“Karelian” model (Petri Shemeikka to Sibelius, 1892, cited in Murtomäki, “Sibelius and Finnish-Karelian Folk Music,” 35)
Glinka, “Bridal Chorus,” Life for the Tsar, Act 3
Borodin, Symphony no. 2, finale opening (from rehearsal number A)
Borodin, Symphony no. 3, Scherzo
Borodin, “Maiden’s Chorus,” Prince Igor, Act 1, scene 2
Tchaikovsky, Symphony no. 6, second movement
Rachmaninoff, Isle of the Dead, opening
Tchaikovsky, Symphony no. 4, finale, second subject
Kalinnikov, Symphony no. 1, opening
Borodin, Symphony no. 3, opening
Borodin, Symphony no. 2, opening
Example 2. Nineteenth-century Russian music based on folk sources.
Apart from any purely musical parallels, there are certain thematic associations in Sibelius’s compositions inspired by the Kalevala and Russian works based on bïlinï (epic poems), such as Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko (performed in Helsinki in 1895), and later pieces such as Reynhold Glière’s Third Symphony (Il’ya Muromets, 1909–11). Although it has not been a dominant theme in the study of the Kalevala, a number of folklorists have argued that similarities between elements of the Kalevala and certain of the Russian bïlinï attest either to the shared origins of or mutual influence between the Karelian and Russian traditions.127 In the late nineteenth century, for instance, Vsevolod Miller pointed to a series of parallels between the figures of Sadko and Väinämöinen that were, he suggested, the result of the close links between the Finns and the citizens of the medieval city-state of Novgorod, to the northwest of the East Slavonic heartlands of medieval Kievan Rus.128 Whether or not there are any direct connections between Finnish and Russian works inspired by the Kalevala and the bïlinï, they nonetheless attest to a shared interest in myth and origins that was characteristic of Russian and Finnish art around the turn of the century.129
If critics have been assiduous in positing connections between Sibelius and Russian music in his earlier, “romantic nationalist” works, they have also tended to assume that in the wake of his turn to classicism and modernism from the Third Symphony onward the Russian influence wanes, or simply vanishes. Where Russian works had been so generative when it came to the questions of nationalism, folklore, and myth central to Sibelius in the 1890s and early 1900s, they seemed less likely to inspire his turn to abstraction and the search for a pan-European, quasi-universal form of musical communication. Murtomäki summarizes Sibelius’s change of style in the early twentieth century as an explicit rejection of the kind of nationalism he had learned from Russian models:
With the revisions of En saga (1892/1902) and the Violin Concerto (1904/05), he was distancing himself from the nineteenth-century romantic style and trying to find a new, more classical way of composing. According to this explanation, Sibelius sought to reorient himself away from Wagnerism and the New German School; those composers who had espoused these ideals in Bohemia, Russia and Scandinavia tended to be associated with national Romantic schools and denigrated as folklorists.130
The work that seems best to encapsulate this process of evolution is the Third Symphony. Writing about a Russian review of a 1907 performance of the symphony in St. Petersburg, Johnson argues: “It is worth nothing that there were no references to Tchaikovsky. Indeed, the Third may be regarded as the beginning of Sibelius’s attempt to break away from the style of the heavy-handed ‘Romantic’ symphony.”131 Yet even here, some observers have detected residual links with the Russian traditions. Edward Garden, for instance, suggests that Sibelius took “Balakirev’s First Symphony in C major as a starting point for his Third Symphony in the same key.”132 While observing a superficial similarity between the opening figure of the Third Symphony and that of Borodin’s Second,133 Burnett James prefers to see the relationship between Sibelius and Borodin in terms of their sense of organic symphonic growth stemming from a process of “preliminary thematic fragmentation.”134 Tawaststjerna suggests a further Russian parallel: “The work can be most nearly compared with Glazunov’s pastoral Eighth Symphony, also composed in 1907, although Glazunov’s classicism seems far smoother and more traditional than that of Sibelius.”135 If there is some confusion in Tawaststjerna’s description of the Eighth (it was in fact the Seventh Symphony of 1902 that was called “The Pastoral”), then his analogy reminds us that Russian music stands for far more than the nationalist legacy of the second half of the nineteenth century. When critics interpret the classicism of the Third Symphony as a move away from a nationalist dialect heavily influenced by Russian originals, they often fail to note that a similar move was under way in Russia itself (and if musical comparisons are made, they tend to be with Busoni’s “junge Klassizität”). Goss alludes to early twentieth-century visual culture in this respect—“Graphic clarity and classical impulses were streaming in from many directions, and Saint Petersburg was one. A number of that city’s artists, among them Valentin Serov, had begun to rethink their styles”—and cites Solomon Volkov’s evocation of the classicism of such poets as Mikhail Kuzmin, Nikolay Gumilyov, and Osip Mandelstam.136 Yet in the musical field, too, younger composers were rejecting what they perceived to be the nationalist prescriptions of Balakirev and Stasov in favor of greater academic discipline—something already presaged in Rimsky-Korsakov’s works from the 1870s onward137—and a greater range of cosmopolitan influences from contemporary Western Europe. The dominance of Stravinsky’s works of the 1920s onward in discussions of Russian musical neoclassicism has tended to eclipse this intervening generation. In St. Petersburg, it was Glazunov (Sibelius’s exact contemporary) who was striving to fuse elements of the national with the supposedly “universal”; and in Moscow, the German classical tradition was enthusiastically promoted by Taneyev (who, incidentally, thought Sibelius’s Third Symphony “an unusually poor composition.”)138
The most complete account of the Russian aspects in the Third Symphony is, though, by Glenda Dawn Goss. Noting that Sibelius’s personal and professional connections with Russia were particularly strong around the time of the work’s composition (in particularly in the form of his relationship with Siloti), Goss argues that the “new symphony’s features seemed gauged to suit the Saint Petersburg milieu.”139 Although her initial piece of evidence—“that theme in the first movement, undulating sensuously over bass drones sounding the perfect fifth in the strange key of B minor”140—is very much in the established tradition of citing isolated and superficial likenesses as evidence of Russian influence (here, as an instance of the work’s Oriental coloring), Goss’s argument rests principally on the symphony’s innovative construction, and in particular the ambiguous form of the third-movement finale that has proved such a distinct challenge to analysts and commentators.141 Taking issue with a widespread interpretation of the symphony, according to which it constitutes a self-conscious rapprochement with the mainstream, Austro-German school, she sees the symphony as embodying an ambivalence about Germanic forms of symphonic argument that was shared by earlier generations of Russian composers. Noting in passing that the symphony shares the key of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Third Symphony, she ultimately posits Glinka’s Kamarinskaya— and in particular its initial juxtaposition of two apparently dissimilar themes that are subsequently revealed to be related, as well as its structure as a series of ostinato variations—as a possible source for the constructional principle of Sibelius’s work.142 The sonata-form first movement develops the idea of “two sharply differing themes that, in the course of development, are revealed as springing from the same fundamental idea,” and the finale explores the principle of Russian variation technique: “Rather than being ‘developed’ in any systematic, Germanic way, his theme revolves, its circular iterations driving the symphony to a close in a triumphal C major.”143 Most crucially, Goss posits significant Russian influences even where they do not necessarily strike the listener; the Third Symphony cannot sensibly be said to sound anything like Kamarinskaya or
the later Russian works it inspired. As Howell suggests, for all Sibelius’s potential debt to Russian works, his approach to symphonic structure was altogether more organic: “Simplistically, the Russian idea of ‘transition,’ particularly as evidenced in Tchaikovsky, concerns a passage which separates two surrounding blocks of material and this is completely at variance with Sibelius’ technique of continuity.”144 From now on, the lessons of Russian music were to become more profoundly assimilated into Sibelius’s own musical language and may indeed have become more productive, relating less to superficial motivic detail and orchestral color than to issues of symphonic structure and harmonic language. Moreover, the realization that Sibelius’s later compositions draw part of their inspiration from Russian models allows us to perceive deep and underlying connections between works from all periods of his career, from Kullervo through to Tapiola.
The notion that Russian models may have inspired new thinking about symphonic structure accords well with James Hepokoski’s various analyses of Sibelius in terms of rotational form. As Hepokoski explains, “rotational form” refers
to the presence of an extended, patterned succession of musical events (often a collection of “themes”), which are then revisited one or more times (recycled or “rotated through”) with internal variations in intensity, motivic growth, interpolated or deleted material, and so on.145
Hepokoski’s definition suggests numerous Russian precursors, beginning with Glinka’s double variations in Kamarinskaya, to the variations, sequences, and repetitions that were so central to the symphonic practice of the nationalists and Tchaikovsky. Indeed, Hepokoski draws attention to the Russian roots of Sibelius’s technique:
It was doubtless also from Russian symphonic composition, which at least from Glinka’s Kamarinskaya onward had also explored circular stasis, that Sibelius learned of some of the most common generic slots within a “nationalistic” symphony or concerto for such repetitive “peasant” themes. These include the scherzo’s trio and especially the first or (even more characteristically) the second theme of the finale—as a kind of “concluding” device or reductive “folk-goal” of the entire work: one thinks, for example of Tchaikovsky’s Second and Fourth Symphonies or the Violin Concerto; and even Stravinsky’s early Symphony in E-flat and, for that matter, the conclusion of The Firebird pay homage to the convention. In Sibelius the Second Symphony (three reiterations of the same theme in the finale’s exposition, eight in its recapitulation) and the Violin Concerto have already been mentioned in this respect, and to them we might add the earlier En saga and “Lemminkäinen’s Return.” (The Fourth Symphony is also exemplary, but less obvious.) More remarkably, the entire finale of the Third Symphony is overtaken by the reiterative principle. And when the Fifth Symphony drives ultimately to the circular “Swan Hymn” of its finale, it is this convention that provides its most immediate ancestry.146
Furthermore, Hepokoski’s arguments suggest that Sibelius’s interest in Russian models was not just a question of symphonic form in and of itself, but was also profoundly linked to issues of national identity. In borrowing and developing aspects of Russian practice, Sibelius was seeking to reposition his own work in relation to the dominant traditions of symphonic form as represented by the Austro-German tradition: “Much of the most characteristic language of the Fifth Symphony’s first movement is one of stasis, circularity, and neighbor-note activity. These procedures are fundamentally opposed to ‘the principle of teleological progression’ that had underpinned the traditional Germanic symphonic repertoire.”147 Citing once more the example of the Third Symphony as a work of profound transition, Hepokoski usefully illustrates how Sibelius’s innovation was in part a product of a dialogue between national (and even nationalist) traditions in the era of early modernism:
From the last two movements of the Third Symphony (1907) onward, Sibelius seems to have embarked on one of the most remarkable (and least understood) formal projects of his age. As he proceeded into the last half of his career, he grew dissatisfied both with the received notions of musical form as identified in the reified schemata provided in the various Formenlehre textbooks (architectonically balanced sonatas, rondos, themes and variations, and so on) and with the various de facto families of formal deformation that had become common practice among the early modernist composers around the turn of the century.148
Turning briefly to Taruskin’s analysis of Stravinsky’s modernist style in terms of drobnost', nepodvizhnost', and uproshcheniye (“the quality of being a sum of parts,” “immobility,” and “simplification”), we can observe a parallel, if rather different response to the same Russian tradition that stimulated aspects of Sibelius’s rotational technique.149 In both cases, Russian models—Glinka, the New Russian School’s nationalist works of the 1860s onward, explorations in symphonic form by Balakirev, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky—explicitly served both Sibelius and Stravinsky in their early and explicitly nationalist phases (Sibelius’s Kalevala works of the 1890s through to the revised version of En saga, Stravinsky’s ballets for Diaghilev). Yet they also stimulated the seemingly more abstract developments in form, structure, and argument that characterized both composers’ postnationalist periods (Sibelius’s four last symphonies and Tapiola, Stravinsky’s neoclassicism).
Another approach to understanding the sources of Sibelius’s musical language is that taken by Howell. Having surveyed potential Russian influences on Sibelius’s early symphonic works,150 Howell argues:
Much in the way of analysis of the music by Sibelius has concentrated, often exclusively so, on the thematic level. This tends simply to reveal the most obvious, easily detected and assimilated correspondences which, despite providing a satisfying network of germ-motive identity, prove unsatisfactory in the shallow and distorted musical viewpoint arising from such selectivity.151
Not only do such accounts fail to deal with the deeper structural organization of individual compositions; they fail to discern underlying principles that link works from different periods. Howell’s particular interest is in tracing how Sibelius’s melodies (derived, in part, from elements of runic song) affect structure and form across the entire chronological range of his output: “What is of interest melodically is the use of modality, its effect on the tonal organisation of early pieces and the repercussions this was to have in the extended tonal language of Sibelius the symphonist.”152 Many of the features he explores—cyclical and extended tonality, and forms of modality based on whole-tone scales and octatonic sets—are also to be found in the works of Claude Debussy. However, because Sibelius appears to have been unfamiliar with his music until 1905 at the earliest,153 Howell attributes them to “their independent absorption of Wagnerian influence.”154 The influence of Richard Wagner on both composers is genuine enough, yet the harmonic characteristics singled out by Howell have analogies in the Russian tradition, too. Thus any similarities between the ways in which Sibelius and Debussy handle the relationship between modality, harmony, and long-range structure may well be related to the impact of Russian music, and when contemporary critics heard echoes of the French impressionists in Sibelius, they were most likely responding to a shared Russian influence, albeit at one remove. In both France and Finland, composers exploited the means revealed to them by Russian composers to establish new means of tonal organization and symphonic syntax quite unlike the schemes inherited from the Austo-German tradition. And in each case, the legacy of nationalism drove the search for new forms, establishing the Franco-Russian axis (taking in, of course, Helsinki) as the leading instance of modernity around the turn of the century.155
A prominent theme in the secondary literature on Sibelius has been his use of mediant relations both as a means of effecting modulations at the local level and as an approach to structuring symphonic form more profoundly. Of the third movement of Kullervo, Tawaststjerna notes that “the central key relationship, F–C-sharp–F, a major third, provides a strong form-building factor. In many later symphonies
similar relationships play a decisive role.”156 In the First Symphony, Goss notes “the fluid interplay between keys a mere third apart: E minor and G major in the first movement; E-flat major and C minor in the second; and C major and A minor in the fourth.”157 In that same work’s finale, Murtomäki similarly notices the importance of mediant modulation: “In the recapitulation the second theme wanders around in thirds and descends through the series A-flat major– F minor/F major–D-flat major/B-flat minor–G-flat major/E-flat minor– B major before settling on the dominant of the main key.”158 Layton traces “the considerable tonal freedom” in En saga to its use of mediant relations: “The work opens in A minor and ends in E-flat minor, its furthermost pole, while the most important key area of the work is C minor and its relative major, E-flat major.”159 Sibelius’s own claim that the Lemminkäinen Suite was a symphony in all but name is corroborated by Howell’s observation that, whatever the order in which the movements are played, the mediant relationships between them lends the suite an overall sense of formal unity:
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 6