How I Discovered Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and Why It Still Comes Back to Haunt Me!

Beet 6I first discovered the music of Beethoven while listening to a lecture on New Testament Ethics. In other words, by accident. 

While in my final year at Theological College my gran died, and I missed two lectures the day of her funeral. The Principal of the College, R E O White, dictated the two lectures on a reel to reel tape recorder – this was in 1975 – so that I wouldn't miss out on class learning.

At the end of the second lecture, his voice gave way to a piece of music I had heard before, but never listened to. It was The Shepherd's Song of Thanksgiving after the Storm, from Beethoven's Sixth Symphony. Following immediately after a couple of lectures on the ethics of Jesus, it came as a welcome benediction and unrehearsed surprise. REO (as we called him) had recycled the tape and recorded over the music. It was one of those moments that sets up inner reverberations that stay with the heart throughout life. Beethoven has a long half life once his music is properly heard.

I decided to buy the LP (1975 remember) next day, and got a double album with Symphonies 5 and 6. Ever since, I have listened to Beethoven's music, at least the more accessible works, and I like most people I have my favourites. I mention all this because I was listening to that same symphony this morning while working on the latest tapestry based on a George Herbert poem. And there is a connection.

The storyline in the symphony is about arriving in the country, feelings of wellbeing, a rippling brook and the sounds of nightingale and cuckoo. The peasants are feeling joyful, and have an impromptu dance with much merrymaking, until the storm comes. The music becomes sombre and threatening, then erupts in a full orchestral thunderstorm. When it passes we have the shepherds song of thanksgiving after the storm, and in music that is warm, gentle and melodic, the world of composer and peasants is recomposed.

It's that musical sequence of contentment, human happiness and the sudden interruption of the storm with its potential for ruin and damage to crops and property that connects in my mind symphony and poem, Beethoven and Herbert. The tapestry I'm working on is an attempt to show through a variety of images George Herbert's poem The Flower. The poem itself is an exploration of the poet's spiritual experience of growing and declining, blooming and withering, spiritual wellbeing and spiritual anxiety, and thus the changing fortunes of the soul under the changing weather of an often inscrutable providence. In other words, the joy of the garden in spring and summer, declines in autumn and all but disappears in the squalls and storms of winter. 

Over the years I have developed an interest in the inner conversation that takes place between the written word, music, and image, and all of these in the context of being a theologian. So God comes into this too, how we think of God, and those experiences in which God comes to us. Many of my tapestries are worked over a few months when I am exposed to the words of a poem or other ways of writing about the world, God and that part of us we call the soul.

So this morning I was trying to work a panel showing a Spring sky, and playing with Herbert's lovely poignant lines:

"Who would have thought my shrivel'd heart

could have recover'd greennesse?"

I played the Pastoral Symphony while stitching. If the definition of a classic is music which has perennial power to move us, which never goes stale, and contains more truth, beauty and goodness than we can ever exhaust however many times we listen to it, then, yes, Beethoven's Sixth Symphony is a classic – but we all know that! The Flower is one of Herbert's most important and personally revealing poems. This is someone who understands the destructive power of storms, the menace of darkening skies, the elemental forces that are beyond human control, and that can make or break us.

StormOne of Herbert's other poems has the ominous title, 'The Storm'. Here too Herbert is in confessional mood and mode, but he also displays that underlying defiance which is not bad faith, but the persistence of belief that behind the storms, and around the poet, is a love beyond understanding, but which won't let him go.

The last two lines of The Storm are a quite wonderful portrayal of the poet and God clearing the air, and setting things right between them again:

"Poets have wrong'd poore storms: such days are best;

They purge the air without, within the breast."

So a Spring sky can't all be sunshine and blue – there must be clouds, and storms! Beethoven says so, and Herbert said it first! What I find fascinating in the intersection of music, poetry and visual art, is the mystery of what goes on in a mind and the spiritual perceptions and affections, when three different forms of knowing and creating come together. Rather than analyse and try to explain that, there is the far less ambitious call to allow ourselves to be spoken to, addressed, and at times inwardly adjusted in ways we can't always discern. 

So George Herbert and Ludwig van Beethoven, Renaissance poet and Romantic composer of music. That's not a juxtaposition I would have set out to make, but now it seems entirely congruent. Or so it seems to me. And there's still the challenge of that Spring sky!     

Comments

3 responses to “How I Discovered Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and Why It Still Comes Back to Haunt Me!”

  1. Kamalakanta Nieves avatar
    Kamalakanta Nieves

    Thanks so much!
    More and more in these times, we need humanizing voices, voices that keep the heart tender, the eyes open and the being full of love!

  2. Kamalakanta Nieves avatar
    Kamalakanta Nieves

    Thanks so much!
    More and more in these times, we need humanizing voices, voices that keep the heart tender, the eyes open and the being full of love!

  3. Kamalakanta Nieves avatar
    Kamalakanta Nieves

    Thanks so much!
    More and more in these times, we need humanizing voices, voices that keep the heart tender, the eyes open and the being full of love!

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