The Romantic Beethoven

Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, the Sixth, which the Milwaukee Symphony will play this weekend, fits into a larger framework of European thought and feeling at the dawn of the 19th century.

The Industrial Revolution was well underway and sweeping through Europe. Agriculture was losing ground to manufacturing and to commerce as the primary engine of wealth. The nobility was losing ground to the merchant class, and people were abandoning the land and flocking to cities. Enlightenment philosophy and the related scientific method stood behind these developments, which also led to a decline in religious belief. In the 18th century, more and more smart people put their faith in reason.

Late in that century, some first-generation children of the new middle class began to feel uneasy with its values. They felt that innocence, naturalness and the capacity for wonder had somehow been lost in science and materialism. These young people — Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), for example — attended university ostensibly to become lawyers or to prepare to join the business elite, but some of them came out poets, instead.

They sang the praises of intuition and feeling over reason and waxed nostalgic about the lost innocence of Europe, in poems of love and longing for simple country girls and gothic romances about ghostly woodland nymphs. (Giselle brought the latter idea to the ballet stage.)

A fascination with the pre-Christian Middle Ages, folk tales and often with the occult took hold among the Romantics. They gravitated to revolutionary politics and were often in trouble with conservative regimes. They created the notion of the artist as outsider/visionary, a Romantic conceit still very much alive today.

Nature was a favorite topic of the Romantics. In the Age of Reason, nature was something to be tamed and exploited. Formal gardens, for example, imposed rational geometry on nature. Romantic gardens began to take on the cast of a natural Arcadia, with more subtle imposition of the human hand.

Mountains and forest were dangerous places to be avoided to 18th-century urbanites. The Romantics, however, cut their walking sticks, put on their capes and strode into the wild in the belief that communion with nature would refresh the soul and release the natural man. (Such sentiments carried over the the American Transcendentalists and had a great deal to do with the establishment of the American national parks.)

The paintings of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) represent this new impulse, as does Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6. Beethoven composed it in 1807 and 1808, from musical sketches he’d jotted down while hiking in the countryside near then-rural Heiligentstadt, his summer getaway for many years.

Friedrich’s paintings often show the back of a figure who faces a grand natural landscape. The idea is for the viewer of the painting to identify with that figure and imagine the feelings the landscape might raise in that figure. It would not be about classifying plants or analyzing drainage patterns, as it would have been to the scientific Enlightenment elite. Ineffable mystery was the whole point. The intent behind wandering in the countryside was to connect with that inner, long-suppressed “noble savage” (another Romantic invention). To be aware in Nature was to have a religious experience.

Beethoven filled the Sixth with bird calls, an evocation of a storm and his take on the innocent dance music of country folk (as close as he could come to noble savages in 19th-century Austria). But to his mind, the Pastoral symphony was no mere travelogue.

Beethoven revealed his intentions with little notes in his sketchbook:

“People will not require titles to recognize the general intention to be more a matter of feeling than of painting in sounds.”

Artists who put feelings first were and are Romantics.

Music director Edo de Waart will conduct the Milwaukee Symphony this weekend. Concert times are 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2:30 p.m. Sunday, March 5-7, at Marcus Center Uihlein Hall, 929 N. Water St. Tickets are $25-$93 Friday and Saturday and $24-$77 Sunday. Visit the MSO website, call the orchestra’s ticket line, 414-291-7605 or call the Marcus box office, 414-273-7206.

This week’s soloist is the celebrated Vadim Repin, who will join the MSO in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto.