APPALACHIAN SPRING & BEETHOVEN 6 WITH ALSOP( EARTH | SONGS)
“ The orchestration affects the entire space of the hall: in addition to the orchestra on the podium, there are three satellite groups of musicians placed around the hall, in order to let the audience be swept into the soundscape of Fire Music.”
— Brett Dean
Instrumentation: Two flutes, two piccolos, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, midi keyboard, piano, electric guitar, and strings.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Baptized December 17, 1770, in Bonn, Germany Died March 26, 1827, in Vienna, Austria
SYMPHONY NO. 6 IN F MAJOR, OP. 68,“ PASTORAL” [ 1808 ]
At 6:30 pm on December 22, 1808, members of the Viennese public took their seats for a monumental four-hour, all-Beethoven program at the Theater der Wien. From an audience perspective, the evening was not to be a success. Plunging temperatures made sitting still uncomfortable, and inadequate rehearsal time resulted in uneven performances.
And yet, if the past two centuries of concertgoing are any indication, it would seem that we still can’ t get enough of Beethoven’ s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. Composed and premiered concurrently, these titans of the symphonic repertoire represent siblings of sorts, near opposites in disposition yet possessing a certain common compositional spark. The Fifth transforms“ tragedy to triumph” via ecstatic pain and transcendence. By contrast, the Sixth, which Beethoven described as“ more an expression of feeling than tone paining,” seeks spiritual solace in the countryside where the composer habitually undertook his nature walks.(“ In the country every tree seems to speak to me, saying " Holy! Holy!" he would scrawl in his diary.)
Somewhat unusually, Beethoven casts his Sixth in five movements( as opposed to the then-customary four), each depicting a pastoral scene. At first glance, it might seem that the opening bars, gentle and shapely, share nothing in common with the angular and severe Fifth. Yet the first movement— titled " Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the countryside”— demonstrates an oddly similar, almost obsessive insistence on repeating the basic rhythmic and melodic cells. It is therefore the mood, not the basic technique, that Beethoven inverts here; while
Amal Gochenour, piccolo the Fifth’ s opening fires a barrage of minor triads, the Sixth’ s opening movement comprises almost entirely major sonorities. The development section derives its primary theme, a downwards leaping motion, from the opening bars. After much elaboration, Beethoven at last returns to the opening material in the recapitulation, completing the sonata-form schema.
In the second movement,“ Scene by the brook,” gurgling strings imitate the sound of water in a flowing 12 / 8 meter. In the final moments, Beethoven offers the woodwinds a cadenza in which they mimic birdsong: first nightingale, then quail, and finally cuckoo. The third movement,“ Merry gathering of the countryfolk,” features a rustic dance where Beethoven plays a number of little rhythmic tricks, occasionally obscuring the meter to delightful effect. The fourth movement’ s“ Thunder, Storm” scene interrupts the festivities with sudden violence in F minor. Light winds become a gale, and thunderclaps bring torrents of rain. Soon, however, the thunder moves off into the distance, welcoming the final movement’ s sanguine“ Shepherd Song. Cheerful and thankful feelings after the storm.”
Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, two trombones, timpani, and strings.
JACOB JAHIEL is a PhD student in Historical Musicology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is co-editor of a forthcoming historical collection of music criticism: Defending the Music: Michael Steinberg at the Boston Globe 1964 – 1976( Oxford University Press, 2026).
* Brett Dean’ s composer’ s note has been edited for length.
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