Jean Sibelius and His World
Page 1
JEAN SIBELIUS AND HIS WORLD
JEAN SIBELIUS
AND HIS WORLD
EDITED BY
DANIEL M. GRIMLEY
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
press.princeton.edu
All Rights Reserved
For permissions information, see page xiii
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011926904
ISBN: 978-0-691-15280-6 (cloth)
ISBN: 978-0-691-15281-3 (paperback)
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This publication has been produced by the Bard College Publications Office:
Ginger Shore, Director
Anita van de Ven, Cover design
Natalie Kelly, Design
Text edited by Paul De Angelis and Erin Clermont
Music typeset by Don Giller
This publication has been underwritten in part by grants from
Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund and
Helen and Roger Alcaly.
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Contents
Acknowledgments and Permissions
Sibelius, Finland, and the Idea of Landscape
PART I
ESSAYS
Sibelius and the Russian Traditions
PHILIP ROSS BULLOCK
From Heaven’s Floor to the Composer’s Desk: Sibelius’s Musical Manuscripts and Compositional Process
TIMO VIRTANEN
Theatrical Sibelius: The Melodramatic Lizard
JEFFREY KALLBERG
The Wings of a Butterfly: Sibelius and the Problems of Musical Modernity
TOMI MÄKELÄ
“Thor’s Hammer”: Sibelius and British Music Critics, 1905–1957
BYRON ADAMS
Jean Sibelius and His American Connections
GLENDA DAWN GOSS
Art and the Ideology of Nature: Sibelius, Hamsun, Adorno
MAX PADDISON
Storms, Symphonies, Silence: Sibelius’s Tempest Music and the Invention of Late Style
DANIEL M. GRIMLEY
Waving from the Periphery: Sibelius, Aalto, and the Finnish Pavilions
SARAH MENIN
Old Masters: Jean Sibelius and Richard Strauss in the Twentieth Century
LEON BOTSTEIN
PART II
DOCUMENTS
Selections from Adolf Paul’s A Book About a Human Being
TRANSLATED BY ANNIKA LINDSKOG
INTRODUCED BY DANIEL M. GRIMLEY
Some Viewpoints Concerning Folk Music and Its Influence on the Musical Arts
JEAN SIBELIUS
TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH BY MARGARETA MARTIN
INTRODUCED BY DANIEL M. GRIMLEY
Selection from Erik Furuhjelm’s Jean Sibelius: A Survey of His Life and Music
TRANSLATED BY MARGARETA MARTIN
INTRODUCED BY DANIEL M. GRIMLEY
Adorno on Sibelius
TRANSLATED BY SUSAN H. GILLESPIE
INTRODUCED BY DANIEL M. GRIMLEY
Monumentalizing Sibelius: Eila Hiltunen and the Sibelius Memorial Controversy
INTRODUCED AND TRANSLATED BY DANIEL M. GRIMLEY
Index
Notes on the Contributors
Acknowledgments and Permissions
My first thanks are due to Leon Botstein, not only for his outstanding contribution to the current volume, but also for his leadership of the Bard Music Festival and for his creative vision, which continues to inspire audiences and scholars alike. I am indebted to the other contributors in this book, including the translators, for their stimulating engagement with Sibelius’s life and work, and for responding to my editorial demands with unfailing patience, insight, and good humor. A very special debt of thanks is owed to Irene Zedlacher, Christopher H. Gibbs, and Paul De Angelis, who have held this project together throughout and who offered life support at critical moments of editorial crisis. It has been a privilege to work with the team assembled by the Bard Publications Office: copy editor Erin Clermont, Natalie Kelly, Ginger Shore, and Don Giller and Jack Parton, who offered expert assistance with the music examples. Any remaining errors or oversights are entirely my responsibility.
The Sibelius scholarly community is a remarkably supportive and generous one, and I am especially grateful to the following for their help and advice at various stages of the project: Glenda Dawn Goss, Gitta Henning, Tomi Mäkelä, and Timo Virtanen. I would also like to express thanks to the staff of the National Archives of Finland and the National Library of Finland (formerly Helsinki University Library), for their assistance with source materials and other related research questions; to the Central Art Archives at the Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, for the images of paintings by Eero Järnefelt, Axel Gallen-Kallela, and Ilya Repin reproduced in Philip Ross Bullock’s essay; to Lilo Skaarup at the Royal Theatre Archive in Copenhagen and Karsten Bundgaard, and Thomas Trane Petersen at the Danish Royal Library for the Kai Nielsen images reproduced in my own essay on the Tempest music; and to the Sibelius family for their gracious permission to print the previously unpublished material in my essay.
For most of the illustrations reproduced in Sarah Menin’s essay I wish to acknowledge: the National Board of Antiquities, Finland, for the two photographs of the Paris Pavilion; the Museum of Finnish Architecture, Helsinki, for the interior view of the Viipuri Library; and the Alvar Aalto Museum, Jyväskylä, Finland, for the Aalto sketch of the New York World’s Fair Finnish Pavilion.
For many of the photographs reproduced in Leon Botstein’s essay I wish to acknowledge: photographer Anton Brandl and the Richard Strauss Institute, Garmisch, Germany, for the interior view of Strauss’s villa; the Museum of Finnish Architecture, Helsinki, for the two photographs of the staircase in the Pohjola Insurance Company Building, the Saarinen design for the 1908 Parliament House competition, and Saarinen’s 1921 rendering of Kalevala House; and S. C. Johnson Company, for the photograph of Johnson Wax Headquarters.
—Daniel M. Grimley
The following parties have also graciously granted permission to reprint or reproduce the following copyrighted material:
For permission to republish the musical examples from Symphony no. 1 (Example 1 on p. 26), Symphony no. 4 (Example 1 on p. 101), Luonnotor (Example 4 on p. 110), Tapiola (Examples 5 through 8 on pp. 115–18): © by Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden.
For permission to republish the musical examples from Symphony no. 3 (Example 1 on p. 62 and Examples 2a and 2b on pp. 63 and 64): © 1907 by Robert Lienau Musikverlag; and Voces intimae (Example 2b on p. 64 and Examples 2 and 3 on pp. 105–6): © 1909 by Robert Lienau Musikverlag. Frankfurt am Main (Germany). Reprinted by permission.
For permission to reproduce the facsimiles of sketches for Cassazione by Jean Sibelius (Figures 3a, 3b, and 3c on pp. 165–67): © 1994 Fazer Music, Helsinki. © Fennica Gehrman Oy, Helsinki. Published by permission.
For permission to republish four musical examples from Sibelius’s Tempest music (Example 1 on pp. 200–207, Example 2 on p. 210, Example 3 on p. 213, and Example 4 on p. 217): © 1927 Edition Wilhelm Hansen AS, Copenhagen; and to publish the musical example from Symphony no. 7 (Example 1 on p. 249): © 1924 Edition Wilhelm Hansen AS, Copenhagen. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by persmission.<
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For permission to reproduce these photographs—Figure 4 on p. 242 (interior of the Finnish Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair 1939 in Queens, NY, designed by Alvar Aalto) and Figure 10 on p. 294 (traffic entrance to the Marin County Civic Center Administration Building, San Rafael, California, 1963): © Ezra Stoller/Esto.
For permission to reproduce the photograph, Figure 4 on p. 284, main entrance to Helsinki Railway Station, 1939: © Bettman/Corbis. For permission to reproduce the photograph, Figure 7 on p. 288, ceiling of the concert hall in Kleinhans Music Hall, Buffalo, New York: © Enid Bloch.
For permission to reproduce the photograph, Figure 8 on p. 292, ceiling detail in Unity Temple, Oak Park, Illinois: © Neil Levine.
For permission to publish the translation of the Erik Kruskopf–Simon Parmet exchange on pp. 341–53: Erik Kruskopf & Hufvudstadsbladet in Helsinki.
For permission to publish the translations of Theodor W. Adorno’s “Gloss” and “Footnote” about Sibelius, found on pp. 333–37: © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
For permission to reproduce the photograph, Figure 1 on p. 340, the Sibelius Monument by Eila Hiltunen: © Photographer Allan Baxter/ Getty Images.
Sibelius, Finland, and the Idea of Landscape
The music of Jean Sibelius seems richly evocative of a particular sense of time and place. Recently re-released footage of the composer directed by pioneering Finnish documentary filmmakers Heikki Aho and Björn Soldan offers a series of iconic images of the composer.1 Spliced together from two independent reels of film, recorded in 1927 and 1945 at the composer’s villa, Ainola, the visual images are accompanied by stirring performances of carefully chosen extracts from Sibelius’s oeuvre—opening, of course, with the closing measures of Finlandia, conducted by Sibelius’s son-in-law, Jussi Jalas. After the brief title sequence, Sibelius appears at the piano, characteristically with a large cigar, and then at his desk, annotating a score with an unsteady hand. He is then seen in evening conversation with his wife, Aino, after which the film shifts to Sibelius’s daily constitutional walk through the villa’s grounds, and to footage of Aino and their daughter, Margareta, in the orchard at Ainola. A more extended sequence, accompanied by the final pages of the Third Symphony, juxtaposes further footage of the composer at the piano with images of the Finnish landscape, redolent of the work of Sibelius’s friend and contemporary, the photographer I. K. Inha—a surging river cascading over rapids, mist clearing from distant hills, and the pristine waters of a lake—underpinned by the Finnish/Swedish subtitle ‘Sävelten maailmassa/I tonernas värld’ (In the world of music).2 The poignant final sequence returns to a profile shot of Sibelius’s daughter, Margareta, playing the violin, with the nostalgic closing pages of the Romance in F, op. 78/2: music, nature, and the domestic family home all seem organically intertwined.
Such images of Sibelius as the symbolic father and progenitor of Finnish music maintain a strong hold in the popular imagination. In 1945, at the end of Finland’s ordeal during the Second World War, they must have carried a particularly urgent significance.3 For many listeners, Sibelius’s Finland is still associated with a particular idea of northernness: an exotic realm of icy wastes, somnolent lakes, endless spruce forests, and untouched wilderness. This problematic vision of an idealized Nordic landscape has exerted a powerful influence on Sibelius reception, pointing toward what Peter Davidson (alluding to Glenn Gould, an enthusiastic fan of Sibelius’s music) has called our “idea of north”: the land beyond the northern horizon that is “always out of reach, receding towards the polar night, which is equally the midnight dawn in the summer sky.”4 Yet this is only a very partial representation of Finland and the north itself, a poor reflection of the actual cultural contexts in which Sibelius’s work was created and first heard.
A similarly reductive tendency can often be identified in biographical accounts of his music: Sibelius’s creative career has frequently been read as a single narrative curve, the young late Romantic firebrand emerging from his modest lower-bourgeois upbringing in provincial Hämeenlinna 60 miles north of the capital, to lead his nation’s cultural (and eventually political) emancipation, then swiftly turning aside from the vanguard of this dynamic folk nationalism toward an austere, linear classicism more appropriate for the modern age. It is a trajectory that apparently leads inexorably to the obsessive motivic unity of his final large-scale work, the tone poem Tapiola, and the thirty-year silence that followed until his death at the venerable age of 91 in 1957.
As the essays in this volume reveal, however, the true picture is more complex: Sibelius’s world properly emerges as a richly diverse cultural community, a mini-continent of nations and musical traditions, of aesthetic ideas and vital artistic impulses. In Philip Ross Bullock’s panoramic opening survey, Finland’s Russian heritage is understood as a crucial but hitherto neglected part of Sibelius’s creative constitution, both through the Tolstoy-inspired circle of his brothers-in-law, and in his own debt to Russian musical models. Timo Virtanen’s essay similarly asks us to redirect our attention away from a view of Sibelius’s music as obsessively goal-directed or crystalline, toward an improvisatory mode of musical composition in which themes and ideas can freely migrate from one musical context to another. Sibelius’s debt to European symbolism is made vividly apparent in Jeffrey Kallberg’s discussion of his music for Michael Lybeck’s play Ödlan (The lizard): long upheld as a symphonist, Sibelius maintained an equally intensive interest in writing for the stage.
Sibelius’s studies in Berlin and Vienna in the early 1890s had a formative influence on his musical development, and first brought him into direct contact with the Strindberg circle that scandalized the European literary scene. Sibelius’s appearance at the Paris World Fair in 1900 established him as one of the leading composers of his generation, and seemingly defined the sound of Finland. Later it was the landscape of classical Italy that could capture his imagination—parts of the tone poem Tapiola, a musical representation of the Finnish forest world from the Kalevala, as Tomi Mäkelä observes in his account of Sibelius’s ambivalent and poised attitude to modernism, were actually written on the island of Capri, in the distant Mediterranean. For Glenda Dawn Goss, the genuine high point of Sibelius’s professional career was his visit to the 1914 Festival in Norfolk, Connecticut, where his idyllic-pastoral tone poem The Oceanides received its world premiere. During the 1920s and ’30s Sibelius was frequently lauded, both in the United States and Great Britain, as the true inheritor of the Beethovenian symphonic tradition, a role, as Byron Adams demonstrates, that rested upon deeply problematic assumptions regarding race and national character. Sibelius was used as a stick with which to beat the more overtly progressive modernism of a younger generation of continental European composers. Attempts to appropriate Sibelius’s work by certain elements of the Third Reich in the late 1930s and early ’40s were attacked by writers such as Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, whose trenchant critique is the subject of Max Paddison’s penetrating analysis. Such images of nature and landscape, promulgated so widely in Sibelius reception, remained problematic for a whole generation of modernists.
Understood in its own immediate cultural contexts, however, landscape can assume a different, if no less weighty significance in discussion of Sibelius’s work. In the haunting incidental music for Shakespeare’s final play The Tempest, as I point out in my own essay, Sibelius’s creative attention is primarily occupied with the physical experience of being in the landscape, beaten and buffeted by the storm. Far removed from simplistic notions of organicism or purity, Sibelius’s music, I argue, prompts a more critical and reflective sense of our relationship with the natural world, one that might be perceived as a nascent form of acoustic ecology.
This richer, more complex dialogue with natural forms and structures underpins Sibelius’s shared concern with architectural notions of light and space, the subject of the two complementary final essays, by Sarah Menin and Leon Botstein. Through the contrasting work of Alvar Aalt
o, Eliel Saarinen, and the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the natural world emerges as a source of inspiration for a group of creative artists grappling with common problems of community, environment, and individual subjectivity in the turbulent early years of the twentieth century.
Sibelius and His World concludes with a series of primary documents. The earliest source translated here is an extract from Adolf Paul’s 1891 novella Bok om en Människa (A book about a human being), a lightly fictionalized account of Sibelius’s student years in Berlin that shocked contemporary Finnish readers. Sibelius’s own thoughts on the impact of folk music upon his work are expressed in characteristically elliptical fashion in a lecture that he read at Helsinki University in 1896. Never comfortable in formal academic surroundings, Sibelius’s lecture is partly a schematic (and highly relativist) account of the origins of European folk music, and partly an aesthetic manifesto.
Landscape and nature are invoked as prominent metaphors in one of the earliest critical accounts of Sibelius’s work, Erik Furuhjelm’s 1917 biography, a short excerpt from which is presented here. For Furuhjelm, Sibelius becomes “the sublimely realistic portrayer of nature.” Yet it is the problematic nature of such claims that becomes the foundation for Adorno’s landmark 1938 critique, the “Glosse über Sibelius.” Discussions of nature and environment return a final time in the controversy outlined in an exchange of newspaper essays about the plans for a monument to memorialize the composer in Helsinki after his death. Inspired by the sights and sounds of the Finnish landscape, Eila Hiltunen’s strikingly abstract design inspired considerable local opposition at the time of its unveiling in the late 1960s, yet it has now become one of the city’s best-loved landmarks.
Sibelius’s music thus serves as a threshold, rather than an endpoint: it can be understood as a window not purely on a particular vision of Finnishness, although such associations with his home country remain telling and evocative, but also as a portal to a much wider worldview, the intricately complex landscape of early twentieth-century musical politics. Listening to his works critically, almost a century later, we are perhaps better placed to gain a fuller sense of Sibelius’s significance as one of the most powerful and persuasive voices in the repertoire, and a deeper understanding and appreciation of the “idea of north” that remained his continual inspiration and creative guide.