Norman Lebrecht 'hates' Beethoven's 'Pastoral'

[Belle]

Essentially, Lebrecht is a music journalist who lacks credibility because he just makes things up. I wonder if we should care about anything he writes or thinks? (I'm italicizing or commenting on some of his flagrant comments!!)

Why I hate Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony
Norman Lebrecht doubts even Beethoven liked this piece of travel journalism, a parody of country life
"Spectator"
21 January 2023

I loved music before I could walk. It seemed I could harmonise anything my sisters were singing. I had perfect pitch, a mixed blessing since wrong notes made me cry. (Dear me, this really is all about you Norman! "Mother said I could sing before I could talk" - uh, sorry, that was Abba!!)

I hated music when I first heard Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony. (You read it here first, folks!)

I was nine years old. My mother had died when I was two and my father got remarried to a Hitler refugee, half unhinged by exile. My stepmother took me to orchestral concerts at the Royal Festival Hall. She liked all the crowd pleasers, best of all the Pastoral symphony which she played at home on a portable gramophone. I grew to revile the opening rustle of strings, the ‘Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the countryside.’

That never worked for me. I’m not sure now whether Beethoven meant it either. Considered in the totality of Beethoven’s output, the Pastoral is a cuckoo in his catalogue. Had it never been written, our view of him would not change. It was composed alongside the Fifth Symphony and Fourth Piano Concerto and premièred together in an overlong concert in December 1808. Both the other works reflect nervous times, Napoleon hammering at the gates of Vienna.

The Sixth, however, is sheer escapism, a springtime day evoked in deep midwinter and telling a story, which Beethoven never normally does. Here’s how it goes. Chap gets up in the morning, goes for a walk in a meadow. Sits down beside a brook. Watches a ‘Merry gathering of country folk’ (Beethoven’s third movement title), looks up and sees a storm cloud. Finds shelter. Storm blows over. Chap admits to ‘Cheerful and thankful feelings’. Cliché? You said it. Banal? Absolutely. Surely not by Beethoven.

Research a little further and you’ll find more ambiguity. Beethoven left a note saying that his movement titles in the Pastoral are not to be taken literally. The symphony, he hedges, is ‘more expression than tone-painting’. He goes on to say (in a sketch now online at the British Library), ‘one leaves it to the listener to work out the situations’. Well, thanks for that, Ludwig.

Still, the brook babbles away, the bird trills and the thunder is meant to terrify. Beethoven is trying to have it both ways. He is not comfortable with this idyll of country life that he knows to be, at least in part, untrue and at odds with the brittle social and political situation of his times. He confesses to the anomaly. So what are we, as listeners, to make of it?

My initial aversion to the symphony was reinforced by my hated stepmother (was this 'Cinderella' you'd actually been to, Norman!!??) taking me on daylong rambles at the semi-inhabited end of the Metropolitan Line. John Betjeman may have extolled a ‘lost Elysium’ around Ruislip and Amersham. For me, these stations portended sodden misery with a rucksack on my back. I left my Millets bootlaces untied in the hope of breaking an ankle. I failed geography at school so that I could not be made to decipher another plastic-wrapped Ramblers Association map. (Is there a psychologist in the house??!!)

Back home the Pastoral LP that my stepmother wore out on her Philips turntable was conducted by Bruno Walter. In her eyes, Walter was divine. While she was growing up in Munich, Walter was Generalmusikdirector – God, in a compound German noun.

Walter personified the impervious charm of the higher bourgeoisie. (No wonder, he writes for The Guardian!!) My picture files showed the chubby Walter expensively tailored, at a garden lunch with his neighbour Thomas Mann, clinking glasses with Arturo Toscanini, kissing hands with the Papal nuncio to Bavaria, the next Pope. (Being exiled to the USA from your homeland results in champagne, fine clothing, kissing hands and general insouciance. All Beethoven's fault, too, I'm guessing!)

But I soon found feet of clay. Archives and oral memories showed up Bruno Walter as a sex pest who kept a mistress on tap and seduced – technically raped – his neighbour’s pubescent daughter. (Yes, it IS The Guardian!) Forced into exile by the Nazis, Walter resumed his lotus life in a house near Mann’s on Pacific Palisades. The war over, he quickly whitewashed the Vienna Philharmonic of Nazi crimes and conducted them at the inaugural Edinburgh Festival in August 1947 in concerts that provided, for British audiences, formative readings of Beethoven’s Pastoral and Mahler’s Lied von der Erde. Up to his death in 1962, Walter was consulted as an oracle by rising conductors Georg Solti and Zubin Mehta.

Unpicking the human Walter was musically liberating for me. I listened to his Pastoral recording with a Hollywood orchestra and heard him adjusting – pandering, even – to the panoramic delusions of movie moguls and drive-in audiences. His is an exemplary recording, elegantly phrased and executed with a range of warmth and colours that only the most gifted of maestros can summon. It is also an object lesson in how music – specifically the Pastoral symphony – can be adjusted to wholly unrelated issues.

The philosopher Theodor Adorno, a Pacific Palisades pal of Walter and Mann, came up with an intriguing exegesis. In preparatory notes for an unfinished, little-known book, Adorno argues that ‘Beethoven’s music is an image of that process which great philosophy understands the world to be. An image, therefore, not of the world but of an interpretation of the world.’ What Adorno is saying is that everything Beethoven does in the Pastoral is at one remove from reality, a text that is also a commentary on itself. (Not like yours, though, aye??!!)

[diegobueno]

I don't pay much attention to what Lebrecht says.
There's already a thread about this.

[Belle]

I don't pay much attention to what Lebrecht says.
There's already a thread about this.

Ok, I missed that. Mine isn't the entire extract either.

Here's a reminder of that very dear Symphony. Lebrecht just isn't smart enough to understand that an increasingly deaf composer might want to enshrine things he could once hear in an artform in perpetuity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLb1qst6s8s