"MONSIEUR Wagner" said Rossini of his more flamboyant rival, "has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour." One of the most powerful of Richard Wagner's lovely moments must surely be the magnificent thunderstorm portrayed in the third act of Die Walkire.
Indeed, of all meteorological phenomena, the thunderstorm, for obvious reasons, has by far the greatest musical potential, and has been widely used by the classical composers to lend dramatic effect to their more exuberant works.
In the "Spring" section of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, for example, although the overall theme of the passage is one of Joy and relief at the receding grip of a harsh winter, the changeable and untrustworthy nature of the season is illustrated by the inclusion of a brief thundershower. Later in the work, a more violent and lengthy thunderstorm breaks out to disrupt temporarily the hot humid adadio of high "Summer".
Franz Josef Haydn worked on a shorter timescale then Vivaldi. Around 1761 he wrote three short symphonies called Le Matin, Le Midi, and Le Soir - an oeuvre that one might describe as a "diurnal suite". The opening of the first symphony portrays the dawn, while the second is suggestive of the harsh bright sunshine of midday, but the third symphony concludes with a vigorous movement unambiguously labelled La Tempesta, on the horizon, and then the first sounds of the distant thunder, we can acoustically "see" the trees bend beneath the force of the wind and rain, and count the individual thunderclaps as the piccolo gives us the characteristic shriek of a gale force wind.
In due time the storm recedes into the distant, and after one final thunderclap, a musical rainbow makes a gentle acoustical appearance on the quiet distant horizon.
The fourth section of Rossini's William Tell Overture also depicts violent scenes of thunder and of lightning, while Mozart's well known contradance entitled The Thunderstorm fulfils the lively promise of its name. Hector Berlioz, too, threatens us with a thunderstorm when he prescribes the ominous on the timpani in the third movement of his Symphonie Fantastique, only to have the storm recede again before it reaches full potential.
But perhaps the best example of all of the sound of thunder in a piece of music is to be found in Beethoven's Sixth Symphony - the "Pastoral" - which describes in vivid detail the progression of a brief but violent storm. The instruments vividly portray the arrival of the thunderstorm in the middle of a hot summer's day; we can "hear", as it were, the skies darkening.