That there is a well-documented link between cognition and ambulation is impossible to deny. Hundreds of studies and a mountain of anecdotal evidence show that walking is both the perfect exercise for the human body and an effective way of clarifying the mind—and this is nowhere more evident than in the field of music.
Consider Franz Schubert. The composer of the song cycle Winterreise (Winter’s Journey) and the “Wanderer Fantasy” for solo piano was addicted to long strolls, his downcast face and short but sure stride familiar in every quarter of Vienna and the countryside beyond. Gustav Mahler was another Viennese rambler, his lengthy outings often reflected in the pace and duration of his symphonic works as well as, more obviously, in his semi-autobiographical Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer). The young Johann Sebastian Bach famously trekked 400 kilometres in the winter of 1705 to hear Dietrich Buxtehude play the organ in Lübeck—and then, presumably, trudged all the way home with a head full of inspiration. And, more recently, that champion of aleatory music John Cage abandoned the beaten track by pursuing wild mushrooms in the hills of northern California and upstate New York, a passion that put untold miles on his hiking boots.
But music’s Grand Perambulator is unquestionably Ludwig van Beethoven, whose daily walks offered him both solace and the psychic space necessary to compose on a truly transcendental level. “How happy I am to be able to walk among the shrubs, the trees, the woods, the grass, and the rocks!” he wrote in his journal. “For the woods, the trees and the rocks give man the resonance he needs.”
The Symphony No. 7 in A major is not the most “pedestrian” of Beethoven’s works; that would be the Symphony No.6 in F major, the “Pastoral” symphony, which has been variously described as a programmatic depiction of rural life or an attempt to convey, in sound, the exaltation that its composer experienced among “the woods, the trees and the rocks”.
Beethoven 7 is not idyllically calm or restful; early critics described it as a kind of sonic maelstrom. Richard Wagner, however, championed the score, finding physical verve in it where others had only found psychological distress, famously describing it as “the apotheosis of the dance”. Wagnerian bombast aside, he was not wrong. Victoria Symphony music director Christian Kluxen concurs, saying “It doesn’t seem like there are any big problems for [Beethoven] in the first movement, and it tuns into a really wonderful dance. And this whole symphony, if I could choose one word for this—and I’m not the one who has invented this—I would choose the word dance. Not just dance as in dancing, but the whole concept of humanity being unworried and free.”
Dancing, of course, is best done with others, but Beethoven preferred solitude on his rambles, just as he needed privacy to write. The Swedish composer Britta Byström, in contrast, likes the company of other composers, at least while exploring the early stages of her musical “walks”. So far, she’s sauntered along with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Anton Bruckner, and Johannes Brahms, among others, and in A Walk to Beethoven—commissioned by Maestro Kluxen while he was at the helm of Norway’s Arctic Philharmonic—she’s managed to get inside her legendary predecessor’s mind while making a vital, contemporary expression of her own.
“It was not my plan from the start to make so many walks,” Byström says in a conversation from Stockholm. “It was just an idea that came up about 10 years ago, in connection with a violin concerto that I wrote for a Swedish violin player, Malin Broman. In that concerto I had movements which I called ‘gates’, and then I had musical bridges between them, which I called ‘walks’. So my first walk appeared, actually, in my own music, but then Malin came up with the idea that maybe in this concert, which also included music by [Heinrich Ignaz Franz] Biber and Benjamin Britten, she wished to play it as a whole, without breaks between the works. So she asked me if I could write something to bring the whole concert together—and so I had the idea ‘Well, I can take my walks from the violin concerto and mix them with the other works on the program. That’s the reason why I wrote the Walk to Biber and the Walk to Britten.
“For me it has been a kind of gentle conversation with my predecessors and colleagues, even if they are not alive anymore,” she adds. “But also a kind of study for myself. When I wish to write a walk to a specific composer, of course I have to study their work very carefully. So I also learn a lot from that for myself.”
Astute listeners will recognize a quote from the Symphony No. 7 in A major’s second movement cunningly inserted into Byström’s walk. Thematic links to the other works on the program, Friedrich Kuhlau’s Elverhøj Overture and Hector Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été are less overtly audible, although both were written in the early 19th century, within two decades of Beethoven’s death. All four works might share a certain outdoorsy ambiance: Kuhlau’s rousing fantasy is set on the “Elves’ Hill” of its title, while Les nuits—which here will be sung by the Canadian mezzo-soprano Alex Hetherington—is a very consciously programmatic depiction of summer in a variety of romantic or fantastical settings.
If there are connections to be made, Byström is certain that Maestro Kluxen will find them, just as she was delighted with his take on A Walk to Beethoven, the premiere of which can be seen on YouTube.
“I like to hear different interpretations of my music, but of course I like some of them better than others,” the composer notes. “And what I liked very much with Christian is how he worked with the rhythmical aspect of the music. In the walks you can always hear a pace, a pulse, that holds the music together from beginning to end—and he found that pace very easily. He did that very well.”
Notes by Alex Varty
Christian Kluxen, conductor