Table 2. Sibelius’s annotations to Ödlan score, Act 2, scene 3.
What kind of work does Sibelius’s music do for Ödlan? The composer’s manuscript preserves a theatrical document, replete with prompts that respond to the needs of practical stagecraft. Some of his decisions, though simple, were crucial: locating the ensemble behind the stage meant that the music would project invisibly across the action out to the audience, an effect that surely enhanced the otherworldly imagery that pervades the two scenes he set. He responded to the dialogue, of course (and more about this later), but he also necessarily paid close attention to Lybeck’s stage directions, making sure to synchronize musical phrases with various events on stage (phantoms rising), ambient sounds (the cry of a small child), the extinguishing of lights, and the rising and falling of the curtain.
Despite the abundant musical imagery in Lybeck’s play, Ödlan requires actual sounding music just twice. At the end of Act 2, scene 1, which only has three brief passages of dialogue, the music largely engages and supports Lybeck’s extensive stage directions. By contrast Act 2, scene 3 is more intensively a traditional conversational drama, with speaking parts for four actors spread across eight full pages of Lybeck’s printed text, all of which Lybeck wished to be accompanied by music. Working from the printed edition of Lybeck’s play, Sibelius carefully crafted his music for the two scenes in ways that both shape and fit the flow of the drama.18
For Alban, music represents the sole realm in which tormented living souls could find release: “Music has never given the living any pain!”19 Music allowed expression to soar, unlike burdensome words: “Words are too heavy, they impede, but tones, tones. . . .”20 Confessing these sentiments to Elisiv in Act 2, scene 1, Alban sways the emotions of the chaste girl, who calls Alban her lord and master. Her declaration that “I am the violin” leads Alban to pick up his instrument and play, the only means by which he can express his love for her.21 Thus it fell to Sibelius to provide the necessary diegetic music. Strikingly, though, Lybeck’s stage directions call for Alban to disappear just before he starts playing; the visual focus of the audience shifts from Alban to the backlit Elisiv, and on the images (and the non-diegetic sounds) she experiences in reaction to Alban’s performance. Initially these visions all convey a sense of warmth and well-being: the voices of children calling to one another; a broad, blooming, sunlit field with butterflies flitting about; a dance tune. But they transform themselves after sensing the distant cries of a small child (marked already by Alban as a ghostly sound associated with the memory of his dead mother, Alida),22 and at the moment when Elisiv can no longer distinguish between the visions induced by the music and the reality of the summer night, the visions turn grim. The light in the field disappears, and the scene resembles instead an abandoned grave for the dead (en öfvergifven hvilostad för döda); the earth seems to tremble; and finally dark phantoms travel up and down the stairs. Sibelius’s music bears a dual dramatic burden in this scene: it at once supports the visual images that Elisiv—and in turn the audience—sees, and it provides the sonic coherence that lets the chain of images seem like a logical sequence. Or, said another way, the muteness of the characters onstage requires the medium of sound to move the drama forward, to convey both Alban’s love for Elisiv and the doom that this love will soon entail.23
Sibelius organized the three sections of this scene around the idea of gestural and timbral return: attention at the beginning and end of the movement falls on the solo violin (Alban’s violin). That these outer sections differ thematically and tonally serves the dramatic trajectory: the move from the sweetly diatonic A-major tune of the opening to the darkly expressive, tritone- and semitone-besotted G-sharp-minor melody of the final section underscores (literally) the emotional transformation from Elisiv’s visions of love to visions of phantoms. In the final segment, the static accompanying tremolo, the traditional stuff of otherworldly happenings in music, shades our impressions of Elisiv and Alban. Agency here is vague—do the tritones and tremolos stem from Alban’s playing, do they reflect Elisiv’s troubled psyche, or both?—but the music effectively conveys that the characters’ connections with reality are tenuous.
Sibelius’s use of stasis in this scene likewise seems particularly noteworthy. The second and third sections each cultivate repetition in their own way: the second with syncopated pitches in the second violin that emphasize the tonic A (these in turn accompany a slow rising and falling chromatic melodic motive), the third, as mentioned, through the tremolos on the new tonic of G-sharp minor. Prolonged repetitiveness of course gives rise to musical tension, an obviously effective strategy as the visions onstage grow more disturbing. But such passages also reflected a long personal history in Sibelius’s works, and would have an equally long critical history in the ensuing years, with particular attention paid to their roles in conveying impressions of primitive, bleak landscapes. The spatial trope seems important in Ödlan, but the imagery now is roped inward, onto the delimited space of the stage and into the unlimited space of the imagination.
“All music, Elisiv, I mean all great music, aims out over the boundaries . . . the boundaries between life and death.”24 Alban’s declaration in Act 2, scene 1 in effect describes one of the functional roles of Sibelius’s music: it signals the threshold states between life/death, waking/sleep, consciousness/unconsciousness that the drama repeatedly asks us to contemplate. While Act 2, scene 1 offers the visions of a conscious Elisiv, Act 2, scene 3 presents her unconscious delirium. An unnatural light falls over the stage: the grounds of the Eyringe estate give the appearance of petrifaction, as if they were coated with volcanic ash. Below the stairs lies a huge lizard, its head on the ground and its eyes gleaming like fiery slits.25 In the background, phantoms flit back and forth; in the foreground Ottokar, Elisabet, and Alida (Alban’s mother), all departed spirits, converse slowly among themselves. Lybeck instructs the actors playing Ottokar and Elisabet to speak in a monotone, with each word articulated plainly and true to the letter. Only Alida is allowed to speak in warm, living accents. When the words of the characters finally become audible to the audience, the ensuing dialogue is heavily laden with symbolism. Ottokar, Elisabet, and Alida gaze on Elisiv, each noting (and some ruing) her inescapable march toward death. When Elisiv finally speaks, she first cries out for Alban, but then realizes he cannot hear her in this uncanny, ghastly place.26 And if he cannot hear her, then she must be facing death: “Must I die”?27 She begs Alida to tell her if Alban really loves her; Alida hesitantly admits only that Alban loves, but does not say who; Elisiv determines with a shudder that he loves the lizard.28 Finally resigned to her fate, Elisiv lets go, of Alban and of life. At the moment she exclaims to Alban “you cannot follow me!” the lizard’s blazing eyes are extinguished, and recalling Alban’s pronouncement about the liminal powers of great music, Elisiv cries, “Let your tones carry my soul beyond life’s boundaries!”29
Sibelius set this entire scene to music. Indeed, the prelude begins to shape the audience’s impressions of Elisiv’s delirious visions even before they see the set or hear an actor speak. Of course, Sibelius wrote this prelude on Lybeck’s instructions (the stage directions call for music before the curtain rises, and even specify that the music of this scene should draw on motives from the earlier scene), but this does not lessen the impression of a composer choosing gestures for maximum dramatic impact. We will momentarily consider some of the musical evidence for this impression, but for now we should consider other signs of Sibelius’s dramatic planning in this scene. Most important from the standpoint of grasping his theatrical savvy is the series of numbers, from 1 to 10, he marked successively in the score. These are not rehearsal numbers, at least in the conventional musical sense, for normal rehearsal letters appear elsewhere in the score. Rather, since the numbers coincide with the majority of the textual incipits that Sibelius wrote in the score, it seems likely that these symbols served as cues for the entire ensemble: relayed somehow from backstage, where the musi
cians played, they would have helped the actors on stage to deliver their lines at the appropriate musical moments. Together with the frequent breaks in the dialogue (Lybeck wrote “Pause—the music continues,” or some close variant thereof, eight times), Sibelius’s numerical scheme allowed for the coordination of music and words.30 Allowing for a normal conversational flow to the dialogue (and even granting a wide range of tempi both for the delivery of the lines and performing of the music), many of the dialogues that follow Sibelius’s numerical cues feature significant passages where the actors remained silent, and where, consequently, the music stands at the forefront of the audience’s attention.31
Sibelius’s numerical cues reveal some interesting facts that impinge on the understanding of the music. First, the dramatic trigger for the recall of the lyrical solo violin theme from the first movement, in the measures before cue 6, is Alida’s memory of Alban, her son. These first seem to be nondiegetic sounds, music that only Alida imagines, but somehow, in her delirium, Elisiv overhears it, too, for it eventually rouses her to utter her first words of the scene (at cue 7): “Alban! Is that you playing?”32 Second, a cue signals the sole passage in these movements given over to pure dialogue without musical accompaniment, occurring near the end of the scene (just before cue 10). The musical silence shocks, so as to draw attention to Lybeck’s dramatic stroke: Elisiv’s realization that Alban loves the lizard (“Ödlan—ödlan!”). Alida devastatingly intones, “All his thoughts, all his words, the whole life’s dream—it is only escape. But he does not know this,” and the music resumes.33
In most sections of dialogue, the coordination of words and music between the cue symbols is not terribly difficult (and recall that Sibelius knew from the pauses marked in Lybeck’s stage directions that when the actors finished speaking, the music was supposed to continue). The exception is the section of the scene that follows the final cue 10. Here the music must accommodate some fifteen sentences of dialogue, and—atypically within the sections bounded by cue numbers—the music shows considerable variety of style. It begins with a sinister ppp tremolo passage played sul ponticello that stops and starts several times, moves centrally to a final recollection of the melody from cue 9 (a recollection that eventually gains a syncopated repetitive accompaniment that itself reminds us of the middle section of the first movement), and finally shifts, suddenly and surprisingly, from G-sharp minor to G minor for the final ppp tremolo chords. Lacking specific instructions from the composer, it could be perplexing to ascertain how the music should fit with the words. But the review published by K. F. Wasenius on the day of the premiere (and thus presumably based on rehearsals) provides clues that help determine the pacing of the declamation in this final passage:
Elisiv’s grand sacrifice of herself when she says “Alone, alone, I must meet the transfiguration” and “let your tones carry my soul beyond life’s boundaries” has inspired Sibelius to a formally transfigured music with a melodic structure that in exalted flight under sweet harmony soars upwards to ever higher glory, until, from its sublime culmination on Elisiv’s words “I’m so tired” in wonderful motion, it sinks down, so that the words: “but you—you must be happy—my beloved” die away.34
From Wasenius’s description, the passage “Ensam, ensam måste jag möta förklaringen” (Alone, alone, I must meet the transfiguration), which occurs roughly halfway through this exchange, must begin somewhere around the start of the recollection of the melody from cue 9, hence around measure 251. This is the only passage that fits his description as “formally transfigured music” (loosely allowing “transfigured” to mean a return to music heard earlier) and “sweet harmony that soars upwards to ever higher glory.” “Låt dina toner bära min själ bortom livets gränser” (Let your tones carry my soul beyond life’s borders) could follow around measure 264. As would fit the sense of the text, Wasenius must have meant that the sinking down begins with the words “Jag är så trött” (I am so tired), hence around measure 271. And the dying out around “men du—du, måste bli lycklig—min älskade” (but you—you must be happy—my beloved) would mesh well with the beginning of the syncopation, around measure 277.
Considering the whole movement once again, its formal shape is rather complex, with enigmatic motivic snippets, partial motivic returns, and thematic recollections from the music from Act 2, scene 1. Textual echoes spurred some of the motivic repetitions, thus for Elisabet’s “Säg mig—hvem har lefvat?” and Alida’s “Om jag har lefvat” (cue symbols 3 and 5; see Table 2) Sibelius used the same eerie descending-unison motive. Though this network of motivic interrelationships partially helps stitch the movement together, what more determines the experience of the first two-thirds of it is its pervasive chromaticism, expressed both harmonically and melodically. From the opening chords of the prelude, which effectively prolong the unstable sound of the augmented triad, to the semitonally inflected motives that dart in and out of the hazy harmonies, the opening minutes of this scene (apart from the C-major/minor return of Alban’s amorous solo violin tune from the first movement) largely grant only fleeting senses of tonal grounding.
Sibelius called on more than floating tonality and chromatic melody to convey a sense of unmoored form. Most notable is the way the opening two-thirds of the movement calves off small chunks of musical material. Fragments of ideas interrupt other unrelated fragments; they end in sudden outbursts or in unmeasured silence. This lends an almost modular feeling to the opening minutes, a sensation only slightly mitigated by motivic repetition. To be sure, the modularity fits excellently with the needs of the drama, and especially with Lybeck’s repeated insistence that the music should continue to fill pauses in the dialogue. But it also must be noted that this way of assembling larger units of musical sense out of the shuffling about of small, only partly interrelated shards of phrases had long been a feature of Sibelius’s general musical style. (The exposition of the first movement of the Second Symphony provides an excellent point of comparison.) The ability to draw on this stylistic predilection in dramatic contexts helps explain Sibelius’s affinity with writing music for the theater, and his continued successes in the medium.
This prolonged instability created by the constant breaks in continuity and pervasive chromaticism in the second movement of Ödlan lends it a clear expressive arc. Sibelius reserved true thematic identity and relative harmonic stability for the moment when Elisiv begins to realize she must die: “Måste jag dö?” Everything prior to that point serves as a kind of extended structural upbeat to the sense of emotional release that arrives with Elisiv’s painful question. By itself, Lybeck’s line is touching, but Sibelius’s simple, foursquare theme guides the response toward true poignancy. Moreover, the presence of melody here represents a conceptual return: the only other significant melodic passages in the music to Ödlan are associated with Alban (the solo violin music in the first movement). The extended melody at the end of the second scene also conjures Alban, but now as an object of loss for both Alida and Elisiv. With this memory embedded within it, the melodic accompaniment transforms their dialogue from touching to heartbreaking.
In such moments, when the music pulls the viewer toward trenchant emotions, Ödlan reveals its relationship to the genre of melodrama, a musico-dramatic kind that, as we noted earlier, enjoyed great popularity around the turn of the twentieth century.35 Sibelius composed a number of stand-alone melodramas, works that normally allowed the possibility of performance in smaller venues, a more delimited plot, the texts ordinarily deriving from poetry rather than from dramas (the notable exception here being the original melodramatic version of Skogsrået [The Wood Nymph], which sets an extended narrative poem by Viktor Rydberg), and the words delivered by a single speaker. Sibelius scored the majority of his melodramas for varieties of chamber ensembles: recitation, soprano, violin, cello, and piano (found in two early melodramas, Näcken and Svartsjukans natter), or recitation and piano (Skogsrået and Ett ensamt skidspår). Thus when Sibelius decided to score the music
of Ödlan for just a handful of players, he drew on the more intimate (and intensified) sound world that he most commonly gravitated toward in melodrama.36
This generic affiliation was not lost on Sibelius’s first listeners. Julius Hirn (known as Habitué) in his review in Nya Pressen described Sibelius’s contribution as “the melodramatic tone poem.”37 And K. F. Wasenius summed up Sibelius’s achievement in the second movement:
In this entire big scene with its difficult musical statements one shall search in vain for a dead or stereotypically treated moment. It constitutes one big illustration, even celebration of the author’s visions and words. The music nowhere remains still, instead undergoes psychological transformations to an extent that grants it a unique, leading place in the realm of melodrama.38
Wasenius’s words are key, not only for situating the music to Ödlan but also for understanding Sibelius’s creative purpose in much of his theatrical oeuvre. In speaking of the illustrative powers of the composer’s music, its ability to set into relief both words and visual images, and in framing the idea of psychological transformation, Wasenius limns the music of the play as a “mode of excess” with respect to the script.39 That Sibelius’s music, accompanying spoken words and the artifacts of staging, fabricates the affective beyond perhaps explains the ease with which it also conveys the otherworldly: profound emotions and the spirit world, as so often in his work, represent two sides of the same expressive coin.
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 12