We need Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony in our lives now more than ever. Yes for its beauty, yes for its healing effect, and yes for the wonder it evokes in us for nature. But more so for its reminder to seek within us both a strong rational and spiritual connection to a universe of harmony and balance, all as we navigate our chaotic world accelerating in all directions at once.

Beethoven’s music is rooted in the Enlightenment, with its notion that nature and civilization can balance by fusing together rationality with spirituality. Just sixteen years before Beethoven composed the Pastoral Symphony, we Americans adopted our Constitution, with its bold aspiration that the same fusion applied to power can balance and preserve freedoms, create laws independent of capricious factions, and ultimately form a society where each of us can pursue our own happiness. An aspiration to be pursued, not instantly achieved. That aspiration was Beethoven’s passion. He dog-eared and underlined this passage from Christian Sturm’s essay “Nature as a School for the Heart:”

“Nature is a glorious school for the heart! …I shall be a scholar of this school and bring an eager heart to her instruction. Here I shall learn wisdom, the only wisdom which is free from disgust; here I shall learn to know God and find a foretaste of heaven in His knowledge.”

The Pastoral Symphony flowers from that yearning. We feel it immediately in the opening with that first intake of clean country air. Then we explore the wonder of forests, meadows, and streams, the symphony of birdsong, the sublimity of a thunderstorm, and the gratitude and glory witnessing the miracle of a rainbow.

I’ve been feeling how starkly different that view of nature is from that other great nature musical masterpiece that we (still) call contemporary, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Replacing Beethoven’s aural rainbows is the nature of tooth and claw. Violence, fertility, human sacrifice, renewal—all expressed with bristling life-force, intoxicated blood lust, and explosive primitive rhythm. “Adoration of the Earth” indeed. Without a shred of Beethoven’s civilized nature.

Both works carve out unique and fully convincing sonic universes. They also revolutionize the orchestra itself. Beethoven discovers a way to make the orchestra seem to leap out of the auditorium and into the vast landscape of the outdoors. A repeated groove grows increasingly loud as if approaching us, then increasingly softer as if receding in the distance. Arpeggios ascend and descend creating a space for the arches of a rainbow. Double basses quietly rumble like thunder from a great distance.

Stravinsky—well, where should we start? Every darn page of Rite of Spring is a fresh way of conceiving possible texture and color in the orchestra. Have you ever noticed how long it takes to actually hear the strings? Normally they are the main event of the orchestra. Not here. Instead, it’s the woodwinds, brass, and percussion that are front and center. That alone turns the idea of an orchestra on its head. But then there are all those original klangs, chords and clusters that seem both new to the world and older than time, harmonies before we civilized them. Equally “uncivilized” are Stravinsky’s complex polyrhythms that openly defy the tidy refinement of Western bar lines. Then there are the layers upon layers of melodies and riffs playing on top of each other. Stravinsky rips away 10,000 years of civilization and thrusts us in feeling back to our primitive past. That’s the wonder of this piece.

You wouldn’t imagine those ideas in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. Yet they are there! I’m thinking particularly of the recapitulation at the Scene by the Brook. That is about as complex a texture as you find in Rite of Spring. Three successive rising bird calls (bassoon, clarinet, violin) punctuate a main theme (flute) that itself is accompanied by a watery string accompaniment (violins, violas, 2 cellos), a syncopated horn drone, a slower bird song of repeated notes (oboes), slow rising arpeggios in the horns, and a plucked bass ostinato. All of that happens together. And it feels like you are experiencing the beauty of that brook, hearing those bird calls, rustling trees, and gurgling water.

Similar techniques to depict two wildly disparate views of nature. They seem impossible to reconcile. Thatfor me describes precisely what it feels like to be alive now. Two bubbles of our time. One a spiritual universe of beauty, order, and purpose, where we coexist in an ecosystem of balance and morality to give life meaning, beauty, and poignance. The other a raw instinctual universe of unbridled, competing life force, messy, dirty, unrestrictedly violent, governed not by balance, but by power and hierarchy.

Both of those universes are outside of us and inside of us. We hum along to beautiful music while we drive past the homeless. We care forcefully that our pets and wild animals be treated humanely without a hypocritical thought to the unimaginable cruelty in the way we slaughter the animals we consume with gusto. We’re outraged at immigrants destroying our way of life while we at the same time demand their service to clean and repair our homes, to serve our food.

For me, now more than ever, the Beethoven Pastoral Symphony needs to be heard and felt. It’s a reminder of the promise we made during the Enlightenment. Yes we are an instinctual species like every other organism locked in battle for survival and supremacy. And of course we are much more. We can imagine and create a rational, aesthetic, and spiritual universe that gives a meaning to life beyond raw fecundity and reproduction. As Sturm expressed, we can learn wisdom “that is free from disgust.” Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony is a supreme reminder of nature as “that glorious school for the heart.” We are hungry for it. I’ll let Beethoven make his case irrefutably with three aural rainbows from the Pastoral Symphony:

Near the end of the first movement

Exquisite arches near the end of the second movement

The glorious rainbow in the final movement