Yet reactions to performance of the Third Symphony in 1907 were more critical, and Sibelius’s reputation was little helped by Siloti’s careless premiere of Nightride and Sunrise at the end of 1908.87 Ultimately, it would not be until after the Second World War that Sibelius’s music became widely performed and appreciated in Russia, where his nationalist credentials, commitment to traditional forms, and moderate form of modernism could be readily accommodated within the framework of Socialist Realism, especially after the death of Stalin in 1953, when the Soviet Union once again began to open up to limited outside influences.88
If the story of Sibelius’s encounter with Russia itself is largely one of misunderstanding and missed opportunities, then accounts of his openness to its music have been altogether more productive. Tawaststjerna’s biography points repeatedly to Russian influences on works of the early period. The opening bars of the first movement of an early Suite for Violin and Piano (JS187, 1887–88) are held to “breathe an air of Slav melancholy” deriving ultimately from Tchaikovsky,89 and the piano work “Au crépuscule” in F-sharp minor (JS47, 1887) is described as “a rather Tchaikovskian miniature.”90 Tawaststjerna also speculates that Sibelius’s characteristic use of “long-sustained pedal points on the tonic in the major key which become mediant in the related minor” may be related to precedents in works by Mily Balakirev (Islamey) and Alexander Borodin (The Polovstian Dances from Prince Igor).91 The work that evinces the most thorough-going engagement with Russian models is, though, the First Symphony (1899, revised 1900), whether in “the use of a motto theme that appears at the opening of the work,” “many orchestral details,” or “the chord of the dominant ninth . . . poised over a mediant pedal point,”92 all of which are traced back to Tchaikovsky, particularly to his Sixth Symphony. By contrast, the alleged similarity between the main theme of the first movement and that of Borodin’s First Symphony is, according to Tawaststjerna, “more readily discernable on paper than in performance.”93 (See Example 1.) Here, Tawaststjerna alludes to Cecil Gray’s 1931 summary of Russian influences on the First Symphony:
One notes in particular a strong Russian influence here and there, especially in the thematic material, which is unusual in his work. The first subject of the initial movement, for example, is strikingly akin to that in the first movement of Borodin’s symphony in E-flat major, only sharpened and intensified; that of the second movement is distinctly reminiscent of Tchaikovsky, and the broad, sweeping theme of the finale is very much the kind of theme one finds in the last movements of Rachmaninoff or Glazounoff, only very much better.94
Gray’s original observation was picked up and developed by Gerald Abraham, whose familiarity with Russian music meant that he was both more able and more inclined to discern such parallels:
As Mr. Gray points out, the first subject proper is strikingly akin to that in the first movement of Borodin’s Symphony in E-flat. . . . Admittedly, the relationship is merely one of melodic outline, not of rhythm, inflection, or general feeling. But, more curious still, there is a similar relationship between the latter part of the Borodin theme and Sibelius’s second main subject. . . . Moreover, there are other Borodinesque traits in this first Sibelius Symphony: the throwing of the orchestral weight on to the second crotchet . . . , while only tuba and a drum mark the down-beat (cf. the scherzo of Borodin’s Second Symphony), the overlapping descent of a figure through the orchestra coming off the climax just before the appearance of the second subject, the character of the scherzo with its quick repeated notes, the brassy scoring of the whole symphony.95
Example 1. Comparative first movement themes in Sibelius and Borodin. Sibelius, Symphony no. 1, first movement (principal theme) and Borodin, Symphony no. 1, first movement (opening).
The novelty of Abraham’s argument lay less in recognizing discrete and superficial motivic borrowings, and more in asserting the profound influence of Borodin’s attitude to symphonic form on Sibelius’s own practice. Gray had claimed that Sibelius achieved something entirely original in respect of symphonic form:
The nature of this revolution can be best described by saying that whereas in the symphony of Sibelius’s predecessors the thematic material is generally introduced in an exposition, taken to pieces, dissected and analysed in a development section, and put together again in a recapitulation, Sibelius . . . inverts the process, introducing thematic fragments in the exposition, building them up into an organic whole in the development section, then dissolving and dispersing the material back into its primary constituents in a brief recapitulation.96
Abraham, keen to defend the status of Russian music by asserting its prior originality, argued that “Borodin had done this sort of thing more than thirty years earlier,”97 before proceeding to give a summary both of Borodin’s own method, and Sibelius’s appropriation of the technique. Although both Gray’s original observation and Abraham’s subsequent development of it have since been questioned,98 the notion that the Russian influence on Sibelius had as much to do with structure, argument, and development as with obvious thematic parallels remains a productive one.
Taking up the leads first suggested by Gray and Abraham (and subsequently developed by Tawaststjerna), other scholars have distinguished further Russian resonances. Joseph Kraus has considered similarities in voice leading, harmonic language, and tonal plan as evidence of Tchaikovsky’s influence on the First Symphony.99 Eero Tarasti has argued that “the endless repetition of short motifs or themes” in En saga (1892, revised 1902) is derived from “the techniques of Rimsky-Korsakov or Tchaikovsky.”100 Veijo Murtomäki situates Skogsrået (The Wood Nymph) in a genealogy of Russian musical ballads, including Balakirev’s Tamara, Tchaikovsky’s Voyevoda, and Sergey Lyapunov’s Ballade (a tradition subsequently continued by Glazunov and Sergey Taneyev),101 and compares the work’s “tragic slow finale” to “the Adagio lamentoso conclusion of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony.”102 Other works by Sibelius reflect the lighter and more lyrical aspects of Russian music. The Romance in C (1904) has been heard as an echo of Tchaikovsky (particularly his Serenade for Strings).103 And it was the Canzonetta (1911) that prompted Igor Stravinsky—not otherwise sympathetic to Sibelius, whether as a romantic nationalist or a progressive modernist—to identify the musical links between Finland and Russia: “I like that Northern Italianate melodism—Tchaikovsky had it too—which was part, and an attractive part, of the St. Petersburg culture.”104 George Balanchine returned Sibelius’s homage to this aspect of the St. Petersburg tradition by choreographing Valse triste as a ballet in Petrograd in 1922.105
Such arguments are particularly useful for challenging the still commonly held view of Sibelius that emphasizes his autonomous development and exclusively Finnish origins. Yet Sibelius himself denied such influences—as, for instance, in the case of Borodin’s First Symphony106—and there is little conclusive evidence he was familiar with the works in question (his library contains few Russian scores and his letters and diary give few clues). Moreover, the comparisons adduced are often rather slight in the overall scheme of a given work.107 In spite of Sibelius’s denials, there is nevertheless a frequent tendency in criticism to assert that the characteristic features of Russian music were simply “in the air.” Robert Layton, for instance, distances himself from Abraham’s assertion that Sibelius’s First Symphony was directly influenced by Borodin’s First, yet defends his own sense of the importance of Russian works in indirect terms:
The resemblances to which I alluded between “Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of the Island” and the First Symphony of Balakirev, and the slow movement of Sibelius’s First Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence were intended to show a common cultural language. Sibelius obviously could not have known the Balakirev and probably did not know the Souvenir de Florence either.108
There were a number of ways in which Sibelius could have participated in the “common cultural language” that linked Helsinki with St. Petersburg and Moscow. As conductor of the Helsinki Phil
harmonic Orchestra, Kajanus regularly programmed Russian orchestral works.109 Even if Sibelius was absent from such concerts, it seems likely that the two men discussed music that was of such particular interest to Kajanus. Busoni—who spent a considerable amount of time in Russia and Finland in the early 1890s—was a further possible channel of information. Sibelius would also have encountered a good deal of Russian music while conducting his own works in Russia or while visiting European capitols such as Berlin, Vienna, and Paris (his reactions to hearing works by Anton Arensky and Sergey Rachmaninoff in Berlin in October 1910 are noted in his letters and diary, for instance).110
Whether or not Sibelius’s music derives certain structural and thematic features directly from Russian models, the audible parallels may also be related to the fact that both Russian and Finnish music share certain common sources. The first of these is Liszt’s approach to the genre of the tone poem, the impact of which Sibelius readily admitted:
I have found my old self again, musically speaking. Many things are now clear to me: really I am a tone painter and poet. Liszt’s view of music is the one to which I am closest. Hence my interest in the symphonic poem. I’m working on a theme that I’m very pleased with. You’ll hear it when I get home; that’s if I have got so far with it and don’t begin to have too many doubts.111
This statement—frequently cited in the secondary literature—has been interpreted in various ways. In part the result of Sibelius’s self-perceived failure to write a Wagnerian music drama, it reveals his discovery of the music of the New German School, especially the tone poems of Richard Strauss, whose Don Juan had deeply impressed him in Berlin in 1890. Yet Liszt played a decisive role in Russia, too, where composers built on his legacy (as well as that of Hector Berlioz) in their search for a music that would fuse elements of the national, the programmatic, and the quasi-realistic. Indeed, as Pierre Vidal suggests, Sibelius’s concept of the form drew more from Russian and Slavonic precursors than from Strauss:
Inspired by his country and by ancestral myths, Sibelius did not draw upon the same sources as Strauss, for Sibelius avoided metaphysical, philosophical, and idealistic themes. Rather, we associate him instinctively with Smetana and the Russians, whose paradigms descend more from Balakirev’s Thamar and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko than from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet or Francesca da Rimini, which are human dramas transposed onto the romantic-overture tradition. Sibelius was more captured than his forerunners by a sense of primeval beauty.112
At the same time, Russian composers were reinventing the symphony from the European periphery, with a work such as Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique standing as much—if not more—for the very latest in musical modernity, as for any sense of national idiom (the very thing that Tchaikovsky so self-consciously repudiated). Murtomäki notes the prominent role played by Russian composers in rejecting the conventional division between the competing genres of the symphony and the tone poem, and in using elements derived from one genre to revivify and extend the possibilities of the other: “Many Romantic composers after Liszt—for example, Borodin, Dvoák, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Strauss, Rimsky-Korsakov, Scriabin—created works that narrowed the gap between symphony and symphonic poem.”113 More generally, he posits the influence of Russian music on Sibelius’s explorations of symphonic form:
There were also Russian sources for the musical fantasy. In the latter half of the nineteenth century subtitles like “orchestral fantasy” and “symphonic fantasy” were often used. Mussorgsky’s Night on Bare Mountain, for instance, is a “symphonic fantasy,” Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini is a “fantasy,” and his Hamlet and Romeo et Juliette are “overture-fantasies.” . . . As there were close cultural contacts between Russia and Finland during the nineteenth century and as Tchaikovsky had been an important influence on Sibelius’s music until his Second Symphony (1902), it is possible that the idea of the “symphonic fantasy” came to Sibelius from a Russian context.114
Once again, we are faced with speculation about a potential Russian influence on Sibelius that can be neither proven nor refuted. Instead, it is David Haas’s analysis that more subtly links Sibelius to the Russian traditions in this respect:
Although belonging to different generations, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky were chronologically situated to be heirs to the Beethoven symphony and the Liszt symphonic poem and unlike so many of their contemporaries declined to favor either genre, producing instead parallel series of numbered symphonies and programmatically entitled symphonic poems.115
If there are parallels here between Sibelius and Russian composers (particularly Tchaikovsky, but also symphonists from the “nationalist” school such as Balakirev, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov), they relate primarily to their cognate reactions to a particular issue in European music more broadly, that is, the tension between the symphony and the tone poem.
Resemblances may also be explained by the recourse to shared material. As Tina K. Ramnarine observes, “Much of the folk material which inspired Finnish artists and scholars and which contributed to a national culture was paradoxically collected from a region which had been claimed, shared, and divided by both Finland and Russia.”116 The region in question is, of course, Karelia, whose culture played a decisive role in the formation of Finnish national identity. Yet Karelia extended well beyond the Finnish border into northern Russia; indeed, it was Russian Karelia—untouched by the Swedish influence that was predominant in southern and eastern Finland, and unaffected by the traditions and practices of the Lutheran Church—that was perceived by Finnish nationalists as preserving Karelian culture in its most pristine form. Lönnrot’s first edition of the Kalevala was based on material collected in both Finland and Russian Karelia, and an influential travelogue—A. V. Ervasti’s Muistelmia matkalta Venäjän Karjalassa kesällä 1879 (Recollections from a trip to Russian Karelia during the summer of 1879)—further revealed the significance of the region across the border for the development of Finnish national consciousness.117 In a letter to his wife in October 1891, Sibelius referred to the Finnish runic singer Larin Paraske as “a runo-singer from Russian Karelia” (my emphasis).118 The impact of folk music from neighboring regions does much to explain apparent similarities between Sibelius and works by Russian composers. As Murtomäki speculates: “Could it be . . . that the ‘Finnishness’ in Sibelius’s music consists of lifting certain traits from Karelian/Russian folk music and melodic traditions, a source shared by the extremely folk-music-conscious young Russian composers as well?”119 In fact, this argument had already been made in the 1950s by Simon Parmet:
The specific musical resemblance between Tchaikovsky and the young Sibelius, in particular, is to be found in certain easily recognizable turns of melodic phrase, in the long, sweeping lines, in the spontaneity of the music and its immediate, natural charm, and in its proximity to folk music. This last resemblance is particularly significant, as it supports the idea that Finnish folk music is more closely related to Russian folk music than we are generally inclined to believe.120
Indeed, Gray explicitly singled out Sibelius’s Karelian works as those closest in spirit to the Russian national tradition:
In writing music ostensibly Karelian in character and style Sibelius approaches as closely to that of Russia as Karelia itself does to Russian soil. The thematic material is sometimes strongly suggestive of various Slavonic masters, and the eightfold repetition in the trio of the “Alla Marcia” in the suite is as characteristic of Russian music as it is rare in that of Finland. “Karelia,” indeed, is the sole work of Sibelius that one could easily believe to have been written by a Russian if one were to hear it without knowing who had composed it.121
Russian critics, too, have been particularly responsive to such arguments. Stupel suggests that a melody in the first of the Lemminkäinen Legends resembles a theme from Rimsky-Korsakov’s tone poem Sadko (although he does not give details). The significance of his observation rests, however, less on the veracity of the resemblance than on the potential reas
on for its appearance: “This may be a question not just of direct influence, but also of the intonational proximity between the Karelian lyricism that nourished Sibelius’s work, and that of northern Russia which inspired the author of Sadko.”122 A similar point is made by Vera Aleksandrova and Elena Bronfin: “Of particular interest is the question of the intonational relationship of certain of Sibelius’s themes and melodies to Russian folk songs; it would seem that the reason for this is rooted in the proximity of ancient northern Russian folk melodies to early Karelo-Finnish musical folklore.”123
The widely asserted influence of Karelian runic singing on Sibelius’s musical language has been helpfully summarized by Robert Layton:
Generally speaking the runic melodies that Sibelius took down from Paraske comprise two more or less rhythmically symmetrical four or five beat phrases that are within the compass of the first five notes of the major or minor scale. The notes, sometimes extended to embrace the flattened sixth or the flattened leading note, generally correspond with those of the five-stringed kantele and the main melodic protagonists in the Kullervo Symphony leave no doubt as to these runic influences. They persist throughout his career right up to Tapiola, whose basic idea falls within the compass of the kantele.124
These features are also characteristic of some nineteenth-century Russian music, especially that based on folk sources (See Example 2). In rhythmic terms, the key source here is the “Bridal Chorus” from Act 3 of Mikhail Glinka’s Life for the Tsar, the prototype for subsequent 5/4 movements in similarly folkloric vein by Borodin, including the finale of his Second Symphony, the Scherzo of his Third Symphony (posthumously completed by Glazunov), or the maiden’s chorus in Act 1, scene 2 of his Prince Igor. Stripped of its folkloric quality, this rhythmic trait is exploited in the second-movement waltz of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony and Rachmaninoff‘s Isle of the Dead. Likewise, the limited melodic outline of runic song is cognate with aspects of Russian folksong, especially as used by nineteenth-century composers. The song on which the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony is based—“Vo pole beryoza stoyala” (In the field there stood a birch tree)—is constrained within the interval of a fifth, just as the first subject of the first movement of Vasily Kalinnikov’s First Symphony traces that same interval before breaking out of it (it echoes, moreover, the opening theme of the first movement of Borodin’s Third Symphony). And to invert the argument, the shape of the opening motive of Borodin’s Second Symphony even recalls the very contours of runic song itself. Thus, if a work like Kullervo appears to betray a number of distinctly Russian influences, this is not necessarily because it is explicitly modeled on Russian sources (although Goss has recently suggested that Sibelius may indeed have drawn on Russian folksong collections during the composition of the symphony).125 Rather it is because Sibelius’s Karelian sources are similar to some of the folksongs that fed, directly or otherwise, into the works of Russian composers.126
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 5