Pastorale

A work that depicts the characters and scenes of rural life or expresses its atmosphere.

The earliest musical settings of pastoral poetry were made by the troubadours and trouvères. Adam de la Halle's Jeu de Robin et Marion (13th century) is a pastoral play set to music. Pastoral themes are found in chansons and frottolas c 1500 and are common in the Italian and English madrigal; Tasso's Aminta (1573) and Guarini's Il pastor fido (1590) provide many of the texts. The pastoral language of the madrigal was carried to the 17th-century cantata, and most early operas were based on pastoral material. Towards mid-century interest shifted to historical themes in serious opera, but with the Arcadian Academy's influence pastoral elements again became common after 1690. The initial interest in Italy was followed by an equally large wave in France, as in operas by Lully, Destouches and Rameau.

A special category is the Christmas pastorale, vocal or instrumental. It perhaps drew on features of the music-making of Italian shepherds (pifferari) who played at Christmas in the towns: lilting melodies usually in 6/8 or 12/8, parallel 3rds, drone basses and symmetrical phrases. Such movements appear in Baroque vocal works and concertos for performance at the Vatican on Christmas Eve, but the style was widely disseminated. The sinfonia of the second section of Bach's Christmas Oratorio and the ‘Pifa’ (‘pastoral symphony’) of Handel's Messiah are familiar examples.

Beethoven adapted conventions of 18th-century pastoral music in his Pastoral Symphony op.68, and motifs suggesting the sounds and sights of nature permeate much music of Schubert and Weber. In the ‘Scène aux champs’ from the Symphonie fantastique Berlioz intended to evoke a mood of unsatisfied passion in a romantic pastoral setting, and similar imaginative re-creations of archaic pastoral melodies occur in later works, including Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Debussy's L′après-midi d′un faune and Vaughan Williams's Pastoral Symphony.