Weekly SpinOn:
Swan Songs

This week’s edition follows how composers have listened to and imitated birds — from the notated calls of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony to Respighi’s recorded nightingale, from Sibelius’s mythic swan to Wagner’s remembered forest bird. Each piece marks a different stage in the long conversation between nature and music.

The title Swan Songs refers both to the swan that appears in Sibelius’s The Swan of Tuonela and to the traditional meaning of a final song. It can also be read as a collection of music pieces — observations and quiet farewells — forming a mosaic of how composers have heard and remembered the voices of birds.

Track 1: Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68 “Pastoral” – II. Szene am Bach – Ludwig van Beethoven

Our first track opens with one of the most intimate nature scenes in music. In the second movement of his Pastoral Symphony (1808), Beethoven transforms the sound of a brook into a musical landscape. The gentle, unbroken flow of the strings becomes the movement of water; above them, woodwinds imitate three birds that he named in the score – the nightingale in the flute, the quail in the oboe, and the cuckoo in the clarinet.

For Beethoven, nature was a place of refuge and observation. The Pastoral was composed in the countryside near Heiligenstadt north of Vienna, where he often retreated to escape city life. In early 19th-century Vienna, nature remained close enough to be heard — a source of renewal and inspiration. The “Scene by the Brook” stands out for the precision of its orchestration and for Beethoven’s unusual decision to identify individual birds within the score – a rarity at the time and an early example of his interest in natural sound as musical material.

The recording chosen for this playlist was made by Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic during the early 1960s and released by Deutsche Grammophon. Among the orchestra’s principal woodwind players at the time were Karlheinz Zöller (flute), Lothar Koch (oboe) and Karl Leister (clarinet). Their distinctive tone colours give the movement’s closing bird calls a vivid presence within Karajan’s overall smooth orchestral texture.

Track 2: Pini di Roma – III. I pini del Gianicolo – Ottorino Respighi

Whereas Beethoven relied on the woodwinds to portray birds, Respighi could let the real thing be heard. By the time Ottorino Respighi composed his Roman trilogy between 1916 and 1928, gramophone recordings had become part of modern life. In Pini di Roma (1924), the third and most atmospheric of the three tone poems, Respighi used this new technology to include an actual bird: a nightingale recorded on shellac disc.

The composer indicated the source precisely in the score — a 78 rpm recording made by the Gramophone Company in London, catalogued as Il canto d’usignolo (The Song of a Nightingale). He required that the same recording be played at the end of every performance, marking one of the earliest documented uses of recorded sound within a symphonic work. When the nightingale enters, the orchestra has already faded into silence, leaving the recorded birdsong to close the movement — and, for a moment, to replace the orchestra itself.

Respighi wrote I pini del Gianicolo as a nocturne: muted strings, harp and celesta evoke the stillness of a Roman hillside under moonlight, while solo clarinet and violin trace delicate figures of motion. The piece was premiered at the Augusteo in Rome under Bernardino Molinari on 14 December 1924 and quickly established Respighi as one of the leading Italian symphonists of his generation.

The recording chosen for this playlist was made by Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1977 and released by Deutsche Grammophon. It belongs to Karajan’s complete cycle of Respighi’s Roman tone poems, a project he admired for its orchestral colour and precision. In interviews, Karajan described Respighi as a “master of instrumental balance,” whose scores demand absolute control of texture and dynamics. Performing Pini di Roma still presents a logistical challenge: the nightingale’s recording must be synchronised with the orchestra and played through loudspeakers in the concert hall — a technical requirement that makes each performance slightly different, depending on acoustics and timing.

Track 3: The Swan of Tuonela, Op. 22 No. 2 – Jean Sibelius

After Respighi’s nightingale, the next bird appears in a very different setting. The Swan of Tuonela was written in 1895 as part of Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen Suite, based on stories from the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. The work describes the river Tuonela, a dark waterway encircling the land of the dead. On its surface glides a solitary swan, whose song is both beautiful and otherworldly.

Sibelius scored the piece for a reduced orchestra with an emphasis on low strings, harp, and cor anglais. The English-horn solo represents the swan’s voice — one of the most distinctive melodies in orchestral music. Its calm, unbroken line floats above a slow pulse in the divided cellos and basses, creating the impression of movement without motion. The tone is hushed and suspended, as if the music itself were drifting on water.

The first version of The Swan of Tuonela was completed in 1895 and revised in 1897 before its first public performance in Helsinki on 13 April 1897 under Robert Kajanus. Sibelius later reused the piece independently, and it became one of his most frequently performed works.

The recording chosen for this playlist was made by Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1984 and released by Deutsche Grammophon. The solo English-horn part was played by Gerhard Stempnik, principal cor anglais of the orchestra from 1969 to 1993.

Track 4: Siegfried-Idyll – Richard Wagner

From Sibelius’s dark river, the final work in this week’s playlist returns to stillness and light. Siegfried-Idyll, written in 1870, was Wagner’s private gift to his wife Cosima after the birth of their son. The piece was first performed by a small ensemble on the staircase of their villa at Triebschen near Lucerne on Christmas morning, with the composer conducting.

Although it draws on themes from the opera Siegfried, the Idyll stands on its own as one of Wagner’s most intimate works. Scored for chamber orchestra, it weaves gentle motifs for strings, woodwinds and horn into a continuous, unhurried line. Among them is the so-called “forest bird” motif from Siegfried, transformed here from theatrical signal into a quiet memory. In this context the bird no longer speaks to the hero, but seems to sing inwardly — a recollection of nature rather than its imitation.

The recording chosen for this playlist was made by Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1977 and released by Deutsche Grammophon. Karajan had conducted the work throughout his career and prized it for its transparency and balance — qualities that reveal Wagner not as dramatist but as lyrical miniaturist.

As a final anecdote, we look at a swan song that changed the paradigm of the whole topic. On the Norwegian island of Hjertøya, the Dada poet and artist Kurt Schwitters, who lived there in exile in the 1930s, composed his Ursonate — a work made entirely of phonetic syllables, rhythm, and tone, without a single real word. It was language stripped to its musical core. Decades later, visitors noticed that the local starlings seemed to imitate fragments of Schwitters’ poem. The Berlin artist Wolfgang Müller recorded the starlings near Schwitters’ cabin and released the recordings in 1997 as Die Stare von Hjertøya.

It became a curious reversal: birds imitating a human who had imitated birds — a perfect, literal swan song to our topic.

—  Pia Bernauer (Karajan Institute)