The quotation about God’s mosaic from Jalmari Finne’s 1905 letter—better known from Sibelius’s diary entry of ten years later, where it relates to the composition of the Fifth Symphony—may be understood as a poetic metaphor for the composer’s work, a devout mission demanding daily effort, patience, and a humble mind.26 In terms of sketch studies, however, it can be understood in a more technical sense as describing, in a clear and concise manner, the compositional genesis of many of Sibelius’s large-scale works. During the creative process, Sibelius’s task was to discover which fragments belonged together, and in what order, and subsequently what kind of picture—or multiple pictures—lay behind the puzzle of the mosaic pieces themselves. Sketch studies reveal that, in many cases, Sibelius’s mosaic pictures could have taken a very different form from those we are familiar with today, and that many of his works represent only one possible realization from among a variety of potential combinations suggested by the ideas on the pages of his working manuscripts. Hypothetically, Sibelius could have contented himself with the first version of the Third Symphony’s second movement, or with the first versions of En saga, the Violin Concerto, or the Fifth Symphony. Even here, it is possible that Sibelius may have remained open in certain respects to further revisions.
But Sibelius’s mosaic metaphor can also be applied to sketch studies of his music as an entire subdiscipline. Just as Sibelius worked with individual mosaic tiles as a composer, so a source scholar works with the manuscript materials Sibelius left behind as his creative legacy. The composite impression of the genesis of his works created on the basis of the fragmentary sketches and drafts that survive in the Finnish archives and elsewhere inevitably remains open to differing perceptions, perspectives, and critical revisions. Comprehensive readings or definitive versions exist even less in the field of sketch studies than in a composer’s oeuvre. However, while admitting that our mosaic image of a particular work will always necessarily remain incomplete, our understanding of that work should always be grounded in its compositional history, from some perspective of the ideas that the composer notated in their manuscript pages, and in the creative decisions that he or she made en route.
NOTES
1. Jussi Jalas’s notes from conversations with Sibelius, dated 17 July and 27 August 1943, respectively. Sibelius Family Archive, Box 1, National Archives of Finland, Helsinki. We do not know the broader context for these statements, nor is their meaning entirely clear: by “original” Sibelius probably meant the completed, final score text, but his reference to a letzter Gedanke (final thought) remains open to interpretation.
2. For instance, Sibelius reported to his copyist that he had lost the autograph score of Finlandia in Berlin—possibly on a train—in November 1900. The copyist had to reconstruct a new score copy from the orchestral parts. This copy, which obviously served as the engraver’s copy, is lost as well. See Fabian Dahlström, Jean Sibelius: Thematisch–bibliographisches Verzeichnis seiner Werke (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2003), 113–14. For the Eighth Symphony, see Erik Tawaststjerna, Jean Sibelius, vol. 5, 1919–1957 (Helsinki: Otava, 1988), 336–37.
3. Hilli Jokela, cited in Vesa Sirén, Aina poltti sikaria: Jean Sibelius aikalaisten silmin (Helsinki: Otava, 2000), 176.
4. Kari Kilpeläinen, The Jean Sibelius Musical Manuscripts at Helsinki University Library (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1991). The Sibelius manuscript collection in the National Library has expanded further since 1982, with several donations and acquisitions. In addition, manuscripts are preserved in other archives, such as the Sibelius Museum (Turku, Finland) and the Sibelius Academy (Helsinki), and in private collections.
5. For discussion of an interesting smaller-scale example, see Jukka Tiilikainen’s study of the song “Dolce far niente,” op. 61, no. 6, in “The Evolution of Jean Sibelius’s Songs as Seen in His Musical Manuscripts,” 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), 39–49.
6. Santeri Levas, Järvenpään mestari (Porvoo–Helsinki: Werner Söderström, 1960), 242. Levas (1899–1987) worked as Sibelius’s secretary from 1938 until the composer’s death in 1957.
7. See the fifths C–G and A–E in mm. 1–2, as well as their continuation (the ascent –F–G) in measure 2. The “fifth motive” also appears in connection with sketches for the funeral march In memoriam, op. 59 (1909).
8. At the bottom of the first page, on the two last staves, Sibelius has written an annotation in Swedish: “Vidare med detta motiv” (further with this motive) as a reminder or instruction to himself.
9. Erik Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, vol. 3, 1919–1957, trans. Robert Layton (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 15–31. See also Kari Kilpeläinen, “Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony: An Introduction to the Manuscript and Printed Sources,” in The Sibelius Companion, ed. Glenda Dawn Goss (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992).
10. Besides the pieces mentioned above, these works include Valse triste, op. 44a (1905) from Sibelius’s incidental music to Arvid Järnefelt’s play Kuolema, Kyllikki; Three Lyric Pieces for Piano, op. 41 (1906); and the first movement, “Die Jagd” (The hunt), from the orchestral suite Scènes historiques II, op. 66 (1912).
11. In addition to the two symphonies (nos. 1 and 4), the ten other compositions linked with the material for Cassazione are the Violin Concerto; Cortège, JS 54 (1905);Pohjola’s Daughter; the song “Aus banger Brust,” op. 50, no. 4 (1906); the “Dance Intermezzo” Pan and Echo, op. 53 (1906); the Third Symphony; the piano pieces “Air varié” and “Ständchen,” op. 58, nos. 3 and 9 (completed in 1909); In memoriam; and “Die Jagd.”
12. It is possible that Sibelius planned to open the First Symphony with the folksong-like theme. In one of the drafts for the symphony, the final slow introduction material for the solo clarinet is preceded by this thematic material (in G minor), with the tempo indication Allegro moderato.
13. This idea also occurs in sketches connected with the song “Aus banger Brust” and the piano piece “Ständchen.”
14. According to previous assumptions (see, for instance, Jean Sibelius, Dagbok 1909–1944, ed. Fabian Dahlström [Helsinki: Atlantis, 2005], 20), Sibelius reworked the version for small orchestra in 1905. However, Sibelius’s markings in the orchestral parts of that version alongside correspondence with his wife reveal that both versions of Cassazione were completed in 1904.
15. The connection with the Fourth Symphony is revealed in a sketch where Cassazione materials appear alongside the chorale-like idea heard for the first time in measure 159ff in the finale of the Symphony.
16. It should be added that Sibelius returned to the (unpublished) Cassazione materials as late in his compositional career as 1926, when he used the hymn-like passage from the work as the closing Epilogue of his incidental music to Shakespeare’s play The Tempest (see Daniel M. Grimley’s chapter in this volume).
17. Levas, Järvenpään mestari, 242.
18. According to a note by Jalas, dated 19 May 1940 (Box 1, Sibelius Family Archive, National Archive of Finland), Sibelius explained that “the tuba suddenly fell out of my imagination after the Second Symphony. I do not hear it anymore.” The composer evidently failed to remember that he had in fact used the instrument in several works following the symphony, including Pohjola’s Daughter, the tone poem Night Ride and Sunrise, op. 55 (1908), and In memoriam.
19. The early version of the movement has been published as an appendix in the critical edition of the symphony (Jean Sibelius Works, 1/4, ed. Timo Virtanen, 2009).
20. All of the available early versions, selected drafts, sketches, and other manuscripts for Sibelius’s works will be published in volumes of the ongoing critical edition of his oeuvre.
21. Levas, Järvenpään mestari, 384.
22. Ibid., 243.
23. Edward Laufer, “On the First Movement of Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony: A Schenkerian View,” in Schenker
Studies 2, ed. Carl Schachter and Hedi Siegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 127–59, quote at 141.
24. Sibelius’s discussion with Mahler was first documented in Karl Ekman’s biography, Jean Sibelius: En konstnärs liv och personlighet (Helsinki: Holger Schildts, 1935). There are no contemporary records of the details of their meeting.
25. Jalmari Finne to Anna Sarlin, 28 June 1905, PR 170, Finne Archive, National Archive of Finland.
26. For the diary entry, dated 10 April 1915, see Dagbok, 223.
Theatrical Sibelius:
The Melodramatic Lizard
JEFFREY KALLBERG
For nearly thirty years of his career starting around 1898, Sibelius regularly wrote music to accompany productions of staged drama. Paradoxically, his considerable engagement with the theater of his time remains obscure. On the one hand, thanks first to Sibelius’s own concert suite arrangements of large portions of the music he composed for dramatic productions and, second, to the recent spate of recordings of both these concert suites and the majority of the original dramatic scores, we can listen with ease to nearly all of the remarkable music he wrote for the theater.1 On the other hand, since the scores and recordings omit the verbal scripts, we fathom with difficulty the original function of this music.2 The music is familiar; its theatrical contexts are not.
Modern critics most commonly index Sibelius’s theatrical music against his symphonies and tone poems and mine the theatrical repertory for evidence of stylistic progress or thematic migration. And with generally wise results: one can scarcely imagine approaches to the music for The Tempest, say, that did not consider it as a grand and craggy culminating gesture of Sibelius’s career, one to be measured against such works as the Seventh Symphony and Tapiola (see Daniel M. Grimley’s essay in this volume). Or considering the music for Ödlan that will occupy us in more detail below, it is surely of crucial significance to grasp the role this dramatic music plays in the evolution of Sibelius’s stylistic experiments in the “crisis” years 1908–12, and to perceive its consanguinities with Voces intimae and the Fourth Symphony.3 Indeed, Sibelius’s own compositional practices sometimes invite this sort of comparative reckoning: the Seventh Symphony entered into the compositional (and perhaps biographical) history of the incidental music to Arvid Järnefelt’s Kuolema when Sibelius cited a characteristic harmonic progression from the Tempo di valse lente (what would become known in concert arrangement as the Valse triste) near the end of the symphony (mm. 518–22).
At the same time, Sibelius’s choices of plays for which he agreed to compose music tell us something about his general aesthetic sympathies. That he gravitated strongly toward symbolist playwrights and plays shows the contemporary nature of his tastes. Although financial considerations and the demands of the playwrights and directors who commissioned him doubtless also factored into his decisions to write music for productions of plays by Maeterlinck, Strindberg, and Järnefelt (among others), these decisions likewise manifest his affinity with the modern—an affinity with which to reckon as we locate Sibelius and his music among the artistic trends of the early twentieth century.4
Sibelius provided an enormous variety of music for use in the theater. A piece like Jedermann (Everyman, or Jokamies in the Finnish translation of Hofmannsthal’s play that Sibelius set in 1916) demonstrates some of this range, from brief dabs of instrumental color (the few seconds of brass and timpani playing a single chord for the entrance of a character) to the nine-minute Largo, sempre misterioso for strings and timpani that accompanies the dialogue between Good Works and Everyman. The music for The Tempest is replete with similar contrasts: on one side, the lengthy overture that opens the play, portraying the ship sinking beneath the waves; on the other side, the pithy orchestral outbursts that accompany Ariel’s multiple entrances and exits.
Mirroring this variety in kinds of pieces that Sibelius composed for dramatic productions was a multiplicity of other kinds of compositions that should also be considered “theatrical.” The majority of his efforts went toward music for multiple-act dramas staged in prominent theatres, but his melodramas, tableaux, historical “scenes,” and opera (including various unrealized operatic plans) must also factor into a broader understanding of his approach to theatrical music.5 Sibelius’s repeated forays into these various kinds of theatrical works form part of a general European vogue in the early decades of the twentieth century for creative efforts that synthesized drama, music, and pictures.6 Some of the most important repercussions of this fashion, and especially those concerned with melodrama, resonated in the nascent realm of cinema.7
The music Sibelius composed for use in two scenes of Mikael Lybeck’s play Ödlan offers fascinating insight into his theatrical thinking. Having made his literary name as a novelist and poet, Lybeck started writing the play—his first—in 1907, and published it in 1908.8 The story of Ödlan develops out of a triangular relationship among the main characters: Alban, the conflicted and sensitive head of the family estate; an older, sensual but viperous cousin Adla (whose name is a near homonym for the green lizard, ödla, found on the family crest and in the title of the play); and the innocent and virtuous Elisiv. Adla tempts Alban sexually; he initially resists, his more chaste love focusing on Elisiv and expressed largely through music (Alban is a violinist). Startled by a lizard on the porch of the estate, Elisiv falls, strikes her head, and falls into a deathly coma. Alban later briefly gives in to Adla’s temptations, but when she triumphantly dons a costume that appears symbolically to represent a green lizard, he kills her and loses his mind. The dramatic burden of Ödlan lies largely in the play of symbols.9 Pulled between the ethereal goodness of Elisiv (as represented through music) and the slithery cunning of Adla (signaled through lizards both real and costumed), Alban loses his grounding in reality.
Sibelius composed his music in 1909, and the play premiered at the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki on 6 April 1910.10 Though initial reviews were favorable, the play closed after six performances, and was not revived thereafter.11 Ödlan is one of the few works of Sibelius’s theatrical music that does not come down to us in a rearranged concert suite: the extant manuscript score, housed in the Sibelius Museum in Åbo (Finnish: Turku), contains, as far as one can tell, what Sibelius conducted at the premiere of Lybeck’s play. (The version of the score published by Fazer, and based on Sibelius’s manuscript, unaccountably omits the cues that link the dialogue and stage directions with specific moments in the music.12 Tables 1 and 2 provide the information necessary to restore these cues.) Because Sibelius never stripped the dramatic associations from the music, it remains bound to Lybeck’s play and hence little known. But it is precisely these associations with Lybeck and his intellectual milieu that render the score particularly valuable historically.
And just what kind of score is it? Lybeck’s printed stage directions refer a few times to the playing of “the orchestra” or “the whole orchestra,” but Sibelius—perhaps exercising a sense of practical stagecraft and considering the expenses related to including music in a stage production—had other ideas, writing instead for a small string ensemble.13 Quite small: Sibelius told Lybeck that though the ensemble should preferably contain nine players, it could be reduced to as few as six.14 A penciled annotation in Sibelius’s hand on the title page suggests seven performers—2 first violins, 1 second violin, 1 viola, 2 violoncelli, 1 contrabass—played in the premiere. Contrary opinions that Sibelius intended the piece for a string orchestra look at the instrument headings in the score, which use the plural forms “Alti” and “Celli,” an article about the play published the day of the premiere that referred to music played by “a little string orchestra,” and Lybeck’s stage directions, which use the word orchestra.15 But such conjecture seems erroneous. Indeed, as we will see, the chamber-sized accompaniment is important to its generic identity, at least as conceived by Sibelius.
* * *
Table 1. Sibelius’s annotations to Ödlan score, Act 2, scene 1.
Sibeli
us’s acquaintance with Lybeck dated back to the 1890s, but more recently the two men interacted in the Euterpist circle, a group of Finnish (largely Finnish Swedish) poets, novelists, playwrights, visual artists, and composers who, starting around 1902, sought ways to translate (figuratively and literally) the modern and symbolist creative spirit of France into their own Nordic culture.16 Among the manifestations of this interest in the aesthetic values of the French were creative efforts that sought, in single works, to unite symbolic resonances from different artistic media. Often this symbolic melding was anything but restrained: it cannot have escaped Sibelius’s notice when he considered collaborating with Lybeck that Ödlan teems with musical imagery, both verbal and (potentially and eventually) sounding. But in other ways, the symbolic affinities could be quite subtle. George C. Schoolfield, in his epochal survey of Finland’s literature, notes that Lybeck’s characters commonly exhibit a sense of reserve, and seem to communicate symbolically through their silences, an observation that Schoolfield smartly uses to bolster his argument for the patent similarities to Maeterlinck that one perceives in Ödlan.17 But Sibelius, too, rendered silence symbolic—we need only to think of the great resonating voids at the end of the Fifth Symphony to remember that he was one of the twentieth-century’s great composers of silence—and his perception of this shared value with Lybeck must have served as a further incitement to contribute music to the play.
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 11