mheu, Historical Museum of the Urban Environment

The work

Published in April 1809 by Breitkopf and Härtel as Opus 68, the Sixth Symphony stands out among Beethoven's symphonic compositions. Written contemporaneously with the Fifth, it is the composer's only "program music," an exercise subsequently much practiced by the romantics. Very free in form—it has five movements instead of the four typical of classical symphonies—the last three movements follow one another without a break. It is a passionate hymn to the countryside, hence the descriptive "pastoral." In the fourth movement, Beethoven literally describes a storm, with cellos, string basses and kettle drums representing the thunder, violins raindrops and a piccolo the wind.

The artist

Ludwig Van Beethoven, a prolific composer of more than 340 works, was born in Bonn in 1770 into a musical family of modest means. His father, an alcoholic brute, realized young Ludwig's talent as a performer and tried unsuccessfully to have him exhibit as a young piano virtuoso, following in the footsteps of Mozart. Beethoven studied composition, with Neefe, Haydn and Salieri, and began a career as an organist and pianist. His encroaching deafness, however, which first appeared in 1798, forced him to give this up. Beethoven then devoted himself entirely to composing, moved by an exuberant inspiration and creativity lauded by his music-loving contemporaries. A pivotal composer in the transition between the Classical and Romantic styles, he took music's evocative power to new heights by accentuating nuances to an extreme and showing the orchestra new subtleties. Ill, unhappy in love, derided as a misanthrope because he isolated himself to hide his disability and sometimes depressed, he nonetheless never stopped creating an immense body of often joyous work, for piano, chamber music, quartets, symphonies and opera. A progressive, he ardently cultivated his independence, going so far as to write one of his patrons, a prince of his state, "The Prince that you are, you are by accident of birth. What I am is of my own making. There are and will be a thousand princes. There is only one Beethoven." He died in Vienna, where he had been living since 1792, in 1827. Schubert was one of the torchbearers at his funeral and some 20,000 admirers gathered at the cemetery.