About This Event
Beethoven's Symphony No. 6,
Pastoral, his only symphony based explicitly on a narrative idea, tells the story of a day spent wandering in the countryside: the peacefulness of the outdoors, a babbling brook; cuckoos, quail, and a nightingale; shepherds and farmers, and a thunderstorm. The perennial favorite Seventh Symphony was composed and premiered in 1812, some four years after the Sixth. Its stately second-movement Allegretto so appealed to its first audience that it called for, and received, an encore.