CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Boston Symphony Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 8:00 PM

Boston Symphony Orchestra
Lorin Maazel, Conductor

BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 6, "Pastoral"
BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 7

Program is approximately 1 hour, 45 minutes, including one intermission

Program Notes:

The Program

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770–1827)
Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68, “Pastoral”

Performance Time: approximately 42 minutes

Beethoven took delight in the world of nature. When in Vienna, he never failed to take his daily walk around the ramparts, and during his summers spent outside of town he would be outdoors most of the day. The notion of treating the natural world in music seems to have occurred to him as early as 1803, when he wrote down in one of his sketchbooks a musical fragment in 12/8 time (the same meter used in the “Pastoral” second movement) with a note: “The more water, the deeper the tone.” Other musical ideas later to end up in the Sixth Symphony appear in Beethoven’s sketchbooks sporadically in 1804. During the winter of 1806–1807, he worked out much of the thematic material for all the movements but the second. He concentrated seriously on the work in the fall of 1807 and the spring of 1808, and apparently finished it by summer 1808, since he reached an agreement that September 14 with publisher Breitkopf & Härtel for the sale of this symphony with four other major works.

One thing that aroused extended discussion of the new symphony—a discussion lasting for decades—was the fact that Beethoven provided each movement of the work with a program, or literary guide to its meaning. His titles are little more than brief images, just enough to suggest a specific setting:

I. Awakening of happy feelings upon reaching the countryside.
II. Scene at the brook.
III. Cheerful gathering of the country folk.
IV. Thunderstorm.
V. Shepherd’s song. Happy, grateful feelings after the storm.

But much more important for an understanding of Beethoven’s view is the overall heading he had printed in the program for the first performance: Pastoral Symphony, more an expression of feeling than a painting. Even given the birdcalls of the second movement, the thunderstorm of the fourth, and the ranz des vaches (Swiss herdsman’s song) borrowed by Beethoven to introduce the final movement’s “hymn of thanksgiving,” he never intended that the work be considered an attempt to represent events in the real world, an objective narrative in musical guise. Rather, this symphony provided yet again what all of his symphonies had offered: subjective moods and impressions captured in harmony, melody, color, and the structured passage of time. Ultimately, all those elements that might be labeled programmatic can be seen to nestle snugly and fittingly into what the eminent critic and annotator Donald Francis Tovey has called “a perfect classical symphony.”

Beethoven’s sketchbooks also reveal that he was working on his Fifth and Sixth symphonies at the same time. They were finished virtually together, given consecutive opus numbers (67 and 68, respectively), and premiered in the same concert (where they were reversed in numbering, with the “Pastoral,” given first on the program, identified as Symphony No. 5). Further, only twice in Beethoven’s symphonic writing—that is, in these two symphonies—did he link the movements of a symphony so they would be performed without a break. In the Fifth Symphony, the scherzo is connected to the finale by an extended, harmonically tense passage that demands resolution in the bright C major of the closing movement. Much the same thing happens in the “Pastoral” Symphony, although the level of tension is not nearly so high, and the linking passage has grown to a full movement in and of itself (the thunderstorm), resulting in Beethoven’s only five-movement symphony.

Yet no two symphonies are less likely to be confused, even by the most casual listener—the Fifth, with its demonic energy, tense harmonies, and powerful dramatic climaxes on the one hand, and the Sixth, with its smiling and sunny air of relaxation and joy on the other. Nothing shows more clearly the range of Beethoven’s work than these two masterpieces, twins in their gestation, but hardly identical. Popular biographies of Beethoven tend to emphasize the heaven-storming, heroic works of the middle period—the “Eroica” and Fifth symphonies, the “Egmont” Overture, the “Emperor” Concerto, the “Razumovsky” string quartets, the “Waldstein” and “Appassionata” sonatas—at the expense of other aspects of his art. On the other hand, some critics of a “neoclassical” orientation claim to find the even-numbered symphonies to be more successful than the overtly dramatic works. Both views are equally one-sided and give a blinkered representation of Beethoven. His art embraces both elements and much more.

—Steven Ledbetter


LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92

Performance Time:
approximately 39 minutes

Every scholar wants to be a revisionist, and Beethoven scholars are no exception; their success, however, has been constrained by an old paradigm of Beethoven scholarship, the division of his work into three periods: the early, when he was learning his craft and finding his voice; the middle, or “heroic,” a flood of bold and legendary masterpieces; and the sublime late, when he was isolated by illness and deafness, and his music became inward and spiritual. The abiding relevance of the three periods gives particular interest to works lying on the boundary between two of them. In the latter position we find the two most surprising of Beethoven’s mature symphonies: the roaring, unbridled Seventh and the witty, backward-looking Eighth. One speaks of them together because they were written together, both finished in 1812.

By 1812, much had changed in Beethoven’s life and career since the extraordinary period between 1802 and 1809, when he produced a flood of masterpieces perhaps unprecedented in the history of music: symphonies 3 through 6, four revolutionary string quartets, the opera Fidelio, two piano concertos, and the Violin Concerto, plus historic sonatas including the “Waldstein,” “Appassionata,” and “Kreutzer.” In the Seventh and Eighth symphonies, we see the turn toward the Late period taking shape. In the Seventh Symphony, Beethoven put aside for good the heroic model of the Third and Fifth symphonies and the nervousness and intensity of the middle string quartets, but he had not yet arrived at the inward music of the late works—though we see in the Seventh something of the searching harmonic style of his music to come.

If it is neither “heroic” or “sublime,” then how should one refer to the Seventh? As a kind of Bacchic trance, with dance music from beginning to end. An expansive and grandiose introduction strikes a note at once appropriate and misleading: The fast dance that eventually starts out from it seems something of a surprise. But everything significant for the symphony is encapsulated in that introduction: It is the magisterial overture for the frenzied dances to come. The main part of this movement is a titanic gigue. Rhythm plays a more central role than melody here, though there is a pretty folk tune in residence. The music is more engaged in quick changes of key in startling directions, everything propelled by the rhythm.

The A-minor second movement has been an abiding hit and an object of near-obsession since its first performances. The idea is a process of intensification, adding layer upon layer to the inexorably marching chords. For contrast comes a sweet, harmonically stable section in A major. Rondo-like, the opening theme returns twice, the last time serving as coda. The scherzo is racing, eruptive, giddy. The Trio provides maximum contrast, slowing to a kind of majestic dance tableau. The Trio returns twice and jokingly feints at a third time before Beethoven slams the door. The finale succeeds in ratcheting the energy higher than it has yet been. Earlier we had exuberance, brilliance, stateliness—those moods of dance, but now we have something on the edge of delirium, in the best and most intoxicating way.

The Seventh was premiered in December 1813 as part of the ceremonies around the Congress of Vienna, when the aristocracy of Europe gathered with the intention of turning back the clock to before Napoleon. The premiere under Beethoven’s baton was one of the triumphant moments of his life. The orchestra was fiery and inspired, suppressing its giggles at the composer’s antics on the podium. In loud sections (the only ones he could hear), he launched himself into the air, arms wind-milling as if he were trying to fly; in quiet passages he all but crept under the music stand. The paper reported from the audience “a general pleasure that rose to ecstasy.”

—Jan Swafford

Program notes copyright © Boston Symphony Orchestra, Inc. All rights reserved.

More Information:

The Boston Symphony has focused its attention on Beethoven this year, re-examining all nine symphonies in its season at home. Carnegie Hall has the honor of hosting two of these works, one of them ebullient—the Seventh Symphony—and the other, for much of its length, calm and serene. But don’t miss the storm in the “Pastoral,” which bursts out with all of this composer’s gigantic force.