Last week's post featured a Nightingale, Cuckoo and Quail in Heinrich Biber's Sonata Representativa written in 1669. A century and a half later in 1808, Beethoven used the same three birds in the second movement of his 6th Symphony, the Pastoral Symphony, a five movement work where Beethoven gave thanks to God for nature and birds and fields and the countryside and shepherds and streams and thunderstorms. It's like an episode of the BBC's Countryfile, only it's absolutely nothing like an episode of Countryfile.
I'm not going to write a lot about the Symphony because I have nothing original to say about it, there are so many great things online for you to read. This is really good.
So instead, I'm going to upload two pictures with stupid captions, and that's good enough for me and hopefully good enough for you.
Hilarious.
The reason for the picture of Beethoven is because a lot has been written about artists receiving thunderbolts of inspiration whilst out walking - for some it's an essential tool for creativity. When Beethoven lived in the centre of Vienna he scheduled a daily walk into his routine, and at the start of the 19th century he could very quickly have left the city and found himself in open space, woods and by the then unspoilt river. Looking at the map below from 1800, Vienna was tiny compared to today. Nowadays it would be a long walk, a full day, to get from the city centre out to any real countryside.
There are two things to think about here, and both are quite depressing.
The first is that looking at how Vienna has sprawled, like everywhere else, it's very easy to understand why there is an increasing dislocation between people and nature - most people on Earth now have to make a big effort to experience proper nature (feeding ducks in the park doesn't quite count), whereas not too long ago it was on your doorstep, people and wildlife lived next to each other
The second is that when Beethoven wrote the Pastoral Symphony, his hearing was shot. His tinnitus had become a problem already by his mid-twenties, and in 1802 he wrote a letter to his brothers in which he confessed his despair over his loss of hearing and that he'd been close to committing suicide. He was totally deaf by about 1815, but in 1808 when he finished the 6th Symphony, it's impossible to believe that Beethoven could have taken one of his walks, or a trip out to the country, and heard for himself a Nightingale, Quail and Cuckoo. So he must have heard these birds earlier in his life - it's very likely that these birds would have been part of his childhood, as they would have been for any child in Europe at that time, because they were very common birds.
Contrast that to a child growing up today. A Cuckoo, that bird which has historically been associated with so much of our folklore, is now a very difficult bird for someone without a specific interest in birds to hear. I'd love to do a survey of how many people under the age of thirty, maybe even under fifty, have ever actually heard one. Even for birders, every year in Britain it gets that little bit more difficult to hear a Cuckoo, and each year it seems like we lose a once guaranteed site for them. For most people, the Cuckoo is now something of mythology, no longer something integral to the changing of seasons as it was to people as recently as half a century ago.
In the amazing Bird Atlas 2007-2011 by the British Trust for Ornithology, the figures for Cuckoo ain't good - a 49% decline in the UK as whole, with a pretty terrifying decline of 63% just in England. And they're declining right across Europe.
Also in the Atlas: Nightingale - 90% (NINETY PERCENT!) decline in England over the last 40 years, and down 52% during 1995-2010.
The British Trust for Ornithology are tracking Cuckoos and Nightingales, and the results about their migration routes and wintering grounds in Africa are being used to draw up strategies to stop them from being featured in books about extinct birds.
So that's good. Here's some music at last. All throughout the second movement (titled Scene by the Brook) of the 6th Symphony, you can hear Beethoven's suggestions of singing birds, usually trilled on the violins. But at 09:53 the orchestra drop out and leave a solo flute, oboe and clarinet to play the songs of Nightingale, Quail ('wet my lips') and Cuckoo. This whole movement, and the whole Symphony, is must-hear music, but if you're short on time then listen from about 7 minutes in. And just in case there's any doubt, from 09:30 you'll hear the best 20 seconds of music ever written.
I'm not going to write a lot about the Symphony because I have nothing original to say about it, there are so many great things online for you to read. This is really good.
So instead, I'm going to upload two pictures with stupid captions, and that's good enough for me and hopefully good enough for you.
 |
| Beethoven with his pet dog Bullseye on one of his walks by the Danube |
 |
| Oliver Reed as Bill Sikes in 1968 |
Hilarious.
The reason for the picture of Beethoven is because a lot has been written about artists receiving thunderbolts of inspiration whilst out walking - for some it's an essential tool for creativity. When Beethoven lived in the centre of Vienna he scheduled a daily walk into his routine, and at the start of the 19th century he could very quickly have left the city and found himself in open space, woods and by the then unspoilt river. Looking at the map below from 1800, Vienna was tiny compared to today. Nowadays it would be a long walk, a full day, to get from the city centre out to any real countryside.
 |
There are two things to think about here, and both are quite depressing.
The first is that looking at how Vienna has sprawled, like everywhere else, it's very easy to understand why there is an increasing dislocation between people and nature - most people on Earth now have to make a big effort to experience proper nature (feeding ducks in the park doesn't quite count), whereas not too long ago it was on your doorstep, people and wildlife lived next to each other
The second is that when Beethoven wrote the Pastoral Symphony, his hearing was shot. His tinnitus had become a problem already by his mid-twenties, and in 1802 he wrote a letter to his brothers in which he confessed his despair over his loss of hearing and that he'd been close to committing suicide. He was totally deaf by about 1815, but in 1808 when he finished the 6th Symphony, it's impossible to believe that Beethoven could have taken one of his walks, or a trip out to the country, and heard for himself a Nightingale, Quail and Cuckoo. So he must have heard these birds earlier in his life - it's very likely that these birds would have been part of his childhood, as they would have been for any child in Europe at that time, because they were very common birds.
Contrast that to a child growing up today. A Cuckoo, that bird which has historically been associated with so much of our folklore, is now a very difficult bird for someone without a specific interest in birds to hear. I'd love to do a survey of how many people under the age of thirty, maybe even under fifty, have ever actually heard one. Even for birders, every year in Britain it gets that little bit more difficult to hear a Cuckoo, and each year it seems like we lose a once guaranteed site for them. For most people, the Cuckoo is now something of mythology, no longer something integral to the changing of seasons as it was to people as recently as half a century ago.
In the amazing Bird Atlas 2007-2011 by the British Trust for Ornithology, the figures for Cuckoo ain't good - a 49% decline in the UK as whole, with a pretty terrifying decline of 63% just in England. And they're declining right across Europe.
Also in the Atlas: Nightingale - 90% (NINETY PERCENT!) decline in England over the last 40 years, and down 52% during 1995-2010.
The British Trust for Ornithology are tracking Cuckoos and Nightingales, and the results about their migration routes and wintering grounds in Africa are being used to draw up strategies to stop them from being featured in books about extinct birds.
So that's good. Here's some music at last. All throughout the second movement (titled Scene by the Brook) of the 6th Symphony, you can hear Beethoven's suggestions of singing birds, usually trilled on the violins. But at 09:53 the orchestra drop out and leave a solo flute, oboe and clarinet to play the songs of Nightingale, Quail ('wet my lips') and Cuckoo. This whole movement, and the whole Symphony, is must-hear music, but if you're short on time then listen from about 7 minutes in. And just in case there's any doubt, from 09:30 you'll hear the best 20 seconds of music ever written.
Beethoven mentions birds in lots of his songs for voice and piano, but there's two of particular interest here - Der Wachtelschlag (Cry of the Quail) and Der Gesang der Nachtigall (Song of the Nightingale). Translations are easy to find using magical internet search engine machines.
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(if you notice any dead links or removed videos, then please email me. Thanks)
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