Jean Sibelius and His World

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Jean Sibelius and His World Page 10

by Grimley, Daniel M.


  Manuscript Types and Compositional Process

  In his memoirs titled “The Master of Järvenpää,” Sibelius’s secretary, Santeri Levas, recalled that “Sibelius once mentioned that writing sketches increases a composer’s productivity. . . . I remembered him saying sometimes that unused themes from his youth become grains of gold in a later age.”6 It is clear that Sibelius constantly noted down musical ideas—usually short thematic fragments—in a routine fashion, without necessarily having any particular work in mind. Sibelius’s manuscripts include a large number of pages that might be described as thematic memos. Only later would he select usable themes from among these papers and begin to elaborate on the ideas and try to fit them into more extensive passages. Very often, Sibelius would mark especially noteworthy ideas with strong (color) pencil strokes or some other type of annotation, such as Obs!—abbreviated from the Swedish word observera, meaning “observe!”—in the margins of the manuscript pages. The ideas on a particular manuscript page could then develop in diverse ways, migrating through various compositional plans, and appear in final form across several works completed over a long period of time. Unused material might very well prove to be a grain of gold in a later stage of the composer’s career.

  The progress and characteristics of the compositional process sometimes depended upon the genre and the scale of the particular work concerned. Smaller-scale works, such as piano miniatures and songs, often evolved without the need for extensive sketching, whereas large-scale works quite understandably required more planning and elaboration, and hence resulted in more extensive sketch material. But other characteristics of the works, or single passages within an individual piece, might also have some bearing on the number of sketches involved. For example, it appears that more sketches and drafts have survived for transitions and developmental sections than for purely thematic passages, and more materials exist for expositions than for recapitulations—the first movement of the Third Symphony (1907) is exemplary here, as we shall see below. But even for some large-scale compositions, we may have only a few surviving manuscript sources, particularly where the music is based on repeated or recurring sections—the principle that James Hepokoski has appositely described as “rotational form.” No sketches whatsoever survive for the tone poem Luonnotar, op. 70 (1913), for example, which is largely built from two extended rotations and features no extensive developmental passages, and the surviving manuscript materials for the second movement of the Third Symphony are similarly limited.

  In other cases, even short thematic statements or brief passages required numerous sketch pages. The opening theme of the first movement of the Third Symphony, for instance, has survived as dozens of sketches and drafts revealing numerous slight alterations made incrementally. As can be seen from a draft for the opening page of the movement (see Figure 1), Sibelius initially planned to begin with an entirely different thematic idea from that which appears in the final version (see the third staff). The opening theme as we know it today is largely based on a series of scalar progressions, whereas the initial idea for the opening, with its ascending open fifths, was closer to the rugged opening theme of the slow movement of the Fourth Symphony.7 Astonishingly, this “fifth motive”—notated in ink—was from the outset already followed by material familiar from the opening passage in its final form (see measure 3ff in Figure 1). In this draft it can also be seen how the opening’s definitive thematic idea—notated in pencil above and partly over the “fifth motive”—eventually found its way into its final position in the score.

  Sketches and drafts often contain evidence of Sibelius’s intense self-criticism, including deleted or erased passages, comments or instructions, and other dos and don’ts, such as meilleur, besser, bättre (French, German, and Swedish words for “better”) or längre (Swedish for “longer” or “more extended”). Other times the manuscript pages reveal moments of conviction or contentment, expressed, for example, with the words soll or soll sein (shall be). The same French and German phrases occur in Beethoven’s sketchbooks, and it is interesting to speculate how consciously Sibelius may have emulated the working pattern of such a canonic figure, whose methods had attracted particular attention thanks to Gustav Nottebohm’s studies, published shortly before Sibelius studied in Berlin and Vienna in the early 1890s.

  Figure 1.

  Typically, Sibelius’s thematic sketches and more extensive (continuity) drafts were notated on a pair of staves (as in Figure 1) and comprise a melodic line with occasional bass notes or chordal “accompaniments.” Sibelius often outlined extensive passages, including entire sections of a sonata form movement, in such continuity drafts. At this stage, the composer’s view of the composition as a whole and the materials belonging to that particular work could still be far from fixed, and materials occurring harmoniously together in a certain draft could still find their way into a different piece later. Among the manuscript materials for the first movement of the Third Symphony, there is a two-page draft that begins with the “fifth motive” described above (Figure 2a, staves 1–2). Then, after four measures, material familiar from the opening of the movement appears in its final form (staves 1–8, exclusive of the empty staves). This passage leads to one presenting an idea that later appeared in the tone poem Pohjola’s Daughter (the crossed-out staves). After another intermediate passage featuring an entirely new thematic idea (Figure 2b, staves 1–2), a repetition of the aborted “fifth idea” from the opening page (staves 3–4, exclusive of empty staves), and forte material heard in the horns during the first movement’s exposition (staves 9–10), the music leads to a passage that we now recognize from the second movement of the String Quartet in D Minor, Voces intimae, op. 56 (Figure 2b, final four staves).8 To summarize, in addition to the Third Symphony, the materials included on the two pages of the folio refer to three other works completed during the years 1906 to 1911, namely: Pohjola’s Daughter, Voces intimae, and, more distantly, the Fourth Symphony. One of the other ideas contained in this draft does not appear in any work known today. This complex overlayered amalgam of ideas is hardly rare among Sibelius’s manuscript pages and is an illustrative example of his general compositional working routine.

  Figure 2a.

  Figure 2b.

  The Case of Cassazione

  In his biography of the composer, Erik Tawaststjerna discusses the interconnections between the sketch materials for the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh symphonies in some detail.9 The manuscript sources for the Third Symphony similarly reveal connections with at least six other pieces, finished either before the symphony or following its completion.10 The situation with Cassazione, however, is even more complex: twelve pieces in total have some material connection with the work. These pieces were completed over the course of a decade, covering approximately the period between the First and Fourth symphonies respectively (c. 1899–1910).11 Figure 3a shows a draft that begins with material from the closing Allegro moderato section of Cassazione (originally in A minor, but transposed to C minor in the final version of the work). Following the opening measures, a new folksong-like thematic idea appears on staves 3 and 4 that originates from the time of the composition of the First Symphony.12 This idea did not anchor itself in Cassazione, but appears five years later in the piano piece “Air varié,” op. 58, no. 3 (1909).13 And even here, the material associated with Cassazione is unrelated to the first version of the work (for full orchestra), but belongs rather with the later version (for small orchestra).14

  The fragments in a further source (manuscript HUL 1585 in the Finnish National Library) illustrate the complex network of ideas associated with different compositions—originally intended for a single work—in an even more compact form than the pages from the source materials for the Third Symphony discussed above. The sketch (Figure 3b) opens with an idea—helpfully labeled “a” by the composer himself—that later appears in the Funeral March of In memoriam from 1909: on one of Sibelius’s manuscript pages, this idea has been subtitled Memento mori. This
idea is followed by “b,” a short passage appearing in Pohjola’s Daughter, and still later a trill idea familiar from Cassazione itself, “c.” The same materials appear in a different order further down the page (staves 6 and 7, crossed out). Following an empty staff, and not directly connected with these fragments, Sibelius has notated a sketch for the scene “Trois soeurs aveugles” (Three blind sisters) from his incidental music to Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas et Mélisande, op. 46 (1905).

  Figure 3a.

  If the origins of Cassazione are at least indirectly connected with the compositional genesis of the First Symphony, Fig 3b illustrates a much later stage of the compositional process related to the work.15 The draft shown in Figure 3c (HUL 0272, p. 1) opens with a fanfare-like idea, and the following measures contain material that eventually appeared in the opening movement, “Die Jagd” (The hunt), of the orchestral suite Scènes historiques II, op. 66 (1912). Staves 3 and 4 subsequently present the Allegro moderato theme from Cassazione (see also Figure 3a).

  Thus Cassazione, a relatively neglected work which is seldom performed today and which Sibelius himself left unpublished, appears to be a key stage in the developing network of his compositional plans over a period of nearly fifteen years.16 If we consider the way in which the folksong-like idea from the manuscripts for the First Symphony, the “fifth motive” from the manuscripts for the Third, and the Cassazione ideas migrated through several compositional drafts and finally appeared (in slightly modified form) in the piano work “Air varié,” In memoriam, the slow movement of the Fourth Symphony, and the opening number from Scènes historiques II, some sense of the complex interrelationships between Sibelius’s music from the final years of the nineteenth century and his modernist highwater mark in 1911–12 can be gained. Cassazione hence suggests the existence, at some level, of a meta-work, a schematic creative project that underpins many of the pieces from this period, much as the themes and ideas in his 1914–15 sketchbook do for the late works from the Fifth Symphony through Tapiola. Further more, the mobility of Sibelius’s working process neatly explodes any idea of the autonomous artwork, regardless of the apparently “absolute” quality of his symphonic works.

  Figure 3b. Note “a,” “b,” and “c” at the top.

  Figure 3c.

  Orchestral Drafts, Fair Copies, and Later Revisions

  In the case of Sibelius’s orchestral music, early drafts on two staves were frequently followed by more detailed instrumental drafts and score fragments. According to Levas:

  [Sibelius] heard his music already orchestrated. Most composers first make a piano draft of their work and then arrange it for the orchestra. Sibelius never did that. He wrote directly in full score bar-by-bar. Once, in the early days, I asked whether he ever had to consider which instrument he needed to use in a particular context. “Never,” replied Sibelius without a moment’s hesitation. “My music is already arranged. The actual work of instrumentation is therefore entirely foreign to me. I allow the musical thoughts to speak for themselves.”17

  This anecdote certainly does not tell the truth, at least in every case. Sibelius’s drafts reveal that there were often moments of hesitation in his compositional work, including matters of instrumentation, and that he could indeed change his mind regarding the orchestration of a particular passage, sometimes even drastically.18

  For Sibelius, the term fair copy rarely refers to a definitive, neatly written score. He very often made extensive revisions to his fair copies, and sometimes a manuscript that was clearly intended as a final version turned out to be only a complete draft and had to be written out once again. An early version of the entire second movement of the Third Symphony has survived in this form. Judging from markings in the manuscript, Sibelius sent the score to a copyist, who began to prepare orchestral parts from the score, but then decided to revise the movement. He added plans for the final version to the manuscript in pencil and then revised the score—while also changing the instrumentation considerably.19

  Sibelius similarly made revisions to many of his works after their first performance. The most well-known cases are En saga, op. 9; “Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of the Island” and “Lemminkäinen in Tuonela” from the four Lemminkäinen Legends, op. 22; the Violin Concerto; and the First and Fifth symphonies. He also planned to revise other works, such as the orchestral ballade Skogsrået (The Wood Nymph) op. 15, and Cassazione, but never realized his intentions. Sibelius’s eagerness in such cases to return to earlier compositions and revise them has strongly challenged the idea of a definitive version (or Fassung letzter Hand), and the author’s copies of his own scores sometimes contain additions and changes made many years after publication.20 In addition to the early version of the Third Symphony’s second movement, the current critical edition, Jean Sibelius Works (JSW) has already published more than twenty previously unpublished (early) versions of Sibelius’s compositions, including the 1892 version of En saga.

  Manuscripts and “Profound Logic”

  In his discussion of Sibelius’s working methods, Levas further recalled how the composer “emphasized that he only wrote music which he had already heard in advance in its final form.”21 There often appears to be an assumption that a composer’s compositional work proceeds in a strictly linear fashion, beginning with an overall idea, or a mental “image” of the work as a whole, and then striving toward the faithful execution of that “image” through a logical, linear chain of events. The compositional process thus constructs larger formal units from smaller fragments or ideas, ideally by following the principles of “motivic development” (or “organic variation”) to ensure the ultimate cohesion (or “unity”) of the final composition. In Sibelius’s case, however, there is no evidence to support this kind of procedure, at least if we consider the genesis of his large-scale orchestral works. On the contrary, sketch studies of Sibelius’s larger pieces have revealed that he did not always have a clear picture of the work in its entirety at the outset of the compositional process, nor, in many cases, for an extended period of its genesis, and that he took final decisions concerning the form and thematic content of a work only after a series of unsuccessful attempts at completion. This also means that, typically, the compositional process was not a linear or goal-oriented evolutionary progression but a more seemingly unforeseeable or improvisatory process, in which one step forward could be followed by two—or sometimes even three—steps back. Sibelius did not, in fact, construct his works from small motives by propagating or developing them “organically.” On this point alone, Sibelius’s comments, as reported by Levas, seem to correspond with the evidence supplied by sketch studies of the sources themselves:

  Cecil Gray and many other writers after him have explained that Sibelius first presents his motives as small fragments, and then, as the work proceeds, arranges them into an actual theme. Once, in the autumn-winter of 1950, when this issue came up in discussion, Sibelius stated quite categorically: “It is not true at all. I do not build my themes from fragments.”22

  In the light of more recent scholarship, we can see that Sibelius was not a composer who cultivated his large-scale works systematically from a few small motivic cells into larger “symphonic” constructions. Rather, the compositional process seems to have been a question of selecting and then weaving together the right components from a rich tapestry or network of diverse threads. The issue was one of assembling a continuous large-scale form from thematic material that was compiled over many years, and was never initially intended to be used in a single, specific work. In his analytical study of the first movement of Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony, Schenkerian theorist Edward Laufer refers to Levas’s account above, and elegantly frames his conclusions about the work’s structure in a way that supports the evidence supplied by sketch studies. “The themes are not built out of small fragments,” Laufer explains. “Rather, different themes may be associated by their having fragments in common; that is, certain components recur in the various themes. This does not
mean that all the themes are somehow the same. Like brothers and sisters in the same family, they have certain features in common—yet each theme is different and individual.”23 In his apocryphal discussion about the symphony with Gustav Mahler in 1907, Sibelius is famously reported to have declared his admiration for “the profound logic that creates an inner connection between all motives” in a symphonic work.24 While notions of compositional logic and profundity might seem hard to sustain in our current critical environment, the phrase could perhaps be understood not in terms of creating large organisms from smaller motivic cells, but rather as the way in which such “profound logic” manifests itself in assembling a sense of continuity from a rich variety of ideas. One essence of Sibelius’s mastery might thus lie in his diligence and patience in testing his ideas, and his skill in dovetailing such originally heterogenous materials through various compositional plans and processes in a way that sounds both seamless and determined.

  From Composer’s Desk to Scholar’s Study

  In a letter to the singer and pedagogue Anna Sarlin dated June 1905, Jalmari Finne wrote: “Sibelius spoke extremely beautifully about music. Among other things, he said: ‘For me, music is a fascinating mosaic which God has assembled, he takes all the pieces in his hand, throws them down into the world, and we have to reconstruct the picture.’”25 In light of the connections between different works revealed among the pages of his sketches, the study of Sibelius’s manuscripts has raised what may seem like a paradoxical question: What is actually meant by a sketch for a particular work? Sibelius apparently did not always have a clear picture of the identity of the piece he was working on, and so how can we, in turn, construct such an image? How can we plausibly define the work to which a certain manuscript belongs, if the materials occurring in the manuscript refer to several different compositions from across a broad timeframe? The network of ideas and materials is often highly complex, and the picture that emerges is similarly complex and multidimensional.

 

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