Jean Sibelius and His World

by Grimley, Daniel M.

  NOTES

  I am grateful to Liisa Byckling, Glenda Dawn Goss, Gitta Henning, and Timo Virtanen for their invaluable help and advice with my research and for their generous hospitality in Helsinki. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

  1. Major works in this field include Matti Klinge, Finlands historia 3: Kejsartiden (Espoo: Schildts, 1996), and his Keisarin Suomi, trans. Marketta Klinge (Espoo: Schildts, 1997); and Osmo Jussila, Suomen suuriruhtinaskunta: 1809–1917 (Helsinki: WSOY, 2004). Accessible English-language versions of some of Klinge’s arguments can be found in his Let Us Be Finns—Essays on History, trans. Martha Gaber Abrahamsen, Mary Lomas, Mirja Lavanne, and David Morris (Helsinki: Otava, 1990); and The Finnish Tradition: Essays on Structures and Identities in the North of Europe (Helsinki: SHS, 1993). Jussila’s monograph is available in Russian as Velikoye knyazhestvo Finlyandskoye, ed. A. Yu. Rumyantsev, trans. V. M. Avtsinov et al. (Helsinki: Ruslania Books Oy, 2009). In terms of Sibelius scholarship, the impact of this revisionist school can best be seen in Glenda Dawn Goss, Sibelius: A Composer’s Life and the Awakening of Finland (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

  2. Glenda Dawn Goss, Preface, The Sibelius Companion, ed. Glenda Dawn Goss (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), xv–xvi.

  3. Aleksandr Stupel', Yan Sibelius, 1865–1957: Kratkiy ocherk zhizni i tvorchestva (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoye muzïkal’noye izdatel’stvo, 1963).

  4. Dmitry Hintze, “Sibelius ja venäläiset klassikot,” Kirkko ja musiikki 14 (1944): 9–11. The contents of Hintze’s review are summarized in Glenda Dawn Goss, Jean Sibelius: A Guide to Research (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1998), 179.

  5. See, for instance, Richard Taruskin, “Pathetic Symphonist: Chaikovsky, Russia, Sexuality, and the Study of Music,” The New Republic, 6 February 1995, 26–40, repr. in Taruskin, On Russian Music (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2009), 76–104.

  6. James Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 4.

  7. Walter Niemann, Jean Sibelius (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1917), 49.

  8. Ibid., 24–25.

  9. Cecil Gray, Sibelius (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 187 and 181 respectively.

  10. Bengt de Törne, Sibelius: A Close-Up (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), 98.

  11. All references in the present essay are to Robert Layton’s English translation of Erik Tawaststjerna’s Jean Sibelius, 3 vols. (London: Faber and Faber, 1976, 1986, 1997).

  12. Tim Howell, Jean Sibelius: Progressive Techniques in the Symphonies and Tone Poems (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1989), 268–69.

  13. Goss, Sibelius, 69–70.

  14. Karl Ekman, Jean Sibelius: His Life and Personality, trans. Edward Birse (London: Alan Wilmer, 1936), 140.

  15. Harold E. Johnson, Sibelius (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), 88.

  16. Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, vol. 1, 1865–1905, 220.

  17. Derek Fewster, Visions of Past Glory: Nationalism and the Construction of Early Finnish History (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2006), 260.

  18. James Hepokoski, “ Finlandia Awakens,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius, ed. Daniel M. Grimley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 81–94. For descriptions of the tableaux, see Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 1:220–22; and Goss, Sibelius, 254–72.

  19. Edward C. Thaden, with the collaboration of Marianna Forster Thaden, Russia’s Western Borderlands, 1710–1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 4.

  20. Janet M. Hartley, “The ‘Constitutions’ of Finland and Poland in the Reign of Alexander I: Blueprints for Reform in Russia?” in Finland and Poland in the Russian Empire: A Comparative Study, ed. Michael Branch, Janet M. Hartley, and Antoni Mïczak (London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 1995), 41–59.

  21. Quoted in D. G. Kirby, ed. and trans., Finland and Russia, 1808–1920: From Autonomy to Independence: A Selection of Documents (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1975), 14–15.

  22. Ibid., 13.

  23. Hartley, “The ‘Constitutions’ of Finland and Poland in the Reign of Alexander I,” 43.

  24. Ibid., 48.

  25. Thaden, Russia’s Western Borderlands, 61. On general Russian attitudes toward Finnish autonomy, see Keijo Korhonen, Autonomous Finland in the Political Thought of Nineteenth-Century Russia (Turku: Turun Yliopisto, 1967).

  26. Fewster, Visions of Past Glory, 92.

  27. Michael Branch, “Introduction,” in National History and Identity: Approaches to the Writing of National History in the North–East Baltic Region, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Michael Branch (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 1999), 11–16.

  28. Many of these institutions were associated with the transfer of the capital to Helsinki. On this, see George C. Schoolfield, Helsinki of the Czars: Finland’s Capital: 1808–1918 (Drawer: Camden House, 1996).

  29. Michael Branch, “The Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg as a Centre for the Study of Nationalities in the North-East Baltic,” in Branch, National History and Identity, 122–37.

  30. “Finno-Ugric” refers to the supposed common origin of the Finnish and Hungarian languages—a source believed by early twentieth-century linguists to be independent from the Indo-European line of Western European languages or the Slavic languages of Russia and Eastern Europe.

  31. Branch, “The Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg,” 122–23.

  32. Jussi Jalonen, “On Behalf of the Emperor: The Finnish Guard’s Campaign to Poland, 1831,” Slavonic and East European Review 88/3 (2010): 468–94.

  33. Tuomo Polvinen, Imperial Borderland: Bobrikov and the Attempted Russification of Finland, 1898–1904, trans. Steven Huxley (London: Hurst & Company, 1995), 21–22.

  34. Kirby, Finland and Russia, 35.

  35. Ibid., 52.

  36. Edward C. Thaden, “The Russian Government,” in Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 1855–1914, ed. Edward C. Thaden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 13–108.

  37. Polvinen, Imperial Borderland, 74.

  38. See, for instance, Pertti Luntinen, F. A. Seym: A Political Biography of a Tsarist Imperialist as Administrator of Finland (Helsinki: SHS, 1985).

  39. Polvinen, Imperial Borderland, 225.

  40. Ibid., 279.

  41. For a comparative study, see Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (London: John Murray, 2000).

  42. Risto Alapuro, State and Revolution in Finland (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988), 90.

  43. Ibid., 89–92.

  44. C. Leonard Lundin, “Finland,” in Thaden, Russification, 355–457.

  45. Ibid., 399.

  46. Ibid., 403.

  47. Ibid., 401.

  48. Ibid., 401–2.

  49. Ibid., 406.

  50. Ibid., 406–7 and 422–24.

  51. Kerstin Smeds, “The Image of Finland at the World Exhibitions, 1900–1992,” in Peter B. MacKeith and Kerstin Smeds, The Finland Pavilions: Finland at the Universal Expositions, 1900–1992 (Helsinki: Kustannus Oy City, 1992), 12–105.

  52. For a survey of Sibelius’s patriotic works, see Veijo Murtomäki, “Sibelius: Composer and Patriot,” in Sibelius Forum II: Proceedings from the Third International Jean Sibelius Conference, Helsinki, 7–10 December 2000, ed. Matti Huttunen, Kari Kilpeläinen, and Veijo Murtomäki (Helsinki: Sibelius Academy, 2003), 328–37.

  53. Ekman, Jean Sibelius, 189.

  54. Diary entry of 3 December 1910, quoted in Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, vol. 2, 1904–1914, 161.

  55. Diary entry of 30 July 1914, ibid., 282.

  56. For a survey of mostly literary responses, see Ben Hellman, “The Reception of Russian Culture in Finland, 1809–1917,” in Branch, Finland and Poland in the Russian Empire, 199–213.

  57. Ekman, Jean Sibelius, 11. For more details of Sibelius’s life at this time, see Glenda Dawn Goss, ed., Jean
Sibelius: The Hämeenlinna Letters: Scenes from a Musical Life, 1874–1895 (Esboo: Schildts, 1997).

  58. Goss, Jean Sibelius: The Hämeenlinna Letters, 20. Tawaststjerna likewise notes the influence of Tchaikovsky on Sibelius’s piano miniatures: “It never occurred to him that the pianistic layout of a Chopin could give way to a new kind of keyboard sonority such as that evoked by Debussy or that one could carry the pianistic difficulties of Balakirev’s Islamey one stage further as did Ravel in Gaspard de la nuit. Accordingly his mistake was to use as a model of keyboard writing something that was already at the time of its composition pretty undistinguished: the keyboard miniatures of Tchaikovsky. Poetic feeling is powerfully distilled in the smaller pieces of Schumann, Chopin and Mendelssohn but in Tchaikovsky’s waltzes, mazurkas, polkas, nocturnes and songs without words it is for the most part less deeply characteristic.” Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 1:177.

  59. John I. Kolehmainen, “When Finland’s Tolstoy Met His Russian Master,” American Slavic and East European Review 16/4 (1957): 534–41. The influence of Tolstoy in Finland was the subject of an important exhibition titled Children of Mother Earth: Tolstoyism in the Cultural History of Finland at the Gallen–Kallela Museum in Espoo in the summer of 2010. The catalogue is available (in Finnish only) as Maaemon lapset: Tolstoilaisuus kulttuurihistoriallisena ilmiönä Suomessa, ed. Tuija Wahlroos and Minna Turtiainen (Helsinki: SKS, 2010).

  60. Catalogue of the Library of Jean Sibelius (Helsinki: Helsinki University Library, 1973), 134–36.

  61. Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 1:104. Elsewhere, however, Sibelius was more skeptical: “Flirting with the workers worse than currying favour with the upper class. One has to crush so much of your own potentiality. Tolstoy’s views on music are not wholly sound as he does not recognize that there are differences in musicality. He is on the right lines: but he takes his argument to unreasonable lengths” (undated note, 206).

  62. Letter to Aino Sibelius, 1 January 1892, ibid., 101.

  63. Letter to Aino Sibelius, 19 March 1891, ibid., 82.

  64. Ilkka Karttunen, ed., Eero Järnefelt ja venäläinen realismi/Eero Järnefelt and Russian Realism (Punkaharju: Taidekeskus Retretti, 2007).

  65. In addition to the artists discussed here, see also Ben Hellman, “‘He had a Special Liking for our Country. . .’ Vasili Vereshchagin and Finland,” in The Unlimited Gaze: Essays in Honour of Professor Natalia Baschmakoff, ed. Elina Kahla (Helsinki: Aleksanteri Institute, 2009), 323–49.

  66. Aimo Reitala, “The World of Art and Finnish Artists,” in The World of Art/Mir iskusstva: On the Centenary of the Exhibition of Russian and Finnish Artists 1898, ed. Yevgenia Petrova, trans. Kenneth MacInnes and Philip Landon (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 1998), 215–37.

  67. Many years later, in 1923, Diaghilev considered staging Sibelius’s pantomime Scaramouche with the Ballets Russes, although nothing came of this plan. See Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, vol. 3, 1919–1957, 221.

  68. Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 496.

  69. Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 2:46–47.

  70. Kajanus conducted important performances of many of Sibelius’s early works abroad, including the First Symphony in Paris. Yet his relationship with his younger colleague was sometimes fraught. In 1896, they both applied for the post of Professor of Music at Helsinki University; when Sibelius was awarded the post, however, Kajanus worked behind the scenes to have the position reopened and himself appointed. See Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 1:190–93.

  71. Lynn Sargeant, “Kashchei the Immortal: Liberal Politics, Cultural Memory, and the Rimsky-Korsakov Scandal of 1905,” Russian Review 64/1 (2005): 22–43.

  72. Helena Tyrväinen, “Robert Kajanus and the ‘Rimsky–Korsakov Affair,’” Finnish Musical Quarterly 4 (2004): 18–25.

  73. Goss, Sibelius, 228–29.

  74. Johnson, Sibelius, 77–78.

  75. Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 2:212.

  76. Diary entry for 13 January 1912, ibid, 212.

  77. See, for example, Marc Vignal, Jean Sibelius (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 268–90.

  78. Undated letter to Aino Sibelius from Kristiania/Oslo, July 1900, quoted in Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 1:209. Sibelius’s admiration for Tchaikovsky is also recorded in de Törne, Sibelius: A Close-Up, 80.

  79. Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 1:52–53.

  80. Aarre Merikanto, for instance, spent the years 1914–16 studying with Sergey Vasilenko in Moscow, unable to travel to Germany because of the war. Tim Howell, “Aarre Merikanto (1893–1958): Modernism, Methods, and Madness,” in After Sibelius: Studies in Finnish Music (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 29–55.

  81. Anthony Beaumont, “Sibelius and Busoni,” in Proceedings from the First International Jean Sibelius Conference, Helsinki, August 1990, ed. Eero Tarasti (Helsinki: Sibelius Academy 1995), 14–20.

  82. Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 2:53–4.

  83. Ibid., 79–82.

  84. See, for instance, Iv. Lipayev, “Finskaya muzïka. Ocherk (Okonchaniye—IV),” Russkaya muzïkal’naya gazeta, 7–14 May 1906, columns 489–95.

  85. Interview with Svenska Dagbladet, 27 February 1923, quoted in Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 3:227–28.

  86. ‘Kontsertï i opera,’ Russkaya muzïkal’naya gazeta, 7 January 1907, columns 31–39. Extracts from this review are also quoted in Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 2:54.

  87. Siloti made a number of unauthorized cuts in his St. Petersburg performance of Nightride and Sunrise, and the work may also have suffered from lack of adequate rehearsal (see Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 2:97). For a general survey of Russian responses, see Maria Roditeleva, “Jean Sibelius—Seen by Russian Musicians,” in Sibelius Forum: Proceedings from the Second International Jean Sibelius Conference, Helsinki, 25–29 November 1995, ed. Veijo Murtomäki, Kari Kilpeläinen, and Risto Väisänen (Helsinki: Sibelius Academy, 1998), 174–79.

  88. For a survey of Soviet responses, see Vignal, Jean Sibelius, 1077–80.

  89. Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 1:23. The influence of Tchaikovsky, along with more “Slav melancholy,” is discerned in “the main idea of the D minor Romance (1896)” (ibid., 178).

  90. Ibid., 37.

  91. Ibid., 50.

  92. Ibid., 209–10.

  93. Ibid., 212.

  94. Gray, Sibelius, 132–3.

  95. Gerald Abraham, “The Symphonies,” in Sibelius: A Symposium, ed. Gerald Abraham (London: Lindsay Drummond Limited, 1947), 14–37 (15–16).

  96. Gray, Sibelius, 135.

  97. Abraham, “The Symphonies,” 18.

  98. “Gray’s ‘discovery,’ according to which Sibelius would combine small fragments into themes as opposed to the reverse procedure of the classics, has turned out to be particularly debatable.” Veijo Murtomäki, Symphonic Unity: The Development of Formal Thinking in the Symphonies of Sibelius (Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 1993), 3.

  99. Joseph Kraus, “The ‘Russian’ Influence in the First Symphony of Jean Sibelius: Chance Intersection or Profound Integration,” in Murtomäki, Sibelius Forum, 142–52.

  100. Eero Tarasti, “Sibelius and Europe,” in Murtomäki, Sibelius Forum, 43–51. Specifically, Tarasti discerns parallels between the opening of En saga and the “triple-metre dance at the end of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherezade.”

  101. Veijo Murtomäki, “Sibelius’s Symphonic Ballad Skogsrået: Biographical and Programmatic Aspects of his Early Orchestral Music,” in Sibelius Studies, ed. Timothy L. Jackson and Veijo Murtomäki (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 95–138, esp. 107n57.

  102. Ibid., 108. See also Murtomäki’s broad survey of Russian parallels in works by Sibelius: “Russian Influences on Sibelius,” in Murtomäki, Sibelius Forum, 153–61.

  103. Tawaststjerna Sibelius, 2:31; Johnson, Sibelius, 105.

  104. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 164, quoted in Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 2:201–2. Stravinsky’s comme
nt was occasioned by the award of the Wihuri-Sibelius Prize in 1963, which prompted him to arrange Sibelius’s Canzonetta, op. 62a, for two clarinets, four horns, harp, and double bass.

  105. Goss, Sibelius, 237.

  106. See translator Layton’s note in Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 1:212.

  107. The most comprehensive attempt to disprove arguments in favor of any specific Russian influence is found in Malcolm Hamrick Brown, “Perspectives on the Early Symphonies: The Russian Connection Redux,” in Tarasti, Proceedings from the First International Jean Sibelius Conference, 21–30.

  108. Robert Layton, Sibelius, 4th ed. (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1992), 3. Layton’s observations were initially made in the first edition of his monograph in 1965.

  109. For a list of Russian works performed in Helsinki between 1885 and 1917, see Murtomäki, “Russian Influences on Sibelius,” 160–61. Murtomäki’s list is based on Nils–Eric Ringbom, Helsingfors orkesterföretag 1882–1932 (Helsinki: Helsingfors orkester förening, 1932), 91–126.