Pastoral Symphony, The

American  

noun

1. the Symphony No. 6 in F major (1807–08) by Ludwig van Beethoven.

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Example Sentences

Classical composers have used it to evoke sounds of nature and a sense of something ancient, rustic or outside of time: Think of the gentle hum that opens Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, the almost inaudible whine at the beginning of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 or the E flat at the bottom of the Prelude to Wagner’s “Rheingold,” which seeps into the listener’s consciousness like water.

From New York Times

In the “Pastoral” Symphony, the tempo transitions in the scherzo were clumsy, and the finale meandered with little sense of narrative; the climax at the end felt almost like an afterthought.

From Washington Post

In the case of the Pastoral Symphony, the music refers obliquely to the war in its use of a bugle-like trumpet cadenza in the slow movement, one of many gestures redolent of elegy or mourning; the distant keening of the soprano solo in the last movement, here realised by Rebecca Evans, was another.

From The Guardian

Neither are the successful effects of the great composers in evoking ideas of particular natural phenomena generally in the nature of real imitations or representations; although passages such as the notes of the dove and nightingale in Haydn’s Creation, and of the cuckoo in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, the bleating of the sheep in the Don Quixote symphony of Richard Strauss, must be acknowledged to be exceptions.

From Project Gutenberg

For Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony the orchestra was joined by a slender, 12-foot-high tree, right in front of Fischer's podium.

From The Guardian