Pastoral [pastorale]
(Fr.,
It. pastorale; Ger. Hirtenstück, Hirtenspiel, Schäferspiel
etc.).
A
literary, dramatic or musical genre that depicts the characters and scenes of
rural life or is expressive of its atmosphere. The term has been used in
musical titles as both an adjective (Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony) and a noun
(Franck’s Pastorale) and may be used both ways in referring to the type
in general.
1. General.
2. Antiquity.
3. Secular vocal
forms.
4. Christmas and
instrumental pastorals in Italy.
5. 17th- and
18th-century Christmas and instrumental pastorals outside Italy.
6. 19th and 20th
centuries.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
GEOFFREY CHEW/R (1–2, 4–6), OWEN
JANDER/GEOFFREY CHEW (3)
Pastoral
1. General.
In
its long history, the pastoral tradition has served a variety of audiences and
artistic purposes. Accounts of it often stress the literary aspects of the
tradition at the expense of the musical and pastorals addressed to cultivated
audiences at the expense of the more popular, and in consequence the tradition
often appears essentially artificial and unreal. Yet it has proved vital and
flexible, not only as a self-contained genre, but (as in German Romantic music)
occasionally in its ability to colour a variety of music not necessarily
considered pastoral either by its composers or by critics. Arcadia or its
equivalent can be an eschatological religious symbol, where the wolf lies down
with the kid or where Christ is the Good Shepherd (as in Bach’s cantata
no.104). Or it may be a symbol of Nature whose response to the sacred, or to
art, is immediate and authentic (as in the Orpheus legend and in the popular
pastoral tradition where animals speak on Christmas Eve). Or it may be a symbol
of the ideal to which the artist vainly aspires. Moreover, within the pastoral
setting, disruptive events may occur, and they are not always negligible or
accountable in terms of double entendre: the idealized surroundings may
only heighten the sense of loss (as in Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin).
Pastoral
depends upon the projection of a philosophical opposition, generally one
between art and nature or between country and city. In pastoral music this
opposition is usually reinforced by the use of distinctive styles, with the
‘natural’ style falling appreciably short of the complexity of the conventional
style of the day. Even when pastoral appears to deal purely with rural life,
its implied audience is almost invariably a knowing one, for whom the
confrontation with ‘natural’ values traditionally represents a moral challenge.
Accordingly, pastoral is often associated with political and religious
allegories; indeed, most Renaissance and Baroque courtly operas, and other
musical entertainments seeking to celebrate the status of a ruler, drew on
pastoral.
The
form and character of pastoral works are often influenced by notions of
rhetorical persuasiveness, and in consequence the history of pastoral is often
understood as a parallel to the history of rhetoric. New attitudes to the
rhetorical force of pastoral took root in the 18th century. These have been
associated (Halperin, 1983) with the critical attitude crystallized in
Schiller’s essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (1800), in
which the category of the idyll was first defined as a ‘mode of experience’ (Empfindungsweise)
– that is, in terms of its psychological and expressive value rather than its
subject matter (see §6 below). Indeed, pastoral is today often defined as a
‘mode’ rather than as genre or style (see Loughrey, 1984).
The
philosophical oppositions in pastoral have been a preoccupation of the
secondary literature, especially in English, since Empson (1935; see in
particular Kermode, 5/1954), and encourage very general definitions of pastoral
that often transcend limitations of subject matter, genre or medium. A
distinction has also been drawn between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ pastoral, following
the definitions of hard and soft primitivism (Lovejoy and Boas, 1935), and
reflecting the ease or lack of ease presupposed by the pastoral model; the
parodies of pastoral so important in its history usually arise from the
substitution of hard for soft pastoral or vice versa. The term ‘pastoral oasis’
has also been used (Poggioli, 1975) to describe a section featuring pastoral
characteristics within a longer, non-pastoral work; such ‘oases’ can be shown
to be subject to different constraints from those governing a work that is
completely pastoral.
Pastoral
2. Antiquity.
Shepherds
playing the syrinx – for the ancient Greeks, a typically pastoral instrument –
appear in Homer’s Iliad (xviii, ll.525–6). Pastoral music, as a subject
of interest in its own right, may have first appeared with Stesichorus (6th
century bce): according to Aelian, Stesichorus was the first to compose
‘pastoral songs’ (boukolika melē; see Varia historia, x,
18), and he may have composed a lament for Daphnis (C.M. Bowra: Greek Lyric
Poetry, Oxford, 2/1961, pp.84–5). Other origins were also claimed for
pastoral song in antiquity, some, like that of Diodorus Siculus quoted below,
no doubt mythical.
The
pastoral song was first elevated to a considerable literary genre by Theocritus (3rd century bce) in his Idylls,
which were probably intended for semi-dramatic public recitation. The pastoral Idylls
include laments, strophic songs with refrains and singing matches, and the
protagonists often play the syrinx as a literary device. These motifs perhaps
originated in popular Sicilian shepherd music: Diodorus Siculus, for example,
attributed the invention of pastoral song (boukolikon poiēma kai melos)
to Daphnis, who played the syrinx (iv, chap.84). Other Alexandrians imitated
Theocritus, and pastoral features are occasionally found in other musical
genres. Greek terms for pastoral song include boukoliasmos (linked by
Hesychius with ‘rustic’ music and dance), boukolika and so on. The
closest to pastoral drama in antiquity was the satyr play; Euripides' Cyclops,
for example, makes use of pastoral subject matter.
In
ancient Rome, pastoral poetry was completely separated from music.
Nevertheless, Virgil’s Eclogues (or Bucolics), partly in
imitation of Theocritus, and set in a fictitious Greek ‘Arcadia’, were
performed as sung mime in the 1st century bce (for the importance of musical
concepts in the poetry of the Eclogues, see Virgil). It is no doubt primarily to
Virgil that the persistence of Latin, and later vernacular, pastoral poetry is
due.
Ancient
dramatic theory (Aristotle and Horace, for example) takes no account of
pastoral, however, and there are no contemporary accounts of the music used in
satyr plays (see Brommer, 1944). This embarrassed some later ‘neo-classical’
pastoralists, who sought to conform to ancient precedent, for the use of traditional
pastoral is itself virtually a statement of loyalty to classical ideals.
Pastoral
3. Secular vocal forms.
(i) Up to 1700.
The
themes of pastoral poetry were revived in Carolingian times, especially in the works
of Alcuin (?735–804), and they occur also in the repertory of the troubadours
and trouvères in the Pastourelle, where the earliest musical settings of
pastoral poetry survive. The 13th-century Jeu de Robin et Marion,
ascribed to Adam de la Halle, is an entire pastoral play set to music; from the
14th century ecclesiastical dramas featuring shepherds and lowly characters
were accorded similar treatment.
Between
the late 15th and mid-18th centuries, Virgil’s Eclogues and other
classical models, in Italian translation, inspired a series of notable original
productions, the first of which was Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia, a set of
12 eclogues (written 1481, published 1502). Pastoral themes occur occasionally
in chansons and frottolas around 1500 but became ubiquitous during the
subsequent history of the Italian and English madrigal. As the polyphonic
madrigal gave birth to the monodic madrigal in the early 17th century, and the
latter was superseded in due course by the cantata, the pastoral language was
carried forward, with frequent references to Filli, Lilla, Clori, Dorillo,
Silvio, Damone and other stock figures and use of devices such as the echo (see
Echo, (2)). Cantatas with two or three pastoral characters were
particularly common; as these works grew in proportions and acquired
instrumental support they served as the chief point of departure for the later Serenata.
Even
in the late 15th century, however, pastoral poems had been drawn out to large
theatrical dimensions and associated with music. Angelo Poliziano’s Favola
d’Orfeo (1471) included various instrumental episodes and dances; and
throughout the 16th century dramatic and musical pastorals became increasingly
popular in Italian courts and academies, and strongly influenced early opera.
They generally took the form of elegant courtly entertainments with a classical
veneer, especially for weddings. The most influential pastoral dramas of the
Renaissance, Torquato Tasso’s Aminta (1581; see fig.1) and G.B. Guarini’s Il pastor fido
(1589), were produced in courts such as Mantua and Ferrara, from which emerged
also many other musical versions of pastoral: intermedi and similar
celebratory occasional pieces (see Intermedio); a flood of semi-dramatic
polyphonic madrigals setting Guarini and other poets (Il pastor fido
provided the texts of well over 500 madrigals); and the earliest operas,
notably Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607; on Tasso, Guarini and opera, see
Abert, 1970). Related to these is Cavalieri’s sacred allegorical pastoral Rappresentatione
di Anima et di Corpo (1600). Pastoral tales formed the basis of most of the
early operas of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the two most popular
being Dafne (libretto by Ottaviano Rinuccini, 1597), set by Peri, Gagliano
and Schütz, among others, and Euridice (Rinuccini, 1600), based on the
story of Orpheus, set by Peri and Caccini. The Orpheus legend has had lasting appeal
for composers since Poliziano and Monteverdi, forming the subject of operas by
Stefano Landi, Antonio Sartorio, Antonio Draghi and many others up to
Birtwistle in the late 20th century.
Pastoral
operas declined in popularity in Italy towards the middle of the 17th century,
as interest shifted to historical themes in opera seria and to a commedia
dell’arte spirit in opera buffa. Yet the use of pastoral ‘oases’,
supplying a distinctive, affective colouring for the sake of variety, became
part of the opera composers’ stock in trade for centuries to come (see
Bianconi, 1970, for an example). Late 17th-century Italian secular pastorals
are usually small-scale, sometimes termed favole boscareccie, and often
intended as occasional entertainments (e.g. La Circe, a two-act pastoral
‘operetta’ with text by G.F. Apolloni and music by Cesti and Stradella,
performed in the garden of the Villa Aldobrandini, Frascati, on 10 May 1668 in
honour of Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici). At the end of the 17th century,
however, literati patronized by Queen Christina of Sweden and other aristocrats
in Rome, together with composers such as Alessandro Scarlatti, sought to
reconstruct Italian literary culture according to the traditional Christian
classical pattern of Petrarch. Pastoral operas as such once more took their
place in the repertory of this circle (see Dent, 1951, for an example). (For
17th-century Italian sacred pastorals, see §4 below.)
Guarini’s
Il pastor fido remained the chief model for pastorals in the 17th
century, and was translated into all the principal European languages and
various dialects (Bergamasque, 1600; English, 1602; Spanish, 1604; French,
1622; Neapolitan, 1628; vernacular Greek, 1658; German, 1671 etc.). It
eventually lent itself to parody, as in Il pastor infido (a ‘scherzo
drammatico’, Padua, 1715).
Of the
countries in which pastoral drama and prose were cultivated in the Renaissance,
Spain was also influential; a well-known early example of Spanish dramatic
pastoral is the Diana of Jorge de Montemayor (c1560), and the
Spanish pastoral romance was burlesqued in Cervantes’s Don Quixote
(1605–15). The most characteristic pastoral genre of the 17th century in
Spanish musical theatre was the Zarzuela, with spoken dialogue and songs; the
earliest such piece sung throughout was Lope de Vega’s La selva sin amor
(1627). This repertory persisted until the introduction of Italian opera to
Spain in the early 18th century.
French
pastoral dramas drawing on Italian and Spanish precedents, with music,
choruses, dancing and machines, appeared first in the late 16th century.
Although the pastoral drama retreated in France in the 17th century in the face
of French classical tragedy, pastoral theory formulated at that time (notably
by Rapin and Fontanelle) was influential in France, England and elsewhere (see
Congleton, 1952). The first pastoral to be sung throughout in France was Le
triomphe de l’Amour of Charles de Bey and Michel de La Guerre (first
performed 1655); subsequent pastorals included the Pastorale d’Issy of
Cambert and Perrin (1659), an important part of the establishment of opera in
France, Lully’s Les fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus (1672) and
Destouches’s Issé (1697). At the same time a perhaps paradoxical
subgenre, the Pastorale-héroïque, is found.
Italian
pastoral opera was performed as early as 1618 in the Steintheater at Hellbrunn
(Salzburg) and also in other places in central Europe, including Bohemia and
Poland, in the early 17th century. The earliest German operas were also chiefly
indebted to the pastoral opera of the Italian courts (for example Schütz’s Dafne,
1627, now lost, and S.T. Staden’s sacred pastoral Seelewig, 1644).
Pastorals remained popular in German- and Slavonic-speaking areas, largely
because musical institutions were centred on local aristocratic courts; later
examples include J.S. Kusser’s Erindo (1694).
Italianate
pastoral drama was established in England by Lyly, Shakespeare and Fletcher,
among others, about 1600; this tradition, together with court masques, which
reached their peak in the early 17th century, and pastoral entertainments such
as Henry Lawes’s setting of Milton’s Comus (1634), represented the chief
manifestations of dramatic pastoral in England before pastoral operas such as
Blow’s Venus and Adonis (c1683) and, perhaps, Purcell’s Dido
and Aeneas (1689; see Harris, 1980). However, the traditional pastoral
opera was never strongly established in England during the Baroque or later.
(ii) After 1700.
During
the 18th century traditional pastoral opera retained its usefulness as a
vehicle for graceful entertainments before noble patrons (fig.2),
especially in France and Germany; examples range from Fux’s Orfeo ed
Euridice (1715) and Caldara’s Dafne (1719) to Haydn’s ‘dramma
pastorale giocoso’ La fedeltà premiata (1780). The expression of the
polarity of ‘art’ and ‘nature’ continued to develop, however, in accordance
with the evolution of the conception of ‘naturalness’. In the early 18th
century German composers could allude to pastoral by means of simple,
‘folklike’ aria structures, often with vernacular texts, probably first found
in pastorellas and other non-operatic genres. One such is ‘Mein Kätchen ist ein
Mädchen’ from Keiser’s Croesus (1711). Similar pastoral touches occur
also, for example, in Bumbalka’s Czech aria ‘Já jsem plná veselosti’ from the
vernacular intermezzos to František Antonín Míča’s opera L’origine di
Jaromeriz in Moravia (1730; see Helfert, 1925). They are of great
importance for the later creation of national styles in central European and
German opera.
In
Germany and elsewhere, this simple pastoral style contributed to the rise of
the Ballad opera, and (particularly in theatres subject
to commercial pressures) to the pastoral parody, a wide variety of which was
manifested in the 18th and 19th centuries; this at first often presupposed a
fairly sophisticated understanding of the pastoral tradition. Among the most
inventive parodies of the early 18th century are those of the ‘Scriblerus Club’
in England (Swift, Pope, Gay and others), whose aim was to ridicule ‘all the
false tastes in learning’. Gay’s absurd versions of pastoral include the
enormously successful Beggar’s Opera (1728). Another, rather different
product was his pastoral ‘serenata’ Acis and Galatea, set by Handel
(1718); here the parodistic element is absent, and the work perhaps stands as a
manifesto of contemporary English neo-classical pastoral. In Scotland Allan
Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd (first published in 1725 and often
reprinted) was transformed on several occasions into a ballad opera, on the
model of The Beggar’s Opera, first in Edinburgh (1729) and later in
London. A version with music by Thomas Linley (i) was produced in 1781. Of
later 18th-century parodies, this time of the traditional Italian Platonic love
pastoral, Lorenzo da Ponte’s libretto for Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte
(1790) particularly deserves mention, though Mozart’s setting is scarcely
pastoral in any distinctive sense.
The
French equivalents to the simple melodies of German and British ballad operas
were the vaudevilles (popular melodies to which new texts were added), from
which so-called vaudeville comedies were constructed in the first half of the
18th century (see Vaudeville). These became the basis of a tradition
of soft pastoral, of which J.-J. Rousseau’s Le devin du village (1752)
is an early example: this comprises opéras comiques in rural settings,
often with deliberately simplified music, whose plots reflect a mythical,
idealized view of the peasantry along the lines of Rousseau’s own thought.
Analogous works were also produced in England (for example the pasticcio Love
in a Village, 1762); the Singspiele composed by J.A. Hiller in Leipzig in
the second half of the century (for example Die Jagd, 1770) also
represented adaptations of French librettos of this type. All such works
reflect a simplified musical style which was regarded as the ‘natural’ pastoral
style of the period – a natural style comparable, perhaps, to the soft pastoral
of Marie Antoinette’s milkmaid disguise.
In
the 19th century the eclectic approach of composers such as Meyerbeer ensured
the survival of pastoral ‘oases’ among other means of creating local colour in
French grand opera and elsewhere; among the most original of these should be
counted the shepherd’s ‘alte Weise’ in Act 3 of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde
(1865). Otherwise, in the French repertory as in the Italian, pastoral traits
are not very evident, even with subject matter that would in earlier times have
virtually demanded their use.
The
‘folk-based’ pastoral style in 18th-century opera became the basis, however,
for many new developments in national opera repertories. Since the common
conception of ‘nature’ at this period comprised landscape, often a specifically
national landscape, the Singspiel pastoral idiom acquired powerful new
ideological and psychological content. From the early 19th century it was able
to symbolize national aspirations, both in German Romantic operas such as
Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821) and later (through the rediscovery of
equivalent idioms: see especially Nejedlý, 1929, iii) in works of the Czech
nationalist school, of which the most prominent example is Smetana's The
Bartered Bride (1866).
Pastoral
parody, normally comic, also continued throughout the century, principally in
French operettas and their offshoots elsewhere; to an unexpected extent these
returned to Renaissance and Baroque pastorals for their basic subject matter or
style (for example, Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers, 1858, and Sullivan’s Iolanthe,
1882). In addition a new form of pastoral, the ‘pastoral of childhood’ (see
Empson, 1935), may be discerned later in the century in the Märchenoper (‘fairy-tale opera’) such as
Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel (1893).
The
new soft Mediterranean pastoral idiom which had been developed from the late
19th century in French orchestral music and ballet, as in Debussy’s Prélude
à l’après-midi d’un faune (1892–4) and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé
(1912), in turn suggested hard equivalents in the early 20th century, as in
Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913) and The Wedding (1923), or
later in the crude primitivism of Carl Orff (Der Mond, 1939; Die
Kluge, 1943). Other deliberately ‘simple’ and by that token pastoral styles
were developed from various styles of commercial popular music, often drawn
from jazz, either directly or via the Broadway or Hollywood American musical
(for example, in Milhaud’s ballet La création du monde, 1923; Krenek’s Jonny
spielt auf, 1927; Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, 1935, among many
others); these form an obvious hard counterpart to the soft pastoral both of
the continuing folksong tradition, exemplified in Vaughan Williams’s Hugh
the Drover (1924), and of the musical-comedy tradition itself (e.g. Rodgers
and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, 1943). Another source of ‘simple’ music has
been found in the styles of past ages, as in a number of the works of
Stravinsky.
In
some works composers did not merely cultivate ‘simple’ idioms but also rejected
19th-century notions of realism in opera, at the same time succeeding in
returning to a more profound, moral version of pastoral. With Brecht and Weill,
the use of a ‘hard’ cabaret idiom at odds with conventional expectations of
opera is seen in Die Dreigroschenoper (1928) as in Aufstieg und Fall
der Stadt Mahagonny (1930). Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (1951)
appears to represent a different, religious conception of pastoral, both
Auden’s libretto and Stravinsky’s music setting up a pastoral opposition
between country and city against which the spiritual progress of the hero can
be measured.
Pastoral
4. Christmas and instrumental pastorals in Italy.
It
is generally assumed that 17th- and 18th-century Italian composers created a
vocabulary of instrumental motifs, associated with music for Christmas Eve,
which eventually became the common property of all European music. This
assumption is adopted here, although the history of pastoral music is as yet
imperfectly understood: explicitly pastoral sacred songs are attested in
Germany before they are in Italy (see §5 below), and it is not known whether
the Spanish and Latin-American Villancico – another explicitly pastoral tradition
– had any links with pastoral music elsewhere in Europe.
Reference
to pastoral music for Christmas was made by Castaldo (Vita del B. Gaetano
Tiene, Rome, 2/1616, p.85), and he is one of several who claimed that the
custom had been instituted by St Cajetan (Gaetano) of Thiene after a vision he
had had on Christmas Eve 1517.
The
earliest surviving collection of Christmas pastorals in Italy is the Pastorali
concenti al presepe of Francesco Fiamengo (1637), written for the domestic
Christmas Eve celebrations of his patron at Messina. This collection contains
prototypes of most later Italian pastorals, both vocal and instrumental,
including a Sonata pastorale ‘a 2 Violini, Viola, e Trombone ò Leuto’,
and it contains, intermittently, many of the pastoral motifs later popularized
by Corelli. These motifs include lilting melodies in triple time (here 3/2,
later usually 6/8 or 12/8) mainly in conjunct motion, prominent use of parallel
3rds, drone basses and symmetrical phrases (ex.1). Such features are prominent in the
music-making of Italian shepherds (pifferari), who have been recorded
playing the shawm (piffero) and bagpipe (zampogna) at Christmas
in towns since the 19th century (ex.2); it has been reasonably suggested that
this music may have been cultivated in the 17th century and that it was being
imitated in these and later pastorals.
Picturesque
motifs of the same sort occurred in art music as early as 1581, in a madrigal
by Marenzio, and they occur also in Frescobaldi’s Capriccio fatto sopra la
Pastorale, published in his Toccate d’intavolatura di cimbalo … libro
primo in the same year as Fiamengo’s collection. Pastorals for organ
similar to the latter were written in Italy and elsewhere from the 17th century
by many composers, including Bernardo Pasquini, Zipoli and possibly Bach (bwv590: the authenticity of this work has been questioned).
Harpsichord pieces were also occasionally pastoral, notably (outside Italy) in
the musette (see Musette, (3)).
Fiamengo’s
vocal pieces include a lullaby to the Christ child; its text, like those of
other 17th-century Italian and German pastorals, was designed to heighten the
emotional pitch of devotion. This piece seems to be the earliest example of the
Ninna,
a category of Italian vocal Christmas pastoral in the form of a lullaby: ninne
were written by Francesco Durante, Paisiello and Cimarosa, and the tradition
survived until at least the 19th century.
Fiamengo’s
pastorals and those of other 17th-century Italian composers sometimes contain
echo effects: these continued as an occasional feature of the later pastoral
outside Italy. Other pastoral devices, such as dialogues between allegorical
characters, also occur in 17th-century Italian pastorals, and there are
17th-century Italian Christmas motets containing sections with drone basses and
melodies harmonized in 3rds. Leichtentritt (Geschichte der Motett,
Leipzig, 1908/R) described one such motet by Carissimi, dating from
1675.
In
the early 18th century the conventions of pastoral music were applied to the
oratorio and concerto grosso. At the Vatican, in the first and second decades
of the century, vernacular cantatas were given at banquets on Christmas Eve
after First Vespers of Christmas (A. Adami, Osservazioni per ben regolare il
coro dei cantori della cappella pontificia, 1711; the relevant passage is
reproduced in U. Kirkendale, Antonio Caldara: sein Leben und seine
venezianisch-römischen Oratorien, Graz, 1966, p.71). Cantatas with
allegorical characters and pastoral characteristics were written for this purpose
by Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti and by Caldara; Domenico Scarlatti
composed similar cantatas in Lisbon in the 1720s for the king’s name day, which
fell in the Christmas season. Pastoral motifs were used also in liturgical
music: Durante wrote a Gloria in pastorale as well as other pastoral
music. Pastoral masses subsequently enjoyed a great vogue, particularly in
Germany (see §5 below).
Christmas
cantatas contained vocal and instrumental pastorals (for example, at the end of
introductory instrumental sinfonias) in which the pastoral vocabulary of the
previous century reached its classic expression (ex.3). These pastorals are in many respects
almost indistinguishable from sicilianas. Their tempo is often larghetto
(although opinion about the correct tempo of Italian pastorals – whether they
should be fast or slow – was not unanimous even in the 18th century); the time
signature is often 12/8 or 6/8; the melodies are harmonized predominantly in
3rds and 6ths; long drone basses, or at least pedal points, on tonic and
dominant are frequent; a distinction between concertino and ripieno groups of
players is often drawn. Such features are best known, however, from the
pastoral concerti grossi which were published by Italian composers at this
time, especially in Corelli’s ‘Christmas’ Concerto, ‘fatto per la notte di
Natale’, published posthumously in 1714 as op.6 no.8. In this work, the
pastoral (‘ad libitum’, a phrase admitting of varying interpretations) is
placed at the end of a substantial concerto grosso.
Numerous
concertos and, later, symphonies incorporating pastoral motifs in this style,
presumably in imitation of Corelli (though their chronology is not clear), were
written by a number of his Italian contemporaries and successors, including
Torelli (published 1709), Manfredini, Locatelli, Schiassi, Ferrandini, Giuseppe
Valentini and Geminiani. They subsequently came to be written throughout
Europe.
Pastoral
5. 17th- and 18th-century Christmas and instrumental pastorals
outside Italy.
In
the 17th century Germany and the Slavonic countries possessed a distinctive
tradition of Christmas pieces in which well-known Christmas songs were quoted,
often in a deliberately simple and perhaps ‘popular’ style. A mass by Tomasz
Szadek of 1578 quotes the well-known song Dies est laetitiae (WDMP,
xxxiii, c1957); a mass, Exultandi tempus est, by Franz Sales is
in a simple homophonic style, with unusually extensive use of triple time, and
it has been described as the German prototype of the pastoral mass (P. Wagner, Geschichte
der Messe, i, Leipzig, 1913/R, 219ff). This tradition persisted even
after the introduction of explicitly pastoral imagery (see below): instrumental
pieces quoting Christmas songs include the Concerto secundo of Adam
Jarzębski, copied in 1627 (WDMP, li, 1964–5, pp.10ff) and various works by
Pavel Vejvanovský dating from the 1660s and 1670s (e.g. MAB, xlviii, 1982–4
nos.16, 21). In Poland the well-known Christmas songs were themselves termed
pastorals and were published in collections.
In a
Pastorale nel nascimento di Christo sopra il Joseph lieber Joseph mein
(before 1628), Daniel Bollius of Mainz may have attempted to reconcile the
German and Italian traditions: an ornamented version of Joseph lieber
(i.e. Resonet in laudibus) is quoted, and some Italianate motifs occur
within it. Joseph lieber was associated with the German and Slavonic
custom of ‘rocking the Christ child’; Schütz in his Historia der … Geburth
Gottes (1664) also alluded to this custom by adopting a ‘rocking’ motif in
the bass (ex.4), resembling those used by Merula (see
Ninna)
and by Monteverdi, in Arnalta’s lullaby ‘Oblivion soave’ in Act 2 of L’incoronazione
di Poppea (1642).
A
more lasting influence was exerted through Catholic hymnbooks in Germany and
Bohemia (see Cantional). In the 17th century the Jesuits seized
on the hymnbook as a weapon of the Counter-Reformation; and the new texts, many
written to old melodies, in these collections included pastoral texts which,
like those of 17th-century Italian pastorals, were intended to evoke intense
religious emotion. The Jesuit Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld included a number
of pastoral texts in his popular Trutznachtigall (1628), which was
widely imitated and translated into Czech (1665). Many Czech songs in earlier
hymnbooks had been responsorially performed; this quasi-dramatic style,
together with the pastoral convention and with idyllic Christmas songs such as
those of Adam Michna, contributed to the formation of the Pastorella.
In
France, Charpentier introduced popular noëls (melodies with strong pastoral
connotations) into his Christmas Midnight Mass setting (see Noël). Other French composers
arranged noëls either for organ (Le Bègue, Dandrieu, Daquin, Michel Corrette
and others; the tradition survived in the work of Guilmant) or for orchestra as
‘symphonies’ or ‘suites de noëls’ (Lalande, Gossec). From the second half of
the 17th century the French court indulged a taste for the pseudo-pastoral also
in secular music: the bellows-blown bagpipe (musette) and hurdy-gurdy were
cultivated in instrumental and operatic music. The musette in turn gave its
name to a movement in many 18th-century instrumental suites coupled with the
gavotte and using drone basses.
A
lasting tradition of instrumental pastorals began in Germany in the late 17th
and early 18th centuries, when composers in and near Vienna wrote instrumental
pastorals using the Italian pastoral vocabulary of Corelli and his
contemporaries. Sonate pastorali (pastoral trio sonatas) were written by
Fux, J.H. Schmelzer and others (manuscripts in A-Wn and Wsp).
Besides the Italian conventions, the style of Austrian peasant music was
imitated, presumably for comic rather than idyllic effect (e.g. in Heinrich
Biber’s Bauernkirchfahrt; later pieces in this tradition include the Bauernhochzeit,
1755, of Leopold Mozart, ed. in DTB, xxvii, Jg.ix, vol.ii, 1908). Animal and
bird sounds were imitated; Sandberger showed that this was an old tradition in
German music (an example from this period is Poglietti’s Capriccio über das
Henner- und Hannergeschrei for keyboard).
From
the late 17th century, in Poland, Moravia, Austria and elsewhere, the pastoral
tradition developed in the music of provincial church choirs into the
pastorella, the pastoral mass and settings of other liturgical texts (e.g. the Pange
lingua and Alma Redemptoris mater) in pastoral style. These
categories enjoyed an enormous vogue in the second half of the 18th century.
Tittel (1935) enumerated many characteristics of the pastoral mass, which
besides italianate features included fanfare motifs (reminiscent of the alphorn
or tuba pastoralis), occasional sections in unison, omission of sections
of text not in accordance with the Christmas mood and the predominance of
even-bar phrases. An independent echo chorus of soloists is occasionally found,
as in the punning echo effect from the most celebrated of Abbé Vogler’s
pastoral masses (1775;ex.5). Though Tittel termed this the
‘Viennese’ pastoral mass tradition, it was diffused throughout central Europe.
Pastoral masses and other pastoral music remained traditional in many places in
Austria even after the rise of Cecilianism; modern Austrian composers have
occasionally written pastoral masses or mass sections.
In the
early 18th century a pastoral style of instrumentation was developed in both
sacred and secular pastorals, especially in German areas. Wind instruments
symbolized the fluting or playing of reed pipes by classical shepherds: for
this purpose such instruments as the chalumeau, oboe d’amore and oboe da caccia
were used (as for example in the sinfonia of the second section of Bach’s Christmas
Oratorio, whose pastoral conventions otherwise resemble those of Corelli).
Flutes and oboes, often in pairs, eventually became more usual; but the ‘Pifa’
(‘pastoral symphony’) of Handel’s Messiah is still a simple string
setting. The Italian pastoral conventions of the early 18th century came to be
adopted in the works of Bach, Handel and their contemporaries wherever the text
referred to shepherds, in both sacred and secular music – for example, in
pastoral pieces such as Handel’s Acis and Galatea, in Christmas works
and in sacred works where Christ was referred to as the Good Shepherd (e.g.
Bach’s cantata Du Hirte Israel, höre, bwv104).
At
an early date the pastoral tradition entered that of the symphony and solo
concerto in Austria, Germany and Bohemia, sometimes in works written for
Christmas. These works, by composers such as Leopold Hofmann, Linek and G.J.
Werner, were virtually instrumental pastorellas; they contain pedal points and
alphorn-like fanfares, as do the pastoral symphonies and concertos of Mannheim
composers (Cannabich, Toeschi and others). Other such works stand more directly
in the line of descent from Corelli.
Some
works of this period include picturesque nature motifs, such as those in
Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ and bird-calls (Boccherini, G.J. Werner), and
programmatic representations of storms and the thanksgiving of Nature at their
abatement (Steibelt; J.H. Knecht, Le portrait musical de la nature, c1785;
organ improvisations representing storms had been performed by Abbé Vogler and
Knecht). A wide variety of picturesque motifs of this type occur in Haydn’s Creation
(1796–8) and Seasons (1798–1801). (For pastoral Christmas pieces in the
Iberian peninsula and Latin America, see Villancico).
Pastoral
6. 19th and 20th centuries.
Beethoven
adopted many of the conventions of 18th-century pastoral music in his Pastoral
Symphony op.68 (1808), but he carefully described the work as ‘more the
expression of feeling than [realistic] painting’, thereby revealing a
preoccupation with the subjective psychological effects of the pastoral scene
that was more thorough-going than that of his predecessors. The pastoral
qualities of the work are due in part to an avoidance of the dynamic drive
often associated with the tonal design of Beethoven’s forms, in part to an
unusual emphasis within the formal scheme on the subdominant and to the
adoption of a generally slow harmonic rhythm. The first movement, moreover, is
constructed almost entirely from major triads.
The
picturesque and idyllic motifs of Nature already adopted in some 18th-century
music (see above) and unconnected with the Christmas pastoral tradition, such
as motifs suggesting running water or hunting scenes in the forest, came to
permeate much of the music of composers such as Schubert and Weber (e.g. in the
piano accompaniment to Schubert’s Die Forelle, or Weber’s Freischütz
overture). They are indicative of an idealization of Nature, but may be given
an ironic twist (as in Schubert’s Schäfers Klagelied).
Some
19th-century composers increasingly preferred to use the forbidding and
irrational aspects of Nature as models, or to attempt to re-create the pastoral
music of an archaic period when, some believed, it had possessed a power later
lost under the constraints of civilization. No doubt it is in this light that
one should consider the pastoral convention, perhaps invented by Berlioz, of a
melody comprising irregular expressive arabesques on a solo instrument, with
all accompaniment totally jettisoned. There is an example (ex.6) in the ranz des vaches, or
pastoral alphorn melody, for oboe and english horn in the ‘Scène aux champs’
from Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830, subsequently revised; see N.
Temperley, ed., New Edition of the Complete Works, xvi, Kassel, 1972,
esp. pp.x, 191). Expressive, unaccompanied, rhythmically free passages
contrasted with their immediate contexts had occurred earlier (e.g. in the
first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata op.31 no.2, 1802), but Berlioz
invested his with new significance: he intended this example specifically to
evoke a mood of unsatisfied passion in a romantic northern pastoral setting.
(The effect may have been suggested to Berlioz by a passage in Chateaubriand’s René
of 1805.)
Similar
symbolic, imaginative re-creations of archaic pastoral melodies occur in the
works of many later composers. Examples may be seen in the sailor’s song in Act
1, and the shepherd’s piping in Act 3, of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde
(1857–9) and in the passages for natural E
trumpet and wordless voice in Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral
Symphony (1922). Debussy used similar melodies (e.g. ex.7, from L’après-midi d’un faune,
1891–4) to suggest the pastoral music of Greek antiquity – in other words, to
create a specifically Mediterranean pagan pastoral convention. The works of a
number of early 20th-century composers, notably in France, reflect a vogue for
ancient Greek pastoral imagery, sometimes coupled with the influence of
Debussy: these include Roussel’s Le poème de la forêt (1906) and other
works, Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé (1906–11), Carl Orff’s Tanzende Faune
(1914), and Dukas’ La plainte au loin du faune (1920).
Throughout
the 19th century and well into the 20th, composers continued to cultivate the
older italianate pastoral inherited ultimately from Corelli (e.g. ‘How lovely
are the messengers’ from Mendelssohn’s St Paul, 1836), whose conventions
came to be thought particularly well suited to performance during church
services. Non-italianate characteristics were occasionally added to this type
of pastoral, as in Dohnányi’s Pastoral for piano, subtitled ‘Hungarian
Christmas Song’ (1921). Berlioz chose this type of pastoral for the ‘Shepherds’
Farewell’ in L’enfance du Christ (c1850–54) to create an
‘archaic’ effect; a similar neo-classical intention lies behind the italianate
pastoral conventions of the second Interludium from Hindemith’s Ludus
tonalis for piano (1943).
For further information see Bergerette (ii); Brunette; Caccia; Kolęda; Pan; Programme music; Quempas; Ranz des vaches; Siciliana; Syrinx.
Pastoral
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