Jean Sibelius and His World

by Grimley, Daniel M.

  Example 2. Voces intimae, Andante, mm. 1–11.

  The movement ends on the pitch A (in two registers). The transition to the second movement is therefore emphasized, rather than the individuality of each movement. The Vivace is a light scherzo in the Mendelssohn tradition. Here, too, the tonal foundation (A major) remains constant throughout. In the third movement, Adagio di molto, linearity is combined with progressive chromatic movement. The three chords, marked post factum as “voces intimae,” are played pianississimo. After the preceding F-minor passage, they sound almost unreal, if not radically remote. Three times in succession we hear simple E-minor triads (Example 3). They are unprepared, and appear to have no consequences for the music’s subsequent harmonic progression. Twenty-three measures before the end, the chords return on C minor, before the original tonal foundation, D minor, is reestablished. In the first movement (Andante), static chords already disrupt the linear chromatic flow but to a less marked degree: for instance, in measure 38 (E major after C-sharp minor) or measure 42 (C-major chord after A major). The interruption of the polyphonic texture by a chord twenty-two measures before the end (A major after F-sharp minor) and then five measures later (F major after D minor) is peculiar. There are unexpected holes in the polyphonic texture of the second movement as well—a capricious effect within the scherzo topic that is repeated in a varied fashion toward the end of the movement. Though they are unspectacular harmonically, such moments prepare the intimacy of this central third movement.

  Example 3. Sibelius, Voces intimae, più Adagio, mm. 22–27.

  Brahms is the preeminent model in the fourth movement, an Allegretto (ma pesante) in D minor (in a heavy triple meter). The final movement initially returns to the Sibelian elegy of the beginning. Simple motives in a fundamentally tonal but modally and chromatically inflected context are confronted by each other. The remainder of the finale is not so much a rondo alla zingaresca (despite the Brahmsian fourth movement) but rather a Scandinavian spelmans-dance that brings the quartet to rushing conclusion in happy ecstasy.

  In his orchestral music, Sibelius repeatedly extended the formal frame of the larger genres. Voces intimae is an isolated experiment in intimacy, and may be Sibelius’s most important composition without orchestra. In comparison to other chamber music experiments of the era, Voces intimae demonstrates a clear sense of ambition. Mahler’s piano quartet was never finished, and Richard Strauss’s large oeuvre includes only a very few chamber music works and fragments, namely the string quartets op. 2 (1880) and op. 13 (1885). The originality of Sibelius’s op. 56 lies in its unusual and effective post-Romantic characteristics and motivic-thematic processes. Voces intimae was completed shortly before the mature string quartets of Ravel, Schoenberg, and Hindemith. Like those composers, Sibelius distances himself from Brahms (despite the affinity in the fourth movement), the leading chamber music composer of the previous generation. Sibelius creates a texture that, despite the four-part polyphonic voice leading, moves more like orchestral music. Sibelius himself was critical of the work’s orchestral timbre. In his diary on 24 April 1910 he wrote: “The melodic material is good but the sound could be ‘lighter’ and why not more a ‘quartet—’. This ‘cum grano salis’!”51 But he never attempted to re-compose Voces intimae with this lightness in mind. He knew that the composition was difficult to improve, and, in his diary three days later he wrote with a certain sense of pride: “I believe I have passed the apprentice’s exam. Look after your way on the open sea! You can already achieve ‘something’!”52 And, on 26 May 1910 Sibelius drafted a letter following the work’s first performance in Helsinki: “Some weeks ago they performed ‘Voces intimae’ here with the local string quartet. . . . The work, by the way, was a great success. They all say it is my best work. I do not quite think so, but it belongs among the best.”53

  Sibelius’s qualification is plausible. By 1910 he could already look back on three original symphonies, Kullervo, and the violin concerto, as well as many solo songs and choral works. His publisher wrote from Berlin on 14 January 1911, after the first German performance: “A few days ago I heard your string quartet for the first time, in the Tonkünstlerverein with the Ševik Quartet. The performance was outstanding. . . . But indeed, rather different from the usual string quartets.”54 Among the more remarkable contemporary interpretations of Voces intimae must have belonged that of the Amar Quartet, with Paul Hindemith on the viola, at the Nordic Music Festival (Nordisches Musikfest) in 1924 in Heidelberg.55

  Erik Tawaststjerna mentions Beethoven’s string quartet, op. 59, no. 1, as a possible model for Sibelius’s op. 56.56 Interesting parallels can also be drawn between Voces intimae and other more contemporary string quartets. Sibelius certainly heard Claude Debussy’s Quartet (1893) in London on 21 October 1910, and described the work in his diary as “refined but small.” However, the work had previously been played in Helsinki in February 1907 by the legendary Brussels String Quartet,57 and it is likely that Sibelius was in attendance since he was not abroad. Sibelius could hardly have heard Ravel’s 1903 quartet, modeled on Debussy’s work, in 1909, and even Reger’s wonderful Quartet in E-flat Major, op. 109, was written almost parallel to Voces intimae. The first Schoenberg quartet, op. 7 (also in D minor), was written in 1905 but not performed until 1907. Again, we do not know how well informed Sibelius was as far as such points of concurrence were concerned—particularly in the case of chamber music. Voces intimae’s originality lies in effects that—like the works of Janáek and Stravinsky later—break the common sense of musical syntax. The textual flow is far from classical, and such effects mark unexpected changes of character. Reger’s op.109 quartet is related to Sibelius’s op. 56 at least in this respect. In both works the meter frequently loses its formal and syntactic power as a means of coherence. The harmonic rift created by the “intimate” chords in the third movement, for instance, represents extended tonality at the border of functionality. This device is typical of Reger, too, and a good example of Liszt’s progressive maxim, as Reger acknowledged: “I follow the Lisztian sentence: ‘Any chord can follow any chord,’ and act, indeed, accordingly.”58 Similarly, Sibelius employed his “intimate” chords without functional consequences. This is one of the ways he was able to create unusual harmonic transitions in many of his works. To compare Sibelius and Reger in this way is to point out the stylistic position of these artists in the fluid situation between the legacies of Brahms the progressive and Wagner the revolutionary. In that sense, Eugen d’Albert was an alternative synthetic model for Reger,59 as Karl Goldmark was more or less for Sibelius. Schoenberg—aware of Reger’s efforts—elaborated it in a modernist style. But many more senior colleagues, including Sibelius, did not follow him.

  Decomposing Kalevala

  Among Sibelius’s symphonic poems, two works stand out above the others: the tone poem for soprano and orchestra Luonnotar, op. 70, of 1913 (relatively neglected in the musicological literature),60 and Tapiola, op. 112, of 1926.Luonnotar begins with a vibrating F-sharp-minor chord and ends in a vague F-sharp major plus the non-functional tones: D, F, and B. The harmonic language as well as the orchestration is free from convention. Sibelius includes a bass clarinet and two harps in the orchestra, mainly to illustrate the storm evoked by the work’s text (drawn from canto 20 of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala). The absence of a functional dominant in the opening measures means the tonality is weak. In Finlandia, op. 26, and the First Symphony, op. 39, Sibelius first questions but then affirm the work’s final tonality. The functional dominant is prolonged and then elaborated in a manner also found in Brahms’s compositions. The search for the tonality is an auxiliary cadence. In contrast, Luonnotar experiments with the contrast between a strong tonic and other weakened functions. The radical quality of this gesture culminates in mm. 21–22, where Sibelius presents a C-major chord as a substitute for the proper dominant of the following F-sharp-minor tonic triad. Despite this peculiar gesture, the pitch C does not get any special position at this point
. The chord is a curious harmonic idea, only weakening the cadential harmony. Octatonic scales can also be identified in Luonnotar, but it is hard to verify whether they are used systematically. One reason to believe that Sibelius might have been consciously aware of them is that they are increasingly used toward the end of the piece; for instance, at the Tranquillo assai, eleven measures after rehearsal letter B at “Voi poloinen” (oh the poor one); after rehearsal letter K at “pesänsä; alkoi hautoa” (her nest; started to brood); thereafter at “Järkytti jäsenehensä” (trembled her body); and finally thirteen measures before the end, at “kuuksi kumottamahan” (to shine like the moon). This mixture of chromatic, modal, and tonal practices helps to locate Luonnotar between the Fourth and Sixth symphonies.

  The absence of a functional dominant is particularly manifest in the closing measures. Even the final chord is not approached by means of a tonal cadence. The tonic emerges audibly as the foreign tones C, D, and A, vanish one measure before the end. Two measures before the close we hear the six tones C, F, C, D, A, and A in several registers, creating an atonal collection (half a complete chromatic set). The transformation of this chord is remarkable. The atonal chord slowly emerges fourteen measures before the end and gradually disappears, leaving the tonic F-sharp-major triad alone. Five measures before the end the foreign tones are still heard in several registers, but later they appear in only a single register each. The soprano intonates each of the orchestra’s chromatic tones with a single exception: instead of the melodic leading tone E, the soprano sings E. This lower variant might be a modal detail, but it may also simply be a chromatic variant (Example 4).

  The soloist at Luonnotar’s first performance in 1913 was the Finnish soprano Aino Ackté, who had sung the title role in Richard Strauss’s Salome in Leipzig in 1907 and London in 1910. Nonetheless, Luonnotar must have been a special challenge, particularly at the end of her vocal career. The melodic range stretches from middle C up to a high C. With Luonnotar, Ackté said adieu to her audience and simultaneously marked the zenith of her carrier as a performer of modern music.

  Works like Luonnotar and Tapiola reveal that Sibelius was not a composer of simple nature impressions but of highly sophisticated soundscapes that are difficult to place in familiar accounts of musical modernism. Their melodic development, continual search for formal innovation, and intensive reflection upon the possibilities of extending tonality make both compositions unique. Astonishingly, Sibelius’s most progressive works are not symphonies but these tone poems. Tone poems—a Lisztian genre—also include Sibelius’s most conventional, romantic compositions. But the borderline between programmatic and abstract art is highly porous. The presence or absence of a program, particularly in Sibelius’s oeuvre, is no reason to call a composition exclusively either a symphony or a tone poem.

  Example 4. Sibelius, Luonnotar, conclusion.

  Sibelius’s tone poems and symphonies form one of the strongest links between Liszt’s Les préludes and Ligeti’s Atmosphères. Like Liszt and Ligeti’s compositions, Tapiola is not merely a naturalistic representation of “Nordic” woods and shadows, but rather a significant autobiographical document. With some hermeneutic effort, one can hear in Tapiola a synthesis of everything that Sibelius had to say about nature, its elements and mysteries. Simultaneously, it is the true farewell of a great architect, modernist, symbolist, and poet. The composition was commissioned by the Breslau-born American conductor Walter Damrosch (1862–1950), son of Liszt disciple Leopold Damrosch.61 Damrosch Senior was founder of the New York Symphony Society. Sibelius had known Walter Damrosch since he visited the Norfolk Festival in Connecticut in 1914. No other commissioned work of Sibelius reaches such a high artistic level. The other American commission, The Oceanides, op. 73, of 1914, for example, pales by comparison. In a letter of 4 January 1926, Damrosch had asked for a symphonic poem of 15 to 20 minutes, and Sibelius delivered one without any doubt or hesitation. He finished the score on 27 September 1926. By 5 November Breitkopf & Härtel had already sent the orchestral material and score to New York. The first performance in New York took place on 16 December 1926, though sadly Sibelius was not present at this grand occasion.

  Tapiola’s program indicates a mixture of nature and mythology. The word “Tapiola” in the Kalevala refers to the domain of the Forest God, Tapio, and to the Nordic forest as a mythical landscape, also known as “Metsola.” Despite the neo-impressionistic techniques in Tapiola, it is questionable whether the composition is truly about nature or landscape. Certainly, many listeners associate the music with natural spaces or atmospheric landscapes. But the composition’s possible associations range much further to include a symbolic narrative interpretation drawn either from Finnish mythology or the composer’s own rich imagination.

  Generally speaking, Sibelius’s landscapes should be regarded as landscapes of the mind or “phantasy landscapes.” En saga, op. 9 (1892; rev. 1902), is a prime example. Realist musical landscape painting or impressionism are rare in Sibelius’s output. In his miniatures and incidental music, for example, in the overture to Shakespeare’s The Tempest (see Daniel M. Grimley’s discussion in this volume), decorative or illustrative moments can be found with an intensity that is often expected (in vain) from his larger orchestral works. Sibelius’s major works do not simply analyze or illustrate nature. They are documents of the effect of nature upon the mind of the artist, similar to the synesthesia promoted by such visual artists as Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Sibelius’s most prominent Finnish contemporary. In some cases, nature was used as a semantic substitute for human matters, an individual’s encounter with birth, death, the originary states of human life, and other favorite topics in late Romanticism.

  The Kalevala is Tapiola’s main literary context. A narrative interpretation that accords with the Kalevala’s epic model may therefore seem likely. However, major parts of Tapiola were composed in Rome, Berlin, and on the “isola magica” of Capri.62 Sibelius is not documented to have read the Kalevala during the voyage—facts that suggest the title needs further analysis. Sibelius seldom (if ever) took as a given Liszt’s classical definition of programmatic music—that the program not only has an effect on a work’s structure, but that its listeners must also know it in detail. Instead, Sibelius often deceived the audience with his titles. This possibility also has to be taken into account when listening to Tapiola. On the island of Capri, where Tiberius had once ruled over the Roman Empire and the mythical landscape remained omnipresent (the rocks of Scoglio del Monacone inspiring Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead series), the impressions and ideas Sibelius had collected in Finland over the years while reading the Kalevala were amplified and elaborated. Sibelius may have been similarly inspired by Capri’s woods, where he would not have seen a single Nordic Picea abies, the mythical tree of the Finns, but rather an overwhelming mixture of Pinus halepensis, Laurus nobilis, Melaleuca armillaris, and Cupressus sempervirens—a sight that from afar might have superficially resembled a Finnish forest with rocks. More important, Sibelius’s mind was always open to ancient history and mythology, and Latin and Greek belonged among his favored subjects at the Finnish high school in Hämeenlinna. This does not mean that Tapiola is a mere “caprice,” or an exercise in Nordic Italianitá. The intention is rather to open up discussion beyond the supposedly Finnish roots of the composition, thereby broadening its modernist validity.

  Tapiola is less tightly connected (if at all) to the text of the Kalevala than Kullervo, op. 7, the four Lemminkäinen Legends, op. 22, or Luonnotar. There is no single passage in the epic that would fit with the tone poem as a program. The name of the mythical region Tapiola is briefly mentioned only a few times. In the 1849 edition that Sibelius normally used, Tapio and his court enter in Canto 14 (the legend of Lemminkäinen), and briefly reappear in Cantos 15, 32, and 46. We can summarize by suggesting that Tapiola is omnipresent as a mythical space in the Kalevala, but this hardly seems sufficient as the program for a single composition. The only evidence of a program, in
fact, is the poem that is printed in the score, where it was published in English, German, and French. The original is obviously the German: the others are more or less opportune translations. Sibelius must have been asked to write or approve a programmatic text, just as Liszt would have done. He presumably gave some hints, but the poem is not by the composer himself—Sibelius did not write poetry—but probably by a member of the publishing house.

  Da dehnen sich des Nordlands düstre Wälder

  Uralt-geheimnisvoll in wilden Träumen;

  In ihnen wohnt der Wälder großer Gott, Waldgeister weben heimlich in dem Dunkel.

  Widespread they stand, the Northland’s dusky forests, Ancient, mysterious, brooding savage dreams;

  Within them dwells the Forest’s mighty God,

  And wood sprites in the gloom weave magic secrets.

  The matter is best documented in Sibelius’s correspondence with his publishers and Walter Damrosch before the first performance. Sibelius did not play a central role in discussion of the work’s title and program, but he accepted all proposals. On 26 September 1926, Sibelius wrote to Breitkopf & Härtel in his customary diplomatic manner (particularly evident when the topic did not really interest him): “I find the poem at the beginning very beautiful. From my heart I thank you.”63 If Sibelius was ever concerned about a matter, he generally used more refined terminology. But the problem of a title associated with the woods first appeared as early as April 1926, when Sibelius wanted to explain what he was composing. Reading the letters between Sibelius and Aino during the weeks before the title was finalized might even open up the possibility that it was Aino’s idea to call the work Tapiola, even if it is impossible to prove such a hypothesis definitively.64 In June 1926, Sibelius wrote to Damrosch about the subject, but the final elaborated version of the title with fixed programmatic associations seems to have been Damrosch’s idea, who wrote: “Tapiola, a wild Nordic desert where the God of the Woods and his nymphs are staying.”65 We might well be surprised to find Damrosch so well informed on Finnish culture. But before Damrosch receives full credit for the program, we need to know more about his assistants and his social milieu, and we should not underestimate the international popularity of the Kalevala at that time.