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The painting Beethoven in Nature (1919) by N.C. Wyeth depicts the composer on one of his daily walks.
Though Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh symphonies have been saluted in books, plays and movies over the years, his Sixth (Pastoral), which the CSO will perform in concerts Oct. 4-6, under Christoph Eschenbach, also maintains a vaunted place in popular culture.
Here are some examples:
“Fantasia” (1940)
For this third animated full-length feature, Walt Disney drew inspiration from classical music, setting seven segments to chestnuts from the canon. Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony underscores the fifth segment of “Fantasia” as it depicts a fantastical world of centaurs, gods, fauns, cupids, and other creatures and characters of classical mythology.
Instead of having the animation based on Beethoven’s “recollections of country life,” Disney asked his animators to conjure up gallivanting centaurs and flying horses. Some critics felt that the comical characters diminished Beethoven’s music, especially the centaurs and “centaurettes” are indeed odd, drawing as they do on the kind of cheesecake illustrations that used to be commonly seen on service-station walls.
Despite criticism, Disney defended the decision to mix the playful and the profound for the Pastoral segment. Beethoven would have approved. It creates a whole new feeling — a whole new sympathy, so to speak, for this music. “What impresses me most,” animation historian John Canemaker has said about the Pastoral segment of Fantasia, “is the reach that it attempts.”
“The Simpsons”: “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge”
The long-running animated television series has had several episodes that reference Beethoven over its 35-plus years, but one of the standouts dates back to Season 2, Episode 9. In a wordless sequence, the town’s children romp to the strains of the first movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (in a reference to a similar scene in Disney’s “Fantasia”).
The plot revolves around matriarch Marge’s objection to the violence depicted on “The Itchy & Scratchy Show” (a cartoon within the cartoon). After she starts a campaign to tone down violence, the network makes changes to “The Itchy & Scratchy Show” that children find unsatisfactory; in protest, they turn off their TVs and head outside to play in the sunshine, as Beethoven’s Sixth is heard in the background.
In his review, Nathan Rubin of the AV Club, wrote: "A censorship-happy Marge has neutered ’Itchy & Scratchy’ to the point where the children of Springfield are moved to do the unthinkable: stop watching television. A dystopia instantly becomes a small-town paradise, a happy realm of frolicking children and sunny innocence as kids wake up from a TV fog and embrace life’s rich pageantry."
“Columbo”: “Etude in Black” (1972)
The rumpled detective (Peter Falk) suspects wealthy and imperious conductor Alex Benedict (John Cassavetes) of murdering his mistress, a concert pianist who is threatening to reveal their affair.
Falk works well with Cassavetes, not surprising, since he was a member of the director-actor’s stock film company, beginning with “Husbands” (1970). As Lt. Columbo unravels the crime, the action cuts back and forth to rehearsals and a concert at the Hollywood Bowl, where the program includes Beethoven’s Sixth. Though increasingly testy over Columbo’s suspicions, Benedict takes particular umbrage when the detective admits that his favorite album is the conductor’s recently released recording of Strauss waltzes.
Though a great actor (and even better director), Cassavetes needs some remedial lessons in conducting. Witness this viewer’s review on imdb.com: "As a professional musician, I have to say a few things. First of all, a conductor who merely produces these pedestrian performances of the most basic examples of the repertoire (Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Strauss waltzes, Beethoven) is never going to have a house like that or fame like that or cars like that, much less be called a genius. And the conducting that the actor does is so bad as to be laughable. No orchestra would take him seriously."
It’s still worth a watch, in any case.
“Soylent Green” (1973)
In the near future, when overpopulation and depleted resources threaten the planet’s existence, a New York City police detective named Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) stumbles upon a sinister plot. Aided by his elderly friend Solomon Roth (Edward G. Robinson), Thorn sets out to uncover the truth.
Unable to live with what he and Thorn have uncovered, Roth opts for assisted suicide at a government clinic, a process referred to as “going home.” As he lies dying, Roth envisions the Earth in a more pristine state, while the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (along with other works) is heard on the soundtrack.
