the age-old pastoral tradition of the hunt and the use of horns to communicate across long distances in the countryside. Strauss’s musical ideas likewise look back to an earlier time, calling forth images of the pastoral with classic arpeggiated “hunting horn” motives, particularly in the third movement, reminiscent of Mozart and early Beethoven. Indeed, the contemporary critic for the New York Times, firmly in the camp of musical modernism, dismissed the concerto for “embodying ideas that are sure in the nature of things to be buried forever: for who ventures to produce concertos for the French horn in these days?”

We close this concert with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, the beloved “Pastoral.” The Beethoven of the Pastoral is very different from the man we’ve come to know over the past few seasons: the heroic, if prickly and domineering, protagonist of Symphonies 3, 4, and 5. In the Sixth Symphony, Beethoven has abandoned his dynamic, world-shattering persona to immerse himself in the natural world in what a contemporary critic called “musikalische Malerei,” or musical painting, and what the composer himself called “Erinnerung an das Landleben,” or “Memory of Country Life.” Beethoven described the symphony as “more [an] expression of emotion than tone-painting” (the invocation of specific images through musical form), but he nevertheless associates each of his five movements with scenes of the peasantry interacting with the countryside as they hold a village dance, flee a terrifying tempest, and finally hear the piping of a shepherd – represented by that quintessential pastoral instrument, the horn – as it restores balance both to nature and to human society. Beethoven goes so far as to include musical imitations of a murmuring stream and the songs of three distinct birds – the nightingale in the solo flute, the quail in the solo oboe, and the cuckoo in two solo clarinets – as well as depictions of rustic songs and a slightly drunken dance party, with the village band’s bassoonist consistently entering the music a beat late. In contrast to the Symphony No. 5, there is no “I” in this music, but, instead, a sense of community, and instead of the march of time we heard last season through the artist’s struggle and ultimate triumph over adversity, we observe the cyclical round of the natural world. Beethoven the triumphant artist, the overpowering ego, the revolutionary has absented himself, leaving in his trace a foreshadowing of the future Beethoven, the Beethoven of the Ninth Symphony and the late string quartets:  the Beethoven who has left the self behind and become one with nature and with the great masses of humanity.