The Seasons in Music
Music and nature have formed a close symbiosis from the beginning. Music is itself rooted in the facts of nature, in mathematical ratios and acoustical overtones. And theorists of music have argued that it, like the other arts, is in its essence an imitation of “nature,” if we take that to mean both the phenomena of the physical universe and of the human soul. Musical tones have in fact a remarkable capacity for evoking things beyond music itself, whether feelings, states of mind, gestures, or physical phenomena, and in the Western classical music tradition creators have often delighted in reproducing experiences and phenomena of nature in tones. The experience of the seasons is one of the primal and universal phenomena. As such the seasons provide a natural subject for music, and we shouldn’t be surprised to find a number of composers in our tradition depicting or evoking them. Finding our natural experiences reflected in human art is deeply satisfying, just as the cavemen of Lascaux must have felt on seeing the animals that they knew so well lovingly reproduced on the cave walls.
The seasons offer rich opportunities for specific musical evocation: the winds and harsh chill of winter, the avian friends and gushing waters of spring, the human activities that fill autumn (hunting, revelry, the vine), the sudden storms of summer. As well, the composer can invoke the emotional and psychological effects which the season produce in us. In fact, the best seasonal music goes well beyond mere imitation to reflect deeper psychic and spiritual dimensions of death, rebirth, celebration, harvest, sorrow and joy, energy and repose, and much else.
While there have been countless pieces about a single season—spring music alone is almost a cliché—complete seasonal cycles are a rarity in the classical canon. I think there are a number of reasons for this. Program music—instrumental music that represents an extramusical idea, scene, story—only became a central preoccupation of composers in the Romantic era, although some earlier figures like Vivaldi anticipated this. Too, depicting an entire cycle of seasons in music is a considerable artistic task, requiring planning and organization to create a convincing whole. Vivaldi’s violin concertos Le quattro stagioni are certainly not the earliest attempt at descriptive music, but they may be the first largescale, integrated musical depiction of the seasons. Coupling each season/concerto with a descriptive poem, Vivaldi used the techniques of stringed instruments to suggest birdsong, hailstorms, hunters’ gunshots, chattering teeth, and much else, while weaving these sound-pictures into cohesive, melodious, durable (and how!) pieces of music.
However, if we dig into the repertoire a bit, we find a handful of seasons cycles apart from Vivaldi’s perennial favorite (which has received more than enough commentary over the years). Here I’ll introduce three perhaps less familiar. As I combed through candidates, I gave a momentary pass to examples from Tchaikovsky, Werner, Spohr, Raff, Milhaud, and others and settled on cycles by Haydn, Roussel, and Delius.
Joseph Haydn: The Seasons
Haydn’s The Seasons is one of those works that all classical music buffs know about but few perhaps have actually heard. In 1801, Haydn wound up his illustrious composing career with this secular oratorio, set to a German text based on a very popular English-language poem by the Scottish poet James Thomson. English and German are highly compatible languages and, when it comes to vocal music, easily transferable one to the other; The Seasons has been performed in both languages. Haydn’s oratorio was a follow-up to his enormously successful The Creation, written during the composer’s happy sojourn in London. Although The Creation is sacred and The Seasons secular, both works embody Haydn’s essentially religious outlook on life, thanking God for the wonders of his world.
The Seasons has a scenario involving three peasants—a soprano, a tenor, and a bass—and their trials, travails, and pleasures throughout the year. The story is told like an opera in a mixture of arias, recitatives, and choruses; the drinking chorus that ends Fall is a roistering affair indeed. Some critics believe that The Creation and The Seasons together form a sort of gigantic diptych about man and nature.
For some reason—maybe its ambitious size and scope—The Seasons is not often performed. It has all the charm and delightful naivete of Haydn at his best and is filled with some choice seasonal depictions: the passage from winter to spring, a sunrise, a summer storm, the wine-soaked harvest celebration, winter fog and frost, the croaking of frogs, a hunting party. The whole work shows Haydn’s good-natured love of life and the beauty of nature, opening up a portal that the Romantic composers would enter.
Albert Roussel: Symphony No.1, Le poème de la forêt
Albert Roussel (1869–1937) is the first composer you should explore if you’re curious about French composers of the turn of the 20th century who weren’t Debussy or Ravel. Roussel is an inspiration to late bloomers and lifelong experimenters: he turned to music only after a career as a navy officer and was still learning, improving, and trying new styles into middle age. Roussel assembled the movements that would become his First Symphony, subtitled “Poem of the Forest,” over several years; the entire work premiered in 1908.
Those years were the heyday of Impressionism in both music and painting, and what Roussel gives us here is a set of four mood pictures of a forest in different seasonal dress. Unusually, Roussel starts with winter and ends with fall. The movements are: “Winter Forest,” “Renewal,” “Summer Evening,” and “Fauns and Dryads.” Roussel expresses the cyclical recurrence of the seasons through the cyclical thematic technique, a method of carrying forth and transforming musical themes throughout an entire work. In this way, he is able to tie the four movements together, expressing the transitions between the seasons as well as their individual characters. When the nostalgic theme of “Winter Forest” returns gently at the end of Fall to round out the symphony (and the year), the effect is extremely moving and satisfying. The music throughout is protean, like the weather itself, ever-developing, intimate, colorful; Roussel uses the full resources of the symphony orchestra to express seasonal sensations and the psychic—and spiritual—dimensions of nature as no one had done before.
Roussel’s symphony is one of the best-kept secrets of the symphonic repertoire. I am waiting for some enterprising multimedia maestro to combine appropriate imagery with the Roussel, whether in a live concert or on video. For that matter, I am waiting for anyone outside of music cognoscenti to notice it.
Frederick Delius: North Country Sketches
One of the leading lights of the British musical renaissance, Delius (1862–1934) wrote a number of seasonal tone poems: On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, Summer Night on the River, In a Summer Garden. North Country Sketches from 1923 is an almost complete seasonal cycle—I am not entirely sure if the third movement, “Dance,” is meant to represent summer. The other movements are “Autumn: The Wind Soughs in the Trees,” “Winter Landscape,” and “The March of Spring: Woodlands, Meadows and Silent Moors.” Delius was, like Roussel, an Impressionist, and his musical impressions—especially in this suite—relate to the landscapes and weather of his native Yorkshire region. One commentator hears “mists and winds of wild moorland.” Precisely how a composer finds musical equivalents to these sensory phenomena would require a volume; suffice it to say Delius hits on musical gestures and tonal colors that really do suggest these effects of light, wind, and weather. To take just two examples, the high undulating strings in “Autumn” to depict the wind in the trees, and the combination of winds, strings, and harp for an icy start to “Winter Landscape.”
All three of these seasonal selections, I would say, are connected in some way with Romanticism. Haydn, the epitome of Viennese Classicism, shows the first stirrings of Romantic sensibility in his oratorios: the love of nature, the emphasis on intimate human sentiment. Roussel’s symphony and Delius’ suite represent the Indian Summer of Romanticism (and gateway to musical modernity) that was Impressionism. I would dare say that Impressionism is a style that appeals to almost everyone. It connects us to warm and nostalgic feeling, to universal experiences of nature before the era of mechanization, to instrumental sounds that provide sensuous delight. It’s probably no accident that this style has lent itself most readily to representing the seasons that form the backdrop to our lives.
*This essay was first published at The Imaginative Conservative and is republished here with gracious permission.
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