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58 The touchstone for Beethoven’s early ideology remains the Eroica Symphony, namesake and glory of the heroic style.A host of political interpretations has marched alongside the Third Symphony for nearly two centuries now. Each generation, from Beethoven’s age to our own, has wrung new meanings out of the Napoleonic dedication, the French Revolutionary march, and the “heroic” title. The critic who would join this long parade might well despair of finding any unturned stone, any unbeaten path. Yet one source seems to have escaped attention, a related work that at first seems wholly removed from political concerns—the Sixth Symphony. This mildest offspring of Beethoven’s heroic impulse has rested in the shade of its more bellicose siblings, disarming political criticism with its motley country charms. Nevertheless, the Pastoral quietly preserves the legacy of the Eroica, pointing to a level of meaning more telling perhaps than all talk of emperors, battlefields, or even heroes. A brief study of the later symphony will lead, by a somewhat roundabout route, into the political context of the Eroica. The Pastoral ends on a conspicuously meditative note as, near the end of the finale,a sotto voce idea subdues the jubilant coda (see Example 3).The eightbar fragment (bars 237–44), like the main theme of the finale, derives from the rustic ranz des vaches that follows the thunderstorm. The four-part chorale setting identifies the new theme as a hymn, a characteristic style familiar from such movements as the Molto adagio of the Quartet in E Minor, op. 59, no. 2, or the Heiliger Dankgesang of the Quartet in A Minor, op. 132. The finale of the Sixth Symphony is itself a hymn of thanksgiving—literally , a “shepherd’s hymn” (Hirtengesang), expressing “glad and thankful 3 Promethean History Promethean History / 59 feelings after the storm” (Frohe und dankbare Gefühle nach dem Sturm). The original concertmaster’s part for the movement even bears the inscription Gebeth. 4 Stimmen (Prayer. 4 voices).1 By transforming the principal theme into a strict chorale in the final bars of the coda,Beethoven effectively distills the character of the movement. Two features of the chorale, however, point beyond the finale. The melody stresses both the sixth degree, D, and the subdominant. In the first statement, a II ⁶ ₅ underlies this special note; in the second statement, the orchestra supplies a sonorous IV chord.The sixth degree and its subdominant harmony, given such stress only bars from the end of the work, cannot help but arouse interest. To understand the significance of these two details, we shall have to go back and take a close look at the opening bars of the symphony . The time will by no means be wasted. For in tracing the history of this brief chorale, we shall discover a narrative paradigm that transcends the program of Beethoven’s sinfonia caracteristica and makes contact with the most urgent concerns of contemporary German philosophy. Had Beethoven happened upon Schiller’s treatise On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (Über naïve und sentimentale Dichtung, 1795–96), he would have read this opening description of “naive” objects: There are moments in our lives when we dedicate a kind of love and tender respect to nature in plants, minerals, animals, and landscapes, as well as to human nature in children, in the customs of country folk, and to the primitive world, not because it gratifies our sense, nor yet because it satisfies our understanding or taste (the very opposite can occur in both instances ), rather, simply because it is nature. Every person of a finer cast who is not totally lacking in feeling experiences this when he wanders in the open air, when he stays in the country, or lingers before the monuments of ancient times; in short, whenever he is surprised in the midst of artificial circumstances and situations by the sight of simple nature. Schiller, who had just emerged from his study of Kant, defines the naive in idealistic terms: “It is not these objects, it is an idea represented by them which we love in them. We love in them the tacitly creative life, the serene spontaneity of their activity, existence in accordance with their own laws, the inner necessity, the eternal unity with themselves.” Such harmony holds a precious charm for modern “sentimental” subjects, who suffer the disjuncture between thought and being, mind and nature, individual and cosmos. In a naive object modern man recollects the unconscious innocence of childhood and, by extension...

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