The overall key-scheme, considering later concerns for a tonal cycle operating over an entire work, would support the symphonic view: E-flat major–A minor–F-sharp minor–(C minor)/E-flat major, displaying minor-third relationship which so often characterize internal key schemes of the component pieces. Ironically, it is the original order of the movements which would make this more schematic: E-flat–F-sharp–A–(C)/E-flat.160
Now, it cannot be claimed that the prominence of such key relationships in Sibelius derives solely from the Russian context. As Murtomäki observes, such canonical works of the Austro-German tradition as Brahms’s Second Symphony and Beethoven’s Ninth also employ aspects of mediant tonality.161 In Sibelius’s Second Symphony, Murtomäki suggests that “the tonal progression D major–F-sharp minor–A major . . . which resembles obviously the three-key exposition developed by Schubert,”162 and also that “the influence of Liszt may have served as a starting point.”163 Liszt and especially Schubert were, of course, held in high regard by Russian composers, not least for their innovations in harmonic structure. As Richard Taruskin points out, Schubert became “the godfather of the New Russian School” by dint of “the mediant progressions that are the very essence of early Romantic harmony.”164 Russian composers displayed their indebtedness to such models with little sense of restraint, evincing “a notable tendency to make the symmetry of the third relations explicit in a literal way that composers to the west normally did not exploit.”165 The first movement of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Third Symphony is structured around a series of rotations through major and minor thirds, and Tchaikovsky exploited the potential of this technique in the first movement of the Fourth Symphony, which “with its key relationships of rising minor thirds (F minor–A-flat minor–C-flat major/B major– D minor–F major/minor) is one of Tchaikovsky’s great inventions.”166
As well as structuring the relationships between movements and sections, this emphasis on the interval of a third had distinct implications for the role of harmony in a work as a whole. In the Second Symphony, as Tawaststjerna points out, “rising [major] thirds often give an impression of the whole-tone scale.”167 Murtomäki sees the Third Symphony as taking this blurring of the boundaries between diatonic and the whole-tone material a stage further: “The tonal scheme of the Third Symphony forms a logical pattern centered around the axis of major thirds C–E–G-sharp/A-flat, but it also contains progressions in minor thirds as well as the tension between diatonic and whole-tone material—all elements on which the later symphonies are based.”168 As well as the whole-tone scale, mediant relations (whether in the major or the minor) are likely to lead to the creation of so-called octatonic sets—that is, modes constructed out of alternating tones and semitones. The interplay between conventional diatonic harmony and the modal world of whole tone and octatonic scales is pursued most rigorously in the Fourth Symphony, a work in which Sibelius achieves a particularly close integration of surface melodic gesture, intermediate harmonic progression, and profound symphonic syntax. The opening gesture of C–D–F–E ushers us into a world where whole-tone scales, octatonicism, and mediant relations predominate. Writing about the first movement exposition, Tawaststjerna illustrates how the key relations are derived from the opening thematic material: “a Dorian A minor —leading to a Lydian C major—then F-sharp major. Thus we see that the augmented fourth of the germinal cell is reflected in the basic tonal layout.”169 This process is further played out at the level of the symphony as a whole, with the four movements unfolding in the order: A minor–
F major–C-sharp minor–A major.
Tawaststjerna suggests that “this tension between tonality as a structural force and whole-tone textures was typical of the time, and part of the wider erosion of major-minor classical tonality.”170 He even alludes to potential parallels in the Russian musical world: the Coronation Scene from Modest Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Alexander Scriabin’s Prometheus chord.171 Yet the notion that Sibelius’s explorations in non-diatonic forms of harmonic procedure might have explicitly Russian roots seems barely to have been considered. Elliott Antokoletz, in one of the most detailed studies of such elements of the Fourth Symphony, suggests that the similarities are indicative of affinity rather than influence: “Sibelius’s general use of semi-functional diatonic folk modes and their cyclic-interval (whole-tone and, as we shall also see, octatonic) transformations reveals an affinity more with the melodic-harmonic palette of his folk-inspired contemporaries (e.g. Bartók and Stravinsky) than with the ultrachromaticism of nineteenth-century Romantic composers.”172 Joseph Kraus makes a passing comparison between the use of the octatonic set in the Fourth Symphony and “‘magical’ music from 19th-century Russian opera, particularly Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila.” It is, he conjectures, “as if some distant musical memory from Sibelius’s exposure to the St. Petersburg circle has now been refashioned by the composer into music so very much his own.”173 But Sibelius was alert to far more than the formal potential of Russian-inspired harmonic procedures, having also discerned what one might term the “semiotic” potential of octatonicism and whole-tone scales. Going back to Glinka, and the music for Chernomor in Ruslan and Lyudmila, these techniques had been used by Russian composers to evoke the otherworldly and the fantastic, reaching their apogee in Stravinsky’s Russian ballets. In the case of Sibelius, the associative implications of this musical language are explored most resolutely in iconic works dealing with the Finnish landscape and mythology, such as Luonnotar or Tapiola. Having learned not only what Russian music sounded like, but also what it meant (to both composers and audiences), Sibelius was able to employ its techniques to evoke similar associations with the pagan and the primitive in Finnish culture.174
In the case of the Fourth Symphony, though, the suggestion of links to the fantastic realm of the Russian and Finnish folk imagination seems altogether more singular. After all, it is the uncompromising severity, austerity, and purity of this work that has long served as evidence of Sibelius’s commitment to some form of musical modernism. Yet there is evidence that the work was not conceived as the ultimate expression of absolute symphonic form. In the wake of its first performance in April 1911, the critic Karl Fredrik Wasenius asserted that the Fourth Symphony depicted a journey to Mount Koli and Lake Pielinen.175 Sibelius publicly denied this account, although it is possible that this was due to Wasenius having revealed the initial inspiration behind what was a very private composition. But even without the knowledge that Sibelius and his brother-in-law Eero Järnefelt had indeed visited Mount Koli and Lake Pielinen in September 1909, the Fourth Symphony betrays the influence of one of Sibelius’s own explicitly programmatic and folkloric works. Tawaststjerna traces the symphony’s use of modal elements and the interval of an augmented fourth/diminished fifth to similar instances in the much earlier Kullervo, as well as suggesting that “its opening bars give the . . . impression of entering Tuonela” (the realm of the dead in Finnish mythology).176 But the decisive parallel is with Pohjola’s Daughter, which, he argues, “anticipates the Fourth Symphony in its tonal layout”:
It has moved from G minor through B-flat to E major just as the exposition of the first movement of the Symphony moves from A minor to C major and then F-sharp. So we can see Sibelius replacing the classical tonic-dominant key relationship with a contrast based on the tritone. But the parallel between the tone poem and the Symphony goes even further. In the final group there appears a sequential motive into which the tritone is woven. These four notes anticipate the opening idea of the Fourth Symphony.177
The link back to Pohjola’s Daughter, warmly received on the occasion of its premiere in St. Petersburg as a work with profound links to the Russian traditions, allows us to posit the Fourth Symphony as a work similarly related to those traditions. Sibelius’s profound assimilation of Russian influences extends far beyond programmatic tone poems on a nationalist theme to symphonic structures that appear, initially at least, to have little in common with that school. The recog
nition that works as original as the Fourth Symphony and Tapiola build on techniques inherited much earlier likewise suggests that works such as the Fifth Symphony, in which “all movements are based on axial tonality, and both minor and major third axis are exploited equally,”178 and the Sixth Symphony, whose modal tonality is characterized by whole-tone and tritonal inflections,179 also belong to this genealogy. What Sibelius learned from Russian music was not so much its ability to convey psychological narrative or evoke place through ethnographic detail (witness his horror at Wasenius’s claim to know the supposed topographical inspiration for the Fourth Symphony), but rather its capacity for suggesting the hidden yet palpable forces at work in the natural world. Much as he was a composer shaped by modernity, he was also keenly aware of the lingering presence of the premodern, the primitive, and the pagan; the subjective and highly personal perception of this presence forms the subject matter of many of his works—even one as apparently abstract as the Fourth Symphony—and constitutes his most significant debt to Russian models.
Russia was more than just a productive influence on the formal and technical means available to Sibelius; it also served as a salutary warning about the potentials and perils of musical nationalism. From the outset, critics had discerned the influence of Tchaikovsky in many of Sibelius’s works. In Finland, this could often be a sign of admiration, as in Karl Flodin’s review of the Lemminkäinen Suite,180 or both Flodin’s and Kajanus’s reaction to the Second Symphony.181 If Sibelius was happy enough to concur with such assessments, then this was because, domestically at least, Russian music represented the search for national identity in music, as well as the latest in progress and modernity. Inspired by his friends and colleagues, he cultivated a deliberate interest in Russian music as a way of countering what he saw as Germanic conservatism and cultural superiority. His teacher at the Helsinki Music Institute, Martin Wegelius, had little time for Russian music, dismissing Tchaikovsky’s Sérénade mélancolique as “violinistic drivel.”182 His teacher in Berlin, Albert Becker, was “the personification of musical conservatism,”183 and writing to his fiancée from Vienna in January 1891, Sibelius offered the following summary of the views he encountered there:
The Germans are far too conventional and do not respond in the least to new movements in either art or literature. They loathe both the French and the Russians, and one cannot talk about anything Scandinavian without trotting out the conventional nonsense about “barbarians.” One cannot escape the conclusion that as far as art is concerned the Germans are finished. They could not produce an Ibsen, a Zola or a Tchaikovsky; they see everything through blinkers —and bad ones at that!184
By signaling his belief that the German tradition had run its course, and aligning himself with the latest developments in European art in Scandinavia, France, and Russia (and note that Tchaikovsky is the only composer in his list), Sibelius was making an implicit point about the future direction of Finnish music, as well as espousing a deliberately cosmopolitan outlook. For Sibelius at this time, Russian music was to be valued not so much because it was national, but more profoundly because it was modern.
Outside of Finland, however, such comparisons took on a quite different set of connotations. If, on Sibelius’s trips to Berlin and Vienna in the early 1890s, the example of Russian music had offered liberation from the Germanic conservatism and the validation of his vocation as a composer of Lisztean tone poems, then subsequent visits to Continental Europe revealed to him the perils of nationalism. As Hepokoski argues:
From Sibelius’s point of view, the most galling problem was one of reception. The European public that he had hoped to address (the public concerned with legimating and institutionalizing “modernism” in the arts) had repeatedly refused to perceive his more recent symphonic works in categories commensurate with his musical thought. Listeners and critics—with the influential Walter Niemann perhaps first among them—had often collapsed him into a mere “nationalist,” an epigone of Tchaikovsky and the Russians, the exotic composer of the cold North, and so on.185
Sibelius’s perception of these anxieties was particularly acute during his trip to Paris in 1900. He was accompanying the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra on its European tour during a period of intense Russification in the wake of the February Manifesto, and nationalist rhetoric in the Finnish party ran high. Finland had gained its own pavilion at the Universal Exposition in Paris only after considerable effort and intrigue.186 Aware that France and Russia were political allies (having signed an entente in 1894 against the triple alliance of Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Italy), Sibelius seems to have suspected Russian involvement everywhere:
Would you believe it, but they have printed Russie on the concert tickets! That will now be crossed out and they will put Finlande. Kajus [i.e., Kajanus] was here this morning and said he was worried about this. One notices Russia’s influence here in all sorts of ways, we’ve had difficulties in getting rehearsal time at the Trocadéro. They constantly make difficulties and keep on altering times. [Aino] Ackté has been a tireless organizer. Well, we’ll see what will happen to our concerts: I am very curious. The pro-Russian papers are bound to heap abuse on us, above all me as I am so nationalistic.187
In fact, French reaction to his music appears to have been largely positive, and sympathy for the Finnish cause was palpable.188
For all that Sibelius’s patriotism was stirred by being in Paris, the tour may also have caused him to reflect on his reception as a nationalist composer, particularly as he tried to establish a reputation as a symphonist in Germany. As he strove to develop a more abstract and supposedly “universal” musical language from the early 1900s onward, recurrent references to other nationalist traditions—usually Russian, but also in the form of comparisons with Edvard Grieg—constituted both an affront to his Finnish patriotism, and a failure to understand his most recent development as an artist. As Hepokoski maintains:
Under such categories, all of which had permitted those employing them to consign his music to the periphery, Sibelius’s more recent music—puzzling in its acerbic character, markedly strained, and decidedly “difficult”—was subject not only to be radically misconstrued but also, in practice, to be casually dismissed.189
The very nationalism that had been so central to establishing Sibelius’s reputation both at home and abroad, simultaneously threatened to confine him to a critical ghetto from which it would be all but impossible to escape. Such had been the fate of Russian music a decade or so before: the Universal Exposition of 1889 had done much to introduce French audiences to Russian composers, and in the intervening years, Russian music came to enjoy considerable prominence in concert programs throughout Western Europe.190 Yet, as the case of Tchaikovsky demonstrates, even where Russian composers aspired to the techniques and standards of the European mainstream (as Sibelius himself did), they were frequently judged as exotic, barbaric, and quasi-Oriental. Whether his journeys through Continental Europe had alerted him to this phenomenon or not, Sibelius’s reactions to composers from other nationalist traditions certainly suggest that he wished to learn from—and even distance himself from—their experiences. Traveling back to Finland from Italy in May 1901, Sibelius was introduced to Dvoák. The meeting, which he described in a letter to Axel Carpelan, seems to have provoked him to reflect on the nationalist cause: Verdi, he argued, had managed to be both national and European, yet Grieg spoke in little more than a local dialect.191 The visit of Glazunov to Helsinki in November 1910 provoked yet more intense anxiety about his own reputation. Stirred by comments in both the Finnish and European press, he confided to his diary: “Am I nothing more than a ‘nationalistic’ curiosity, who must rank second to any ‘international’ mediocrity?”192 His sensitivities were in part provoked by his suspicion that he had been supplanted by Glazunov in Kajanus’s affections,193 but they were also clearly related to his apprehension that the reputation of any nationalist composer would hinder the reception of any works conceived in a more abstract
and universal vein (such as the Fourth Symphony, on which he was then at work). If the absence of any obvious Russian influences in works dating from after, say, the Violin Concerto, bespeaks an ambivalence about the specific value of the Russian traditions, then it also demonstrates Sibelius’s profound sense of unease about the nationalist project itself.
By looking toward Russia, Sibelius learned a way of using folk motives, explored the parallel forms of the symphony and the symphonic poem, refined his harmonic language, and pursued a series of highly original explorations in symphonic syntax. Russian music offered a model of how to balance the lure of nationalism, the specific, and the self-consciously provincial on the one hand, and an interest in the abstract, the general, and the universal on the other. All of this may add substantially to our understanding of Sibelius as a composer—his sources, his borrowings, and his self-fashioning as a composer. Within the more general context of Finnish history, to look at Sibelius’s interest in Russian music is to tell a more complicated story of a small nation’s engagement with its bigger imperial neighbor not through the well-worn narrative of resistance and rebellion but through that of a creative and often ambiguous stimulus. It may also make us rethink the role played by Russian culture in Europe around the turn of the twentieth century, when Russian literature, music, and visual arts came to enjoy a new prominence in the early phase of European modernism. Most of all, though, to talk about Sibelius and the Russian traditions is to begin to refashion our view of Russia itself—not just as exotic, Eastern, untutored, mysterious, and barbarous, all of those myths that propelled the Ballets Russes and Stravinsky’s early fame in Paris and London—but also as a modern, civilized, and advanced culture, one that was well connected to and profoundly integrated with Europe’s other northern realms. If we have come to accept the complexity of Sibelius’s place in Finnish history, culture, and society—a complexity itself indicative of Helsinki’s exemplary status as a cultural crossroads between east and west, and even north and south, rather than as an isolated and even idealized outpost of Nordic national identity—then we also need to attend more carefully to the intricacy of Russia’s musical meanings in the West.
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 7