Ludwig Van Beethoven, 1770-1827
Sonata Op. 79, "Cuckoo" (1809)
Sonata Op. 28, "Pastoral" (1801)
Sonata Op. 31, no. 3, "The Hunt" (1802)
“How happy I am to be able to wander among bushes and herbs, under trees and over rocks; no man can love the country as I love it.” –Beethoven, to Baroness von Drossdick
Beethoven’s life-long ardor for nature had its roots in his early boyhood, and outlasted every other love he had. Young Ludwig and his father took long excursions together into the countryside, sometimes lasting several days; they hiked up rugged hills and through green woods, climbed over dark slate outcrops, gazed down deep gorges, and felt the power of the grey Rhine. It was this formative time spent out of doors that instilled Beethoven’s lifelong love for the Rhenish countryside. As an adult, Beethoven frequently nostalgically recalled the “mysterious fir forests” and the “sweet stillness of the woods” to which he longed to return, and declared that “I never feel entirely well except when I am among scenes of unspoilt nature”. During the hot and dusty Viennese summers he fled to the countryside and dreamed of buying a small house there; and as communication with people around him became increasingly difficult due to encroaching deafness, he spent much time tramping across the countryside alone, compositional notebook in hand. Charles Neate, an English pianist who often accompanied Beethoven on long walks, affirmed that he had never met anyone “who so delighted in Nature or so thoroughly enjoyed flower or clouds or other natural objects”. Other contemporaries tell us that Beethoven, who frequently moved lodgings within Vienna, refused to live in a home unless there were trees nearby, and that he insisted on daily walks even in torrential rain. Beethoven’s interactions with nature provided the relief, inspiration, and comfort that he often lacked in other settings.
Despite Beethoven’s passion for the outdoors, his experiences with nature were not entirely utopic. There were terrifying moments as well: in 1784 his family’s home on the Rheingasse in Bonn was flooded as the great Ice Floods overwhelmed the region, and the 13-year-old Beethoven made a perilous escape across the roofs of neighbouring houses; and in 1816 most of Europe experienced the “year without a summer” as a result of the eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia, leading to failed crops and subsequent food shortages. Beethoven may have been prone to rhapsodic outbursts about the countryside, but he was antithetic to the then-in-vogue interpretation of pastoral life as one of quaint simplicity (an interpretation that culminated in the imitation hameaux built by fashionable 18th century aristocracy). This trope, which equated retreat from the material world with a corresponding increased quality of inner life (and which persists to the present day), celebrated a type of vacuous spiritual achievement foreign to Beethoven.
Instead, Beethoven’s compositions parallel a natural world brimming with the struggle to survive and overcome. His development of musical motives rarely feels facile; one senses the effort and the grunt work underlying their evolution and forward propulsion. Beethoven often introduces cellular motives that he then begins to develop in the most unexpected ways -- perhaps florid, or skeletal, or sometimes a nearly unrecognizable change of character -- but with such a feeling of inevitability that it seems almost as though he was intuiting organic biological processes. Just as nature repeats the same basic materials in infinite variety, Beethoven’s developmental process creates elaborate sonata forms that are breathtaking in scale and yet remain completely dependent on the original musical cell.
However, these structural parallels to the natural world are empty if they do not also open the door to a profound inner experience; a door to sublimity, to transcendence, to the inner ecstasy that nature can produce. I often feel tongue-tied when trying to express the ecstatic experience of being in nature; how does one describe it without descending into platitudes and clichés? Beethoven also despaired of being able to communicate these powerful experiences (“Who can give complete expression to the ecstasy of the woods!”). This is why we desperately need Beethoven’s music, as the perfect expression of something that shares our common experience and is yet profoundly greater. On the cover of the first edition of the Pastoral Symphony is the inscription Mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei (more an expression of feeling than a painting). Beethoven wanted us not to fixate on the literal images of nature, but rather on the response that they awaken in us. When we have a profound experience in nature, perhaps a breathtaking view, it rouses introspective thoughts and emotional sensations linking us in a great chain of shared human experience; the 250-year-gulf separating us from Beethoven disappears when the inner effect of the view sublimates the view itself. Those of us who are drawn to the outdoors can relate to this, because the immersive experience of being in nature is really the entire point. It’s the essence of what we seek: the sudden awareness of how diminutive and vulnerable our bodies are, the mutability of everything we see, loneliness that feels terrifying but that we also crave, moments of such beauty that we feel pain, the knowledge that when we hold a leaf in our hand we are cradling a vast microscopic world, and all of this framed by the incomprehensible immensity of the expanding universe – these dichotomies are irresistible because they mirror the dissonance within our own lives while they open revelations into our inner selves. Nature’s cyclical renewal shatters any illusions of permanence that we harbour; barbarity and beauty are married in a regenerative rhythm. Humanity’s eternal philosophical struggle to find a spiritual footing betwixt the finite and the infinite are summed up in Beethoven’s words, “In the country it seems as if every tree said to me: ‘Holy! Holy!’”
It is Beethoven’s elemental ecstatic connection to the natural world which I hear distilled into so much of his music, and especially the three sonatas on this program. These sonatas were titled not by Beethoven himself, but by editors in reference to the many musical depictions of outdoor life and country tableaux: the cuckoo call in Op. 79, mvt. 1; the rustic country dance in Op. 79, mvt. 3; the bagpipe drone associated with musettes in the 1st and 3rd movements of Op. 28, no. 2; the bucolic hunting horns in Op. 28, mvt. 1 and Op. 31 no. 3, mvt. 4; and the pastoral charm of the gigue in Op. 28, mvt 3.
However, the true meaning of this music is not to be found in a literal illustration of nature. When I now play these sonatas that I first learned as a young student, they resonate with a deeper understanding of how Beethoven transfigured his experiences into a universal language. I keenly disagree with critical remarks dismissing these works (in particular Op. 79, which Beethoven labeled Sonatine) as “diminutive” or character pieces. The birdsongs and the unapologetically lovely country dances are just an enticement (perhaps even a clever ruse) to draw us all into a much deeper and more meaningful experience, in which nature exists not as a literal transcription or as metaphor, but as the structural foundation of the musical form itself, and the notes draw us into the great questions of our place within the universe. Beethoven rewards every attentive rehearing of these sonatas with new revelations into our own awareness, just as he found inspiration to scrawl something new in his compositional notebook while tramping through the same leafy woods that he had walked through so many times before.
Sonata Op. 79, "Cuckoo" (1809)
Sonata Op. 28, "Pastoral" (1801)
Sonata Op. 31, no. 3, "The Hunt" (1802)
“How happy I am to be able to wander among bushes and herbs, under trees and over rocks; no man can love the country as I love it.” –Beethoven, to Baroness von Drossdick
Beethoven’s life-long ardor for nature had its roots in his early boyhood, and outlasted every other love he had. Young Ludwig and his father took long excursions together into the countryside, sometimes lasting several days; they hiked up rugged hills and through green woods, climbed over dark slate outcrops, gazed down deep gorges, and felt the power of the grey Rhine. It was this formative time spent out of doors that instilled Beethoven’s lifelong love for the Rhenish countryside. As an adult, Beethoven frequently nostalgically recalled the “mysterious fir forests” and the “sweet stillness of the woods” to which he longed to return, and declared that “I never feel entirely well except when I am among scenes of unspoilt nature”. During the hot and dusty Viennese summers he fled to the countryside and dreamed of buying a small house there; and as communication with people around him became increasingly difficult due to encroaching deafness, he spent much time tramping across the countryside alone, compositional notebook in hand. Charles Neate, an English pianist who often accompanied Beethoven on long walks, affirmed that he had never met anyone “who so delighted in Nature or so thoroughly enjoyed flower or clouds or other natural objects”. Other contemporaries tell us that Beethoven, who frequently moved lodgings within Vienna, refused to live in a home unless there were trees nearby, and that he insisted on daily walks even in torrential rain. Beethoven’s interactions with nature provided the relief, inspiration, and comfort that he often lacked in other settings.
Despite Beethoven’s passion for the outdoors, his experiences with nature were not entirely utopic. There were terrifying moments as well: in 1784 his family’s home on the Rheingasse in Bonn was flooded as the great Ice Floods overwhelmed the region, and the 13-year-old Beethoven made a perilous escape across the roofs of neighbouring houses; and in 1816 most of Europe experienced the “year without a summer” as a result of the eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia, leading to failed crops and subsequent food shortages. Beethoven may have been prone to rhapsodic outbursts about the countryside, but he was antithetic to the then-in-vogue interpretation of pastoral life as one of quaint simplicity (an interpretation that culminated in the imitation hameaux built by fashionable 18th century aristocracy). This trope, which equated retreat from the material world with a corresponding increased quality of inner life (and which persists to the present day), celebrated a type of vacuous spiritual achievement foreign to Beethoven.
Instead, Beethoven’s compositions parallel a natural world brimming with the struggle to survive and overcome. His development of musical motives rarely feels facile; one senses the effort and the grunt work underlying their evolution and forward propulsion. Beethoven often introduces cellular motives that he then begins to develop in the most unexpected ways -- perhaps florid, or skeletal, or sometimes a nearly unrecognizable change of character -- but with such a feeling of inevitability that it seems almost as though he was intuiting organic biological processes. Just as nature repeats the same basic materials in infinite variety, Beethoven’s developmental process creates elaborate sonata forms that are breathtaking in scale and yet remain completely dependent on the original musical cell.
However, these structural parallels to the natural world are empty if they do not also open the door to a profound inner experience; a door to sublimity, to transcendence, to the inner ecstasy that nature can produce. I often feel tongue-tied when trying to express the ecstatic experience of being in nature; how does one describe it without descending into platitudes and clichés? Beethoven also despaired of being able to communicate these powerful experiences (“Who can give complete expression to the ecstasy of the woods!”). This is why we desperately need Beethoven’s music, as the perfect expression of something that shares our common experience and is yet profoundly greater. On the cover of the first edition of the Pastoral Symphony is the inscription Mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei (more an expression of feeling than a painting). Beethoven wanted us not to fixate on the literal images of nature, but rather on the response that they awaken in us. When we have a profound experience in nature, perhaps a breathtaking view, it rouses introspective thoughts and emotional sensations linking us in a great chain of shared human experience; the 250-year-gulf separating us from Beethoven disappears when the inner effect of the view sublimates the view itself. Those of us who are drawn to the outdoors can relate to this, because the immersive experience of being in nature is really the entire point. It’s the essence of what we seek: the sudden awareness of how diminutive and vulnerable our bodies are, the mutability of everything we see, loneliness that feels terrifying but that we also crave, moments of such beauty that we feel pain, the knowledge that when we hold a leaf in our hand we are cradling a vast microscopic world, and all of this framed by the incomprehensible immensity of the expanding universe – these dichotomies are irresistible because they mirror the dissonance within our own lives while they open revelations into our inner selves. Nature’s cyclical renewal shatters any illusions of permanence that we harbour; barbarity and beauty are married in a regenerative rhythm. Humanity’s eternal philosophical struggle to find a spiritual footing betwixt the finite and the infinite are summed up in Beethoven’s words, “In the country it seems as if every tree said to me: ‘Holy! Holy!’”
It is Beethoven’s elemental ecstatic connection to the natural world which I hear distilled into so much of his music, and especially the three sonatas on this program. These sonatas were titled not by Beethoven himself, but by editors in reference to the many musical depictions of outdoor life and country tableaux: the cuckoo call in Op. 79, mvt. 1; the rustic country dance in Op. 79, mvt. 3; the bagpipe drone associated with musettes in the 1st and 3rd movements of Op. 28, no. 2; the bucolic hunting horns in Op. 28, mvt. 1 and Op. 31 no. 3, mvt. 4; and the pastoral charm of the gigue in Op. 28, mvt 3.
However, the true meaning of this music is not to be found in a literal illustration of nature. When I now play these sonatas that I first learned as a young student, they resonate with a deeper understanding of how Beethoven transfigured his experiences into a universal language. I keenly disagree with critical remarks dismissing these works (in particular Op. 79, which Beethoven labeled Sonatine) as “diminutive” or character pieces. The birdsongs and the unapologetically lovely country dances are just an enticement (perhaps even a clever ruse) to draw us all into a much deeper and more meaningful experience, in which nature exists not as a literal transcription or as metaphor, but as the structural foundation of the musical form itself, and the notes draw us into the great questions of our place within the universe. Beethoven rewards every attentive rehearing of these sonatas with new revelations into our own awareness, just as he found inspiration to scrawl something new in his compositional notebook while tramping through the same leafy woods that he had walked through so many times before.