Today at ten to eleven I saw sixteen swans. One of my greatest experiences! Lord God, what beauty! They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a gleaming silver ribbon. Their call the same woodwind type as that of cranes, but without tremolo…

We can be sure, from this diary entry, of three things:  of the three species of swans in Europe, Sibelius had seen the whooper swan, whose call he describes perfectly;  that they were arriving from their migration, possibly from Britain, since the date, 21 April, is exactly right; and that Sibelius paid close, detailed attention to the sounds of nature.

The diary note goes on:  ...a low-pitched refrain reminiscent of a small child crying. Nature mysticism and life’s angst! The Fifth Symphony’s finale-theme: legato in the trumpets!

It was 1915, and Sibelius had found the inspiration for what was to become one of the most celebrated features of his most popular symphony:  the so-called swan theme.  It appears in the third and final movement, and is hinted at elsewhere.  This movement begins with a rapid melody in the strings, followed by a swaying, triple-time motif in the horns, the swan-theme, inspired by the sound of their calls, and the sight of those sixteen whoopers.  This 'swan-call' motif is said to have been borrowed by several pop bands, as well as Leonard Bernstein for On the Town, and, borrowing from Bernstein, John Coltrane for A Love Supreme.

Sibelius’s love of nature is well documented.  The Finnish landscape often served as material for his music. When his publisher asked for a programme note for his last major work, Tapiola, he replied with a quatrain:

Across the landscape, the Northland's dusky forests,
Ancient, mysterious, brooding savage dreams;
Within them dwells the Forest's mighty God,
And wood-sprites in the gloom weave magic secrets.

His biographer, Erik Tawaststjerna, noted that "Even by Nordic standards, Sibelius responded with exceptional intensity to the moods of nature and the changes in the seasons: he scanned the skies with his binoculars for the geese flying over the lake ice, listened to the screech of the cranes, and heard the cries of the curlew echo over the marshy grounds just below Ainola. He savoured the spring blossoms every bit as much as he did autumnal scents and colours”

Tawaststjerna also related an anecdote regarding Sibelius' death: [He] was returning from his customary morning walk. Exhilarated, he told his wife Aino that he had seen a flock of cranes approaching. "There they come, the birds of my youth," he exclaimed. Suddenly, one of the birds broke away from the formation and circled once above Ainola. It then rejoined the flock to continue its journey”. Two days later, in September 1957, Sibelius died aged 91.

The Proms programme on Tuesday 12 August includes not only the Fifth Symphony, but his equally well-loved Swan of Tuonela. 

For this piece, Sibelius chooses the cor Anglais for an unending, unrepeating melodic line that depicts the graceful course of a swan’s journey as it swims round Tuonela, the island of the dead.  Although the work’s programme is mythological rather than natural – it is about the mythical Lemminkäinen who is tasked with killing the sacred swan – it remains one of the best examples of Sibelius faithfully depicting the grace and beauty of nature.

12 August 2014 on BBC Radio 3 broadcast live from the Royal Albert Hall, London

The BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Thomas Søndergård

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies: Caroline Mathilde - suite from Act 2
Walton: Violin Concerto
Sibelius: The Swan of Tuonela
Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 in E flat major

Available on BBC iPlayer for 30 days afterwards

As composer Jonathan Dove prepares for the premiere of his Gaia Theory at the BBC Proms this week, he took time out to explain how his recent work has been inspired by an Arctic voyage that proved something of a wake-up call.

Jonathan is perhaps best known for his popular and family operas on a diverse range of subjects from Pinocchio to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.  I asked him when concern for the environment started to influence his work?

"In September 2008, I found myself on the Grigory Micheev, sailing among icebergs and glaciers off the west coast of Greenland, in the company of a diverse group of musicians, artists and scientists.

 "I was gazing at landscapes of mysterious beauty, but gradually the message was sinking in that nothing was as it should be."

He had been invited by David Buckland, artist and founder of Cape Farewell, to witness the effects of climate change at first hand. He found himself sharing the experience with other well-known artists including Jarvis Cocker, Marcus Brigstocke and KT Tunstall.

“Were you already a committed environmentalist at that point?”

 "I suppose I was averagely aware of the issues, as much as anyone who watched the news, say.  But spending time with other artists and a team of scientists made me understand the scale and the detail of the problem.

“We were accompanied by a team of scientists and listened to their expert accounts of how the glaciers were retreating, wildlife was disappearing, and local people could no longer cross the sea-ice to hunt.

“I was the only classical composer on board, so I was mostly sketching ideas and trying a few things out, for use later.  The others were writing songs and poems, or painting there and then, and it all went straight into albums and shows when they got back.”

 “I’ve just been finishing another work that takes a story from the past to illustrate the present.  I’ve called it The Day After [to be staged by Holland Opera in June next year] and it’s based on the ancient myth of Phaethon and his calamitous attempt to take control of his father’s sun-chariot, placing life on Earth at risk. 

"I saw in the hubris of the boy much that I see in post-industrial man." says Dove.  “There’s something powerful about retelling stories in the context of today’s preoccupations.  I write music I would want to hear, so I wouldn’t write something that was a kind of lecture or sermon, or a documentary.” 

We talked about the compositional challenges of representing the simultaneous vastness and tininess of the Earth and its intricate detail. "Take respiration," he suggests. "Some organisms breathe many times a second, a forest has a daily respiratory cycle, while recent research suggests the Earth itself ‘breathes' once a year."

“The Walk from the Garden carried an explicit environmental message,” I suggested “will that be true for Gaia Theory or is it more a reflection on an elegant theory for audiences to make of what they will. And would it matter if they didn't get the message?”

"I have no pretentions that my music can change the world..."

“But can it change the way people feel about the world?”

“A useful role for art is to help prepare for change and give the energy for change.  If someone comes away thinking more deeply about these things after hearing my own response, that would be perfect."

 
Laurence Rose

Jonathan Dove’s Gaia Theory receives its world premiere at the BBC Proms on 28 July, at the Royal Albert Hall, London, and will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3.  It will be broadcast on BBC4 TV on 1 August and both programmes will be available for 30 days on the BBC iPlayer.

“How happy I am to be able to wander among bushes and herbs, under trees and over rocks; no man can love the country as I do. Woods, trees and rocks send back an echo that man longs to hear”.

With these words, recorded for ever in a letter to his friend Therese Malfatti, Beethoven famously declared his love for nature and the landscape around his adopted city of Vienna.  An even more explicit outpouring came in the form of his Pastoral Symphony, which will be performed at the Proms on 21 July.  For all its obvious appeal, it is easy to forget that Beethoven’s  6th Symphony continued the tradition that began with his second, that of restlessly moving the form , indeed the concept, of the symphony forward.

In the Pastoral there are many innovations we take for granted today.  So many, in fact that they add up to a gentle revolution in symphonic thinking.  Premiered on the same night as his more overtly radical fifth, the two make a perfect pairing.  Whereas the fifth symphony was – uniquely at the time - built around a single, simple musical motif, the sixth is built around a single non-musical idea – the countryside.

He gave each movement its own title beginning with the unequivocal Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the country.  Then comes Scene by the brook, with its depictions of landscape, water and of cuckoo, quail and nightingale; followed by a Merry gathering of country folk. The programmatic nature of the symphony is emphasised by the inclusion of a dramatic extra movement depicting a sudden and fearsome summer thunder storm, followed in Happy and grateful feelings after the storm by a perfect simulation of that calm, balmy atmosphere that often follows.

Half a century later, Berlioz was gushing in his enthusiasm for the symphony and the images it conjured:  “The shepherds begin to move about nonchalantly in the fields; their pipes can be heard from a distance and close-by. Exquisite sounds caress you like the scented morning breeze. A flight or rather swarms of twittering birds pass overhead, and the atmosphere occasionally feels laden with mists. Heavy clouds come to hide the sun, then suddenly they scatter and let floods of dazzling light fall straight down on the fields and the woods.”  And all this from just the first movement.  His descriptions of the other four – the Pastoral set a precedent in its five movements – are equally pictorial.

Around a century later, Mahler was to incorporate pastoral episodes in many of his symphonies, often as fragments or themes borrowed from his song cycles.  His Songs of a Wayfarer, settings of his own texts, are liberal in their references to birds, and flowers and in celebrating the beauty of the world

Mahler’s first symphony, which will be performed on 4 September, opens with a movement that seems to be some kind of subconscious response to Beethoven’s Pastoral.  The two works have several features in common, notably the use of folk-like tunes (Mahler uses a theme borrowed from the second of the Songs of a Wayfarer) and birdsong-like motifs.  Strikingly, both composers wrote explicit instructions in the score to imitate particular birds – quail and nightingale in the Pastoral and the cuckoo in both.  Both cuckoos are scored for clarinets, but Mahler’s choice of interval seems wrong – Beethoven correctly has the familiar descending major third, while Mahler’s cuckoo sings the wider interval of a fourth.  Can Mahler have got it wrong?  He did, after all, choose to do his composing in the countryside, usually in a hut by a lake or in the forest (he had three such huts at different times).  He could hardly have mis-heard, or mis-represented such a well-known sound.  Perhaps he was particularly struck by an individual with an abnormal call, or maybe he just decided the music needed a fourth.  In any case, like Beethoven, he wanted to be sure to get exactly the right attack, degree of legato playing and of staccato in the second note:  all characteristic details that make the difference between a cuckoo call and merely two notes on the clarinet.  They are all features that could be notated, but both composers decided that a written instruction would be the best way to make the perfect call.

Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending gets its umpteenth Proms outing on 13 August.  The archetypal English Pastoral rhapsody, written by a composer linked inextricably with the English folk-song movement and idyllic representations of the Edwardian countryside.  Yet RVW was arguably less pastorally-inclined than our other three composers.  Country born and bred, at the earliest opportunity he moved to London.  He wrote a Pastoral Symphony (his third) that was not particularly evocative of the countryside, nor intended to be.  The majority of his output is not remotely pastoral, and many of the folk tunes he borrowed were used as material in decidedly non-folksy pieces.  But unquestionably, when he chose to write truly pastoral music – The Lark Ascending, In the Fen Country, the Norfolk Rhapsodies -   he excelled, and since such works are performed, recorded and broadcast more often than all his other work combined, he will be associated for ever with what Elisabeth Lutyens famously called “cow pat music”.

My final pastoral composer may seem like a surprising choice at first.  Born in the (then) industrial town of Accrington in Lancashire eighty years ago, Harrison Birtwistle has been consistent in his preoccupations throughout his career.  Greek mythology, ritual, melancholy and procession figure large in his output.  But his first acknowledged piece, written when he was about fifteen, was the Oockooing Bird, the manuscript of which still exists; indeed the piece is available on CD.  In this 80th birthday year, the Proms features Sir Harri in five concerts, one of which, on 6 September, is devoted to him alone.

When we launched this site I devoted a page to Birtwistle the lepidoperist.  His childhood interest in moths, and his desire in later life to use their decline as a metaphor for wider loss resulted in Moth Requiem at last year’s proms.  Here is a videoed conversation in which he refers to the importance of birdsong as a template for many contemporary composers’ styles. 

In contrast to Vaughan Williams, Birtwistle has chosen rural locations in which to live.  While based in Paris he had a rural retreat, and in the UK the remote island of Raasay or the more gentle rurality of Wiltshire, where he now lives, is where he finds the tranquillity in which to work.  It is no surprise that landscape is another favourite subject.  Invariably, landscape, or rural life, or birds for example, are viewed through another lens.  They serve as subjects in, or backdrops to, explorations of ritual or myth; or, as in Night’s Black Bird (30 July), melancholy.  

Several works have the word pastoral in their titles or subtitles: a mechanical pastoral (the opera Yan, Tan, Tethera);  stark pastoral and white pastoral (two of his Duets for Storab, the last pieces he wrote during his eight years on Raasay) and so on.  While his contemporaries were turning their backs on the Pastoral, Birtwistle seems to have reinvented it.  

Laurence Rose

The 2014 BBC Proms season gets under way this Friday and among the usual mix of favourite classics, anniversary tributes, new commissions and forays into other cultures, is a fair helping of nature-inspired music and literature.

As the season progresses, we will be previewing and reviewing the best examples. We will explore the relationship between nature, the environment and the composers and writers whose works are inspired in some way by the natural world.

During the festival extended features will be posted here.   We explore Beethoven’s gently radical outpouring of love for the countryside, his Pastoral Symphony (performance 21 July), alongside two other “pastoral” works – Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending (13 August) and Mahler’s first symphony (4 September).

Three living composers with very different ways of reflecting the inspiration that comes from the natural world are featured, too.  We will be in conversation with Jonathan Dove ahead of his BBC-commissioned premiere on 28 July and will also explore works by Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies, whose 80th birthdays are celebrated this year.

Proms Plus is reflecting on the writings on Gavin Maxwell in his centenary year, and so will we.  

The BBC Proms run from 18 July to 13 September at venues in London and broadcast live on BBC Radio 3.  Well-loved and new pieces inspired by the natural world include (all 7.30pm at the Royal Albert Hall unless otherwise stated):

Beethoven, Pastoral Symphony 21 July

Jonathan Dove, Gaia Theory (World Premiere) 28 July

Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Night's Black Bird 30 July

Ralph Vaughan Williams, The Lark Ascending 13 August 6.30pm

Mahler, First Symphony 4 September

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies 80th Birthday Concert 8 September, 10.30pm

During the interval on 21 July the live Proms broadcast will feature a celebration of the murmuration of starlings by sound and vision artist Kathy Hinde and  the RSPB's Tony Whitehead.

And on 15 Aug Nature writers Horatio Clare and Miriam Darlington celebrate the life of Gavin Maxwell, author of Ring of Bright Water, whose centenary is this year.  Proms Plus Literary, 5.45pm, Royal College of Music, London