Jean Sibelius and His World

by Grimley, Daniel M.

  Sibelius’s butterfly metaphor fits the expressionist aesthetics of the fragility of individual utterance better than it does academic logic. This was combined with a readiness to deal with unlimited depths of sorrow and pain, and a naturalistic directness, alongside a gothic textural complexity. It is easy to find examples of the butterfly metaphor in the writings of contemporaries. In Gottfried Keller’s “Die Aufgeregten” (The excited ones), which Schoenberg set in his Six Songs, op. 3 (1903), “ein holder Schmetterling” (a proud butterfly) appears at a decisive moment:

  Welche tiefbewegten Lebensläufchen, welche Leidenschaft, welch wilder Schmerz! Eine Bachwelle und ein Sandhäufchen brachen gegenseitig sich das Herz!

  What a deeply moved little résumé, What passion, what wild pain!

  A brook’s wave and a mound of sand Broke each other’s heart!

  Eine Biene summte hohl und stieß ihren Stachel in ein Rosendüftchen, und ein holder Schmetterling zerriß den azurnen Frack im Sturm der Maienlüftchen!

  A bee hummed vacantly and thrust Its quill into a rose’s fragrance, And a proud butterfly tore Its azure coat in the storm of a May breeze!

  Und die Blume schloß ihr Heiligtümchen sterbend über dem verspritzten Tau! Welche tiefbewegten Lebensläufchen, welche Leidenschaft, welch wilder Schmerz!

  And the flower closed its little shrine Dying upon the sprinkled dew! What a deeply moved little résumé, What passion, what wild pain!

  The Six Songs might well be the work that Sibelius referred to in his diary entry of 28 January 1914, describing a concert in Berlin when “a lied of Schoenberg impressed me most deeply.”10 The song’s sense of unlimited pain was indeed central to Viennese modernism. Theodor W. Adorno writes a revealing anecdote about this in his Philosophy of Modern Music— one of the moments when Adorno forgets his role as an academic writer and turns instead to his rich store of firsthand knowledge as a contemporary of many distinguished modernists and their immediate predecessors. Unfortunately, the last part of the common English version is a mistranslation that makes it difficult to grasp Adorno’s point: “The expression of unmitigated suffering, bound by no convention whatsoever, seems illmannered: it violates the taboo of the English governess who took Mahler along to a parade, and warned him: ‘Don’t get excited!’”11 The last phrase in the German original, “der Mahler in die Parade fuhr, als die ‘don’t get excited’ mahnte,” uses the expression “ihr in die Parade fahren,” which has nothing to do with a literal parade but simply means, metaphorically, “to protest against her.” Little Gustav revolted against the governess (understandably so) when she told him not to “get excited”—as indubitably she often did, about anything. As far as we know, Mahler was never forced to watch a parade, imperial or otherwise, nor is it likely that he would have been excited by such an event. Any speculation on the early influence of incidental parade music in his later writing is out of place.

  Sibelius the Progressive

  Sibelius’s most spectacular compositions provoke the question of the limits of aesthetic modernism and of musical modernity in general. Even his most “progressive” works are prototypes of what later became postmodernism or, in Milan Kundera’s words, “antimodern modernism,” a by no means systemic or methodological solution to the problems of artistic production.12 The Fourth Symphony in A Minor, op. 63, composed between December 1909 and April 1911 in Helsinki and at Sibelius’s villa Ainola, and the String Quartet in D Minor, op. 56,Voces intimae, written at Ainola and in Berlin and London in 1908–9, stand at the forefront of this debate in regard to both terminology and the history of style. In addition to these works, we could also add the eight expressionistic Josephson songs, op. 57, of 1909, and three airy Sonatinas for Piano, op. 67, of 1912. A much later wave of progressivism is introduced by Tapiola, op. 112, composed during spring/summer 1926 at home in Ainola and on the Italian island of Capri. Often ignored but instructive is the orchestral song Luonnotar, op. 70, of 1913.

  Even in these essentially progressive works, Sibelius’s musical architecture was situated within a classicist framework. His cosmopolitanism was rooted in the modernity of the fin de siècle rather than in twentieth-century modernism. The closest he got to the latter was his interest in the avant-garde of the early twentieth century, and even this association was never made public. Very few knew that he was buying and reading Schoenberg’s scores. Sibelius did not confront the young modernist movements with the self-confidence of an established elderly professional, having tradition firmly behind his back, but rather from a position of anxiety. He realized the gap between his art and what he detected as the voice of the future in modernist scores. As a great modern but essentially traditional symphonist, he was mostly discussed by both biographers and his compositional apostles (such as Ronald Stevenson)13 as an alternative to more youthfully aggressive forms of modernism. As a matter of fact, Sibelius was one of very few late-Romantic composers who were able to bring the old values into the new century in a slightly different shape.

  Even today, most academics are trained within a modernist paradigm. As a result, isolated progressive elements with a modernist appearance have often been overemphasized in Sibelius’s scores. It may be that such interpretations are influenced by our desire to resist the many critics who regarded Sibelius, pejoratively, as a reactionary and even anti-modernist figure. Indeed, the presence of either short or extended passages that were untypical of their time but common later does not make Sibelius a modernist or even a progressive, nor does the influence of established modernists’ writing upon his work. The compositions that are the closest to the modernism of the early twentieth century (above all the Fourth Symphony and Tapiola) may be more accessible to a particular mode of theoretical inquiry than others. However, most of the modernist categories that we are trained to use are not entirely satisfactory if we consider the compositions in toto. It is too early perhaps to evaluate the relevance of modernist analysis on Sibelius, but it seems likely that analytic approaches still need to be developed that fit both his modernist and his earlier, more traditional pieces: approaches that make sense of both the seemingly modernist and the old-fashioned passages in individual works. The biggest challenge, however, will be to focus on the synthesis of the modern and postmodern, or to quote Wolfgang Welsch’s famous phrase, the “post-modern modernism.”14 To be emphatically modern (that is, to question tradition and ask old questions in a new way) was natural to a composer born in 1865. But Sibelius deeply sensed the gap between the younger generation (including Schoenberg) and himself—the gulf that separated his post-Romantic and proto-postmodern modernity of the 1890s from the avant-garde modernism of the 1910s and later.

  Modernism is a conscious, highly self-reflective avant-garde behavior, an attitude, sometimes even an ideology, rather than a collection of aims, intentions, or techniques generated by tradition. But even modernity is, as Adorno wrote, “a qualitative category, not a chronological one.”15 This makes it difficult to speak about an epoch of modernity in anything other than the most open, common sense of the “Modern Age.” Clearly, Sibelius did not hold to the modernist attitude. Nor was he an anti-modernist. Both in private and professional life he was, rather, a conservative with a utopian, sometimes even revolutionary imagination. This mentality can be found among the monarchist founders of such utopian movements of the era as the Pan-European Union. It remained traditionalist even in its most daring moments. Though one finds passages in Sibelius’s music that could readily have been composed by distinguished post–World War II masters (György Ligeti, John Adams, Wolfgang Rihm, Richard Rijnvos, and many others), they do not appear in a similar discourse. Equally, one finds bits and pieces of Chopin and Wieniawsky in his scores. This does not make him old-fashioned, either. Sibelius can be regarded as a contemporary model today (as he is indeed by many innovative and individualist composers, well beyond the borders of Finland). But even the most progressive moments in Sibelius’s music remain essentially post-Lisztian. In the context of the 1910s and
1920s, this may seem conservative or even reactionary. Even if he was not conscious of it, Lisztian logic and texture influenced him till the end of his life.16 He was not the only composer to penetrate beyond the surface of Liszt’s music. But unlike Schoenberg, who wrote one of his best essays, “Franz Liszts Werk und Wesen,” in 1911, Sibelius never explained this (or any other) great influence upon his work.17 We know how impressed he was by Liszt in his formative years (the early 1890s), but we have been led to believe by later biographers that he soon got rid of this “Germanic” influence and swiftly became the living embodiment of the mythical Finnish seer Väinämöinen, a supposedly autonomous creative magus dwelling in the backwoods of a northern wilderness.

  In order to appreciate Sibelius we have to leave behind the chronology of styles and tendencies. Sibelius’s work transcends modernist teleology as well as the remains of Chronos and Prometheus. His lyrical strength is individual and expressive. Even in his most progressive moments it locates him in the domain of Kundera’s anti-modernism rather than within the mainstream modernism of his day.18 His profile is both extraterritorial and extrachronological.19 Sibelius frees Liszt of his mid-nineteenth-century patina and makes his “New German” innovations seem timeless. This is why Sibelius’s modernity, even his modernist elements, cannot be limited to a clear-cut period of production. He is one of the best musical examples of the composed “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous”—to employ Ernst Bloch’s concept without his pejorative implications.20 Superficially, at least, this makes Sibelius look (anachronistically) truly postmodern—a later trend and ideology recently summarized by Max Paddison as “a state of non-contradictory but dynamic plurality.”21 According to Paddison, modernisms are actually “defined by the conflict between the process of societal modernization and the claims of tradition.”22 The coexistence of such impulses (modernism vs. tradition) is a historical fact, but each fundamentally questions the other in both theoretical terms and structural manifestation. Postmodernism, on the other hand, is defined by its variety. The simultaneity of the non-simultaneous is its richness. A contrasting contemporaneous approach to modernism was traditionalist modernity, which Paddison, in reference to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), calls “a reflection upon established paradigms in order to continue to test them.”23 Unlike modernism, this version of modernity was able to absorb cultural contradictions, but they remained contradictions. Paddison insists on the parallel existence of cultures during the era of modernism, arguing powerfully against (postmodern) models of cultural permeability and transculturation.24

  Sibelius’s reaction to Schoenberg’s music was both inspired and ir ritated. It is one of many possible reasons for the unusually progressive modernity of pieces like the Fourth Symphony. The depth of Sibelius’s interest in Schoenberg has been treated extensively elsewhere.25 Indeed, if we were to try to place Sibelius on the continuum of the era’s central dichotomy of tonal vs. atonal musical languages, as personified by Richard Strauss and Schoenberg, Sibelius would need a position somewhere in between or beyond these two poles. In any case, the key parameter is harmony. His treatment of cadential (tonal) harmony developed in his earliest years, predating Kullervo, op. 7 (1891–92). He was already fascinated by the simultaneity of minor and major chords based on a single fundamental bass tone. In October 1888, he wrote to his uncle Pehr from Helsinki and described his ideas of an “experimental music”: a music example he sketched shows C major and D-flat major simultaneously.26 This is not quite a twelve-tone chord but—considering the year 1888—it suggests a tendency toward atonality and complete chromatic collections. Even though none of his compositions from these years include such pitch configurations, such youthful “experimental music” may once have existed. It is possible Sibelius destroyed such pieces in a later act of self-criticism. The letter of 1888 demonstrates his early bi-tonal sensitivity, an approach that even decades later remained an important part of his musical style, although it never became dogmatic. More important, Sibelius never attempted to systematize. Tonality in its broadest sense never fully disappears from Sibelius’s scores, not even Tapiola. In the later works, specific keys are still marked. In the texture, however, such keys are at least attenuated or questioned. This questioning of tonality starts with the-bi-tonal “experiments” of the 1880s and develops as part of Sibelius’s style over the years.

  Sibelius was interested in the theoretical aspects of Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre. In a diary entry dated 8 May 1912 he called it “ensidig” (one-sided), but he never wrote anything comparable himself. He would have had a lot to say about harmony, and he had promising ideas about “epic instrumentation” (diary entry, 9 June 1910)—a fascinating concept that seems neither to have a prehistory nor a future—but he never wrote more than a few words on either. His opportunistic ideas on the fruitful influence of folk music (1896, translated in the Documents section of this volume) begin with some conventional remarks about the development of Western music (Ars antiqua and Ars nova) and end up in chaos.27 The impulse he gave to a new theory or aesthetics of music was so minimal that even his most ardent admirers were unable to articulate Sibelianism in music. The Sixth Symphony, op. 104, of 1923, one of the most “modal” (Dorian) in his oeuvre,28 is called “Symphony in D Minor” in Fabian Dahlström’s new catalogue of works29—but not, however, in the printed score. The Fifth Symphony, op. 82, of 1915–19, though clearly in E-flat major, is given no key in the score. Was Sibelius’s omission of key signatures simply an attempt to make the Fifth and Sixth symphonies look more modern? By contrast the Fourth Symphony, one of his most dissonant works, is marked as being in A minor. Perhaps here the key signature can be read as an attempt to make the piece appear less atonal than it is in the interests of greater popularity?

  Often, Sibelius seems to have more easily “finished” his most modernist and progressive works (in terms of harmony and texture) than his other pieces. Normally, he made many changes after the first performance. Even during the printing process, before an international premiere, Sibelius often continued to work on his scores. But Tapiola was printed before the first performance in New York, and it seems that Sibelius was satisfied with the result. Sibelius also seems to have made few revisions in the Fourth Symphony after the first performance. On 2 April 1911 he wrote: “The symphony is ‘finished.’ Iacta alea est! Necessary! It takes much manliness to look life in the eyes. Alas!”30 The first performance took place the following day, and in a later context Sibelius mentioned the Fourth Symphony as a piece in which he would not change a single note, unlike the multiple revisions to which he subjected the more seemingly conservative or accessible Fifth.

  When Sibelius was confronted with younger composers’ music, even when he was fascinated by their work, he never considered taking on their project as his own. And not just because of his healthy skepticism toward systematization in the arts, or from a negative attitude toward new music. Rather, he saw his own limitations in regard to particular skills. A fairly complex reflection about his solitary position can be found in a letter dated 1 January 1911, in German to Rosa Newmarch, his British friend and advocate. Sibelius is certainly exaggerating his negativism, but if we ignore the anti-modernist opportunism (and subliminal anti-Germanism, in general less typical of Sibelius than of Newmarch), we find some valuable ideas:

  I had just returned from Berlin where I stayed for two months. As usual, I was overwhelmed by disgust for the “modern direction.” Out of that the feeling of loneliness arose. . . . To my astonishment I can see that my compositions are frequently played on the continent, even though they do not have anything of “Modernity” in them.31

  This is the deepest level we reach in Sibelius’s own thoughts on professional matters. Interacting with Newmarch, he wanted to display his strongly individual position. It was not unimportant to Sibelius that his work be truly progressive, even if modernism—“the modern direction”—could not be his path. On 2 May 1911 he famously wrote to Newmarch tha
t his new symphony op. 63 was intended as a “protest against the compositions of today.” Strangely enough, generations of sensitive critics ever since have seen this composition as an integration of older Sibelianism with the most recent musical developments. The Fourth Symphony is no doubt a progressive composition for 1911. But then Sibelius was writing to Newmarch and not to Busoni, and he was famous for adjusting himself to any person he interacted with (including politicians and journalists). As we read Sibelius’s letters we must therefore be aware of audience and expectations. To a certain degree, this was perhaps also the case with his musical output.

  As late as 1910, Sibelius planned to study counterpoint. On 18 June 1910 he wrote in his diary: “All true talents have made their way ‘ad astra’ through their own studies.” Obviously he felt that the knowledge he gained from his various respectable teachers in Hämeenlinna, Helsinki, Berlin, and Vienna was insufficient to enable him to cope with the artistic and stylistic demands of the day. He needed to take care of progressive techniques, and particularly post-Romantic voice leading, himself. Earlier he had focused his attention principally on harmonic processes. That could indeed mean limitation, since the goal of most modern composers (Reger and Schoenberg among others, and even Busoni, but less successfully) was to combine horizontal and linear elements in a way similar to Bach but within a wholly different stylistic framework. In Sibelius’s diary entry for 6 November 1910, we read: “I forced myself under colossal pressure to do half an hour’s counterpoint.” Admittedly, thirty minutes is not very much, but it shows that Sibelius’s desire to learn a different technique was pressing. His aim was to remove the vertical paradigm of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century musical syntax. On 16 June 1913 he wrote: “Meditating on linear counterpoint!!” and on 9 March 1913, without any hesitation, “My ‘style’ is far too homophonic.” We do not have to agree with Sibelius’s self-criticism, but it certainly deserves to be pursued in future research.