By Malcolm Hayes

Published: Monday, 19 February 2024 at 15:48 PM


Music is music, and a storm is a storm: how can the two phenomena meaningfully be made to connect? Artistic genius can come up with a response so impressive in its own terms that the issue doesn’t seem to matter. Here, we present some of the best pieces of classical music inspired by storms, violent winds and the most dramatic weather patterns.

Classical music inspired by storms and dramatic weather

Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 ‘Pastoral’

Music’s most famous storm of all is the fourth of the five movements of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, the ‘Pastoral’. The idea is simple enough: the happily dancing peasantry in the Scherzo third movement are sent scurrying for cover by a thunderstorm in the fourth, and then emerge into rain-washed sunlit fields for the finale.

Yet these three continuous movements, and the storm in particular, remain one of music’s most thrilling experiences. Beethoven was writing for only a modestly sized orchestra, and the music’s immense power is more of an emotional kind than about actual depiction: the score is headed by Beethoven with the words ‘mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei’ (‘more the expression of feeling than painting’). The ‘storm’ movement itself lasts less than four minutes, yet it has the impact of one much larger. And while the orchestration (intentionally, as Beethoven says) doesn’t sound too much like an actual physical storm, it is exceptionally imaginative nonetheless.

Timpani (kettledrums) here occur only to suggest thunder in the ‘storm’ itself not, as in Beethoven’s other symphonies, in some or all of the other movements. The music’s furious climax is reinforced by a pair of trombones, entering here for the first time; and the insistent use of rapidly repeated, scale-like figures in the low cellos and double basses, another way of suggesting thunder, is as effective at full fortissimo as when the storm is quietly petering out in its closing stages.