Sibelius, Finland's voice in the world
By Robert Layton
I can think of few composers so closely identified with their natural environment as is Sibelius with Finland. True, Mussorgsky seems to enshrine the very soul of Russia, just as Delius evokes the world of the English garden, but no other composer brings to life so vividly the boldness and grandeur of the North as does Jean Sibelius. Of course, the Finland into which he was born was an outlying province of Czarist Russia, and far removed from the sophisticated and prosperous nation it has since become.
During his long life, Sibelius became a national figure in almost the same way as was Churchill in Britain. For most people he was Finland. Already by the beginning of the century, he had become the symbol of national self-determination and his fame penetrated areas of the world which had only a vague idea where Finland was. His musical personality is the most powerful to have emerged in any of the Scandinavian countries. He is able to establish within a few seconds a sound world that is entirely his own. Think how extraordinarily original are the haunting A minor chords that well up from the strings at the beginning of The Swan of Tuonela. Like Berlioz, his thematic inspiration and its harmonic clothing were conceived directly in terms of orchestral sound: the substance and the sonority were individual, one from the other. But it is not only in Finnish and Scandinavian music that he occupies a special position, but in the whole development of the symphony in Europe.
His inner world was dominated by his love of the Northern landscape, and of the rich repertory of myth embodied in the Kalevala. But the romanticism of the first two symphonies and the Violin Concerto gave way to a classical severity and concentration in his later works that was out-of-step with the spirit of the times. This was even more acute after World War I, when Sibelius felt an increasing isolation. As he himself put it, "while others mix cocktails of various hues, I offer pure spring water".
Sibelius was born in 1865 at Hameenlinna, a provincial garrison town in south-central Finland, where his father was a doctor. Until he was about eight years old, Sibelius spoke no Finnish. However, when he was 11, his mother enrolled him in the Hameenlinna Normaallilyseo, the first school in the country to use Finnish as the teaching language instead of Swedish and Latin. It was far-sighted of the family to take the then unusual step of sending him to this particular school, for the Finnish language opened up to him the whole repertory of national mythology embodies in the Kalevala. His imagination was fired by this, as it was by the great Swedish lyric poets, Runeberg and Rydberg, and above all, by the Finnish countryside with its abundance of forests and lakes.
Throughout this youth, Sibelius composed chamber music for his family and friends to play. Even the Finnish capital did not have a permanent symphony orchestra until the 1880s when Robert Kajanus, later to be one of his staunchest champions, founded the Helsinki City Orchestra (incidentally at about this time Sibelius decided to "internationalize" his name, following an example of his uncle who had gallicized his name, Johan to Jean, during his travels. And so from his twenties onward he was known as Jean).
It was not until he left Finland to study in Berlin and Vienna that he for the first time measured himself against an orchestral canvas. It was in Vienna that the first ideas of the Kullervo Symphony came to him. It was this symphony, first performed in 1892, that put Sibelius on the musical map in his own country and that alerted the world to the presence of a nice voice in music. Kullervo shows the emerging nationalist as well as the incipient symphonist. The music that followed in its immediate wake is strongly nationalist in feeling. The Karelia Suite written for a pageant in Viipuri in 1893 has obvious patriotic overtones. So has the music he wrote for another pageant portraying the history of Finland six years later, which became a rallying point for national sentiment at a time when the Russians were tightening their grip on the Finns.
One of its numbers was to make him a household name: Finlandia, and its importance in terms of Finnish national self- awareness was immeasurable. From the time of Finlandia onward, Sibelius was probably the best-known Finn, and many people who would never have become aware of Finland's existence in those days and her national aspirations did so because of his music.
If the 1890s had seen the consolidation of his position as Finland's leading composer, the next decade was to see the growth of his international reputation. In 1898 he acquired a German publisher, Breitkopf and Hartel. To them, Sibelius was later to sell Valse triste on derisory terms, a decision he regretted to his dying day. But his fame was not confined to Germany: Henry Wood included the King Christian II Suite at a promenade concert as early as 1901 and during the first years of the century his works were conducted by such figures as Hans Richter, Weingartner, Toscanini and -- in the case of the Violin Concerto -- by his contemporary Richard Strauss, no less. The Violin Concerto was very much a labor of love, as one would expect from a violinist manque who long nourished ambitions as a soloist in his youth.
By the middle of the first decade when Sibelius entered his forties, although there had been minor setbacks, his star had steadily risen. But with the change of direction in his musical path that took place at the time of the Third Symphony, there came a change in his good fortunes. The Third Symphony showed Sibelius as out of step with the times. While others pursued more lavish orchestral means and more vivid colorings, his palette became more classical, more disciplined and economical. He did not produce any great works in the last 30 years of his life, which were marked by frequent bouts of depression, before his death in 1957.
His achievement in Finland is all the more remarkable in the absence of any vital indigenous musical tradition. He sprang from virtually virgin soil and without the stimulus of either a native tradition or a great deal of musical activity. His power as a symphonist is of a world order. Each of the symphonies is totally fresh in its approach to structure. It is equally difficult to foresee from the vantage point of one symphony the character of the next. Certainly, no one having heard the Second Symphony would have guessed the direction in which the Third was to move.
From the Third onwards his symphonies are totally at variance with the artistic climate of their time. His language is quite unlike such contemporaries as Skryabin, Mahler, Strauss or Schoenberg, for he chose not to develop denser chromatic textures but rather to turn away from the richer colorings of the post- romantic palette.
Perhaps biographical factors (the imminence of death, as he then thought, turned his thoughts inward) account for a much greater austerity in the Fourth, which in terms of tautness and concentration, surpasses anything that came before. If each of the symphonies shows a continuing search for new formal means, in one is the search more thorough or prolonged than in the Fifth. Sibelius was a highly self-critical composer who subjected his music to the keenest critical scrutiny. En saga was completely overhauled; the Lemminkainen Legends were revised twice, and the Fifth Symphony gave him the most trouble of all. In its original form it was in four movements, and was first performed on his 50th birthday. It was subsequently turned into a three-movement work in the following year, and then totally rewritten in 1919. Again from the vantage point of the Fourth Symphony, it is completely unpredictable. The first movement is perhaps the most original creation in all Sibelius -- at least that was the view of the Dutch art historian and novelist Simon Vestdjik who wrote a study of the composer in 1962.
The Fifth Symphony, like its two successors, seems to stand outside time. No one listening to them would guess their date. You could say much the same as Debussy's La mer or a late Beethoven quartet. In other words, what they have to say has universal application. But none of the symphonies is more radically different from the music of its time than the Sixth. Indeed, if one think of the other music composed in 1923 by Bartok, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Hindemith and the members of Le groupe des Six, Sibelius' Sixth inhabits another planet.
The Seventh can be seen as the culmination of a search for organic unity. It illustrates the truth of the assertion that Sibelius never approached the symphonic problem in the same way. It is a one-movement work but unified in a way that the Fourth Symphony of Schumann attempted but never quite achieved. Although there are passages that have the character of a scherzo or slow section, it is impossible to define where one section ends and another begins, so complete is Sibelius' mastery of the art of transition and his control of simultaneous tempi. It is epic in character and can be viewed as the climax of his life work in that the process of thematic metamorphosis works at such a level of sophistication that the listener is barely aware of it.
Tapiola crowns Sibelius' creative achievement is to the northern forest what Debussy's La Mer is to the sea. It evokes the power of nature with terrifying grandeur and awe. Its world is unremitting, indifferent to humankind, indeed unpeopled. Of all Sibelius' works, this is the one which makes the most astonishingly original use of the orchestra. For the work is not only monothematic, deriving all its material from the opening idea, but virtually "monotonal" as well, for it hardly strays from B minor. Like the Seventh Symphony, it has a capacity to move at two simultaneous levels of tempo (the English composer Robert Simpson has compared symphony and tone-poem thus: "The Seventh Symphony is like a great planet in orbit, its movement vast, inexorable, seemingly imperceptible to its inhabitants. But you may observe, the forests of Tapiola are also on the surface of such a planet, revolving. Yes, but we never leave them, we are filled with expectation, but nothing save a great wind arises. There is no real sense of movement."
What lies behind the failure of his creativeness and the drying-up of his inspiration is open to speculation. It is probably due to a variety of reasons; for one, the ever-growing sense of isolation in a world that was becoming increasingly alien. The Sibelius cult in the Anglo-Saxon world where he was hailed as a symphonist such as Brahms, and second only to Beethoven, while in Germany he was neglected, must have been inhibiting factors.
Given the achievement of the Seventh Symphony and Tapiola, his standards and artistic sights were higher than ever, and to reach them or surpass them more difficult. His self-criticism reached destructive proportions. He never approached the symphonic problem the same way: all the symphonies differ from one another and the genus as a whole. Just as he strove not to write one note too many, he may have felt that this precept by which he lived, must apply to his life work: that what he composed in the Eighth Symphony did not materially extend the vision of the Seventh and Tapiola.
The neglect Sibelius suffered in the German-speaking world during the 1920s and later in the decades immediately following the second world war should not obscure the fact that it was Germany that launched him in the first decade of the century. Sibelius' cause blossomed in Germany at the turn of the century. And it was not only Sibelius to which Wilhelmine Germany welcomed but other foreign composers, including Elgar, Stenhammar and Delius. At the same time Hans Richter, Granville Bantock and Henry Wood were introducing Sibelius to English audiences; but there were two important differences between the two countries: in Germany, he had no consistent champion as he was to have in the English-speaking world in Beecham, Henry Wood, Boult and in America, Koussevitzky, Stokowski and Ormandy.
Moreover there was a difference in the climate of receptivity. Sibelius had important critics behind him in England, such as Ernest Newman, Neville Cardus and later in the 1930s Cecil Gray and Constant Lambert. And in America there was Olin Downes. His German champion, Walter Niemann, was by no means as wholehearted or as perceptive. Moreover, Sibelius also had the enthusiastic advocacy of Walter Legge who founded the HMV Sibelius Society and recorded all his major orchestral works, for in the 1930s, 1940s and into the 1950s, Sibelius' cause boomed in the Anglo-Saxon countries to slump in the 1960s. It was the gramophone that maintained Sibelius's profile when he briefly went out of date in the concert hall. There were over 70 accounts of the Second Symphony and far more of the Violin Concerto. Even the Sixth has over two dozen versions and the Fourth has over 30. So Sibelius has more than held his own over the years.