I’m listening to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. One could be forgiven for thinking the opening is prelude to something pastoral and grandly reminiscent of drifts of snowdrops in Cound woods, Shropshire, on a Sunday in February. Spring’s in the air. Some tunes are reminiscent of the 6th - lamb-leaping exuberance contained in the wood, brass, silver and guts of a symphony orchestra.
Imagine that first audience of Beethoven’s thinking they knew where they stood in a Viennese whirl, in their dancing shoes, riding boots. Imagine me thinking I knew where I stood, on Shropshire home soil, in my walking boots, stepping carefully enough around the deeper puddles, plodding through the shallow ones, taking it at variable walking paces, andante, guided by the terrain.
And then imagine me climbing up through the woods, along a clay-slip muddiness of ridge, and spotting, suddenly (through a gate) an open grassy field.
The terrain of the 7th’s second movement is slow to build. It’s funereal, ending in a question, leading to the run down the hill of the third movement..
I think I thought I was Maria von Trapp in a Beethoven alpine pastoral for a moment when I saw the hills alive with grass, and I left the path walking, entered the field at an allegro.
You never run down wet grass, everyone said afterwards. But I did, and I fell flat, picked myself up, fell flatter still.
Mud on my anorak, my trousers, my hat, my watch, my boots - mud in my hair. I lay face up to the sky, a small child, strayed from the path, accelerating into that faster and faster beat of spring, grin on her face, revelling in this forerunner of an ode to the joys of all the outdoors that’s to come, and soon: a child relieved to be so far beyond hope of cleanliness.
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