Jean Sibelius and His World

by Grimley, Daniel M.

  Several important people at Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig could have written a poetic text suitable for use as a program, including the firm’s proprietor, Honorary Finnish Consul Hellmuth von Hase (1891–1979), who prepared the German translation of V. A. Koskenniemi’s lyrics for Finlandia’s 1953 edition. Sibelius himself later stressed that he was inspired to write Tapiola by nature in its entirety “and nothing else,” or “nothing that you might be able to express in words.”66 This is a symbolist position, and is no less limiting than something that can be found only in the Kalevala. Sibelius had used the title “Forest Symphony” (also “The Woods” and “The Forest”) in his early correspondence on the project with his wife, but ultimately this must have been too vague for the publisher and/or conductor. No doubt they felt that almost anyone could compose “The Woods,” but only Sibelius could write a symphony on the great forests of the Kalevala itself, hence Tapiola.

  Irrespective of the title’s origins, the idea of writing a forest symphony in the first place was originally Axel Carpelan’s. He wrote a number of prophetic letters to Sibelius, providing the first (albeit vague) ideas for Finlandia, op. 26 (1900), the Violin Concerto, op. 47 (1903–5), and even Voces intimae, op. 56.67 However, it is unlikely that Sibelius had Carpelan’s early suggestion solely in mind when he started on his Tapiola project. He had already composed nature-related compositions such as Luonnotar, The Oceanides, or even the early Skogsrået (The Wood Nymph), op. 15, without Carpelan’s help.68

  Despite its progressive or modernist passages, Tapiola really owes its origins to Liszt. His influence on modern music remains a relatively neglected topic, in spite of Schoenberg’s important essay of 1911 on Franz Liszt.69 Both James Hepokoski and Tim Howell, for example, have compared Tapiola with passages from Ligeti or other minimalist tendencies en gros.70 The latter association, however, is based on a metaphoric rather than empirical (historical) use of the term “minimalist.” Ligeti’s “micropolyphony” and his techniques of space and texture (particularly the so-called Feldtechniken, or field techniques)71 are in some ways close to what Sibelius is doing,72 but other concepts are required if the work as a whole is to be discussed analytically. Erkki Salmenhaara, in contrast, emphasizes Tapiola’s principle of “organic variation,”73 linking the piece rather with Schoenberg’s notion of “total variation” and later ideas such as those of Karlheinz Stockhausen.74 In all of these cases, Tapiola is not discussed as a melodic composition—a tendency in late Sibelius that begins with the Fifth Symphony, op. 82.75 The most prominent passage that has inspired such talk of minimalism and micropolyphony is the Coda (mm. 513–634). The sheer length of this section is not out of proportion. If one interprets the work as a kind of sonata form, in the tradition of Liszt’s great B-Minor Piano Sonata (as Ernst Tanzberger did in the 1940s),76 the two-part exposition lasts 205 measures, the development a further 250, and the recapitulation (omitting the principal subject) only 50 measures. The Coda is remarkable not so much for its motivic content as for its use of texture. In mm. 513–68 a gradual accumulation of sound occurs, based on a tremolo figure from the second subject area. Then a rhythmic element emerges, quoting a figure from measure 356, whose melodic profile is drawn from the principal subject (Example 5).

  Example 5. Sibelius, Tapiola, mm. 513–31.

  The length and the homomorphous nature of this passage, a slow, completely anti-melodic and atonal accumulation over more than fifty measures, is remarkable in the stylistic context of the 1920s. The passage is prepared by shorter earlier sections with a tendency toward micro-polyphony. The first of these is prepared from a chromatic motive in parallel thirds in measure 1 (Largamente). In measure 21 (Allegro moderato), this pattern becomes faster. Within five measures a steep accumulation of sound (starting piano and reaching fortissimo crescendo) follows, announced by a fortepiano attack in the wind instruments. This gesture returns in the Coda. The coherent melodic statements in measure 26 and following also evoke an effect that is typical of minimalism and its penetrative repetition of small, relatively redundant musical blocks. The same goes for mm. 157–81 in the second section of the exposition. But the purpose of such passages (for example, the texture of mm. 161–67, Example 6) is very different from minimalism as it later developed.

  Such textural issues receive hardly any attention in the analyses by Salmenhaara (1970) or Ernst Tanzberger (1943, 1962). In the minimalism debate, however, they receive more attention than they properly deserve. They do not dominate the composition, but are rather merely elemental and explosive areas of rupture (comparable with what Reinhold Brinkmann describes as “Ausbruchszonen” in Schoenberg’s piano works).77 In En saga a preliminary version of these textural fields can be found on pp. 47–48 of the printed score: a similar tremolo texture lasts eighteen measures. Normally such textures would function as an accompaniment, but in Tapiola they have been emancipated. No less modernist, as Cecil Gray noted in his 1931 study of Sibelius only a few years after Tapiola’s premiere, is the work’s motivic concentration.78 According to the brilliant American Sibelius scholar Harold E. Johnson, Tapiola was an experiment in composing a lot “out of nothing.”79 This does not suggest minimalism, but rather “maximalism” or “maximal music” in the sense that Ligeti used the term.80

  Example 6. Sibelius, Tapiola, mm. 161–67.

  But what about autobiography, rather than landscape or mythology, as a hidden program? Nothing speaks against the idea. Programmatic readings based on the printed anonymous poem, or on the Kalevala, contradict Sibelius’s assertion that the work was inspired by “nature alone” and cannot be described in words. The theory that Tapiola is about confronting life and ultimately death fits this symbolist frame well. Such symbolist readings of Tapiola also suggest that landscape can gain a new interpretative context. According to Hans H. Hofstätter, “Landscape painting creates symbols for the loneliness of man, for his inferiority to the elemental power and to the mysterious almighty God, pictured in infinite space and effects of a cosmic power.” This infinite space is the “Ur-symbol of the Faustian soul in contrast to the sensitive presence of the individual body.”81 As early as 1891 Sibelius, a sensitive twenty-six-year-old with a strong tendency toward hypochondria, asked a doctor to estimate how old he would be at the end of his life. The doctor replied, “certainly sixty”—without considering how time passes and how keenly some people remember such notions.82 Sibelius reached that age in 1925 and respectful as he was, being the son of another doctor, for such medical advice, he became concerned. After all, he had no reason to believe the doctor would be wrong: his father had died at the age of forty-seven, his mother, Maria, at fifty-six, and brother Christian at fifty-three. Based on this genetic inheritance, Sibelius could not have expected to survive and become one of the oldest composers in the history of Western music. He had also lost important friends—such as Busoni when he died in 1923, aged only fifty-eight, and Martin Wegelius, the man who founded the music school that later became the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, in 1906, at the age of sixty. To Sibelius in the 1920s, it must have seemed as though he had already outlived his generation.

  Melancholy and tragic elements are easy to find in Tapiola’s score. The principal motive, omnipresent throughout the composition, begins with the tones B and A (suggesting a G-sharp minor context, but with E and D in the bass), a melodic gesture that readily implies a sense of sorrow:

  Example 7. Sibelius, Tapiola, mm. 1–9.

  Tapiola’s final chord is B major, emphasizing the feeling of full closure within a tonal framework. The opening motive still appears in measure 610 in bright instrumentation (piccolo, clarinets in unison), transformed into major seconds. This diatonic variation of the motive, first heard in measure 246, becomes the answer to a B-minor version of the same idea in measure 593. The descending chromatic line, beginning in measure 588 and leading to the tone B in measure 606, perhaps marks the transfiguration within the lyric ego from sorrow to eternal happiness. Out of the E-major sonority in measure
615 emerges an E-major seventh (the same chord with which the piece had opened but very differently contextualized), leading to the final B major after nine measures. The progression is so slow that there is little sense of tonal consequence, and the final cadence becomes a simple “Amen” or benediction:

  Example 8. Sibelius, Tapiola, mm. 618–34.

  In the final section of the work, this transformation from simple pictorialism into a landscape of the mind, remote from any descriptive narrative, is made obvious by the sense of free pulsation and the meditative brightness of the closing B-major triad. Here the Kalevala-style epic becomes the interiority of a melancholy imagination. Sibelius’s brother-in-law, the painter Eero Järnefelt, once traveled to Koli in eastern Finland with the composer, the location that became the inspiration for the Fourth Symphony, and wrote: “We can illustrate human thoughts and humor, seriousness, joy, angst, hatred, by means of landscape painting.”83 In Tapiola Sibelius also does this, perhaps inviting us to walk through a deep forest where life (and death) are visible in all their stages. Such a walk inspires all kinds of thoughts concerning human misery. But our fear may also vanish as we enjoy the presence of nature in the luminosity of the final B-major chord. Like Böcklin’s painting The Isle of the Dead (1880–83) and Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration, op. 24 (1888–90), in Tapiola the artist helps us to understand the flow of life and accept even the presence of the Swan of Death.

  That Sibelius’s art refers to the elemental in nature, not the figurative landscape, is documented by many aphorisms, metaphors, and small, poetic notes in his diary and other documents. On 4 June 1911, he wrote in his typically symbolist manner: “Wonderful day. Poetry in the air. Nature speaks.” And on 18 February 1925, one year before Tapiola: “A nature poetry that drives one mad! But I mustn’t succumb. This miraculously rich life is un-endurable.”84 With such sentences in mind, and considering that Tapiola is Sibelius’s final major composition, the work becomes one of the greatest farewell compositions in the history of music, alongside Mozart’s Requiem fragment (KV 626), the Adagio from Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, and Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen of 1946.

  Epilogue: The “Pastness of the Modernist Present”

  According to the doctrines of modernism, old-fashioned music is supposed to have been composed earlier.85 No doubt we can assess whether a composition is progressive, anachronistic, or simply a product of its day by keeping the history of compositional techniques in mind. But Sibelius belongs among those composers whose style makes such assessment difficult. The reasons are many. Even in his youth he had a loose personal attachment to traditionalism. He did not pass through any domineering school of composition where he might have mastered a particular technique too early. This is itself sufficient to explain why we can find old-fashioned and progressive moments within a single Sibelius work. Having said this, we need to say as well that in his case the idea of a singular modernism is absurd. The lack of a single compositional system explains his richness of invention, but also makes it difficult to use his music as the model for something new. Consequently, Sibelius taught very few composers (among them Uuno Klami, Leevi Madetoja, and Bengt de Törne). But many others began to imitate him—not least in England and the United States—just as their teachers had imitated Wagner or Brahms earlier. Both Brahms and Wagner, however, possessed a strong sense of compositional technique. Brahms believed in passive inspiration, the Romantic version of André Breton’s écriture automatique of the Manifeste du surréalisme (1924), or, in Mahler’s words: “One does not compose, one is composed.”86 Brahms described the compositional processes (somewhat ironically) during his extended walks in nature: “I consider it very adroit that I allow melodies to fall into my mind when I am out for a walk.”87 Yet perhaps such accounts of creative process should not be taken too seriously. The mixture of the conscious and subconscious, active and passive, conscious and supernatural forms of innovation and inspiration is typically human, and individual differences in disposition can certainly be studied but not to the exclusion of other forms of evidence.

  Modernism is an attitude rather than an aesthetic quality. To evaluate modernism as an attitude means to evaluate its creative processes and artistic motives. This does not mean that modernism’s manifestations cannot also be analyzed, but it may explain the ambiguity we are confronted with by modernist configurations in the oeuvre of composers whose own modernist attitude was ambivalent. We know that Sibelius was interested in the form and “logic” of his works (whether dictated by “God” or his own inner impulse), but we also know that he was motivated by isolated ideas and moments of inspiration as well as various musical traditions—and that he himself was deeply critical about this. Here again we find a mixture of modernist and other attitudes. We face a composer who sought tighter, more conscious control of his material, but whose greatness in the eyes of later generations lies in his unique ideas and innovations, whether inspired by Nordic nature or other cultures. Who can tell how often they should be regarded as the products of a brilliant creative mind with the rare privilege of having been born in Finland?

  NOTES

  The Walter Benjamin epigraph opening this essay is translated from “Schmetterlingsjagd” (1938), in Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 20–21; the Nabokov epigraph comes fromVladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (London: Penguin, 1967; repr. 2000), 103.

  1. Ernst Hofmann, “Analyse aus der Sicht der pädagogischen Praxis,”Musik und Bildung 3 (1979): 175–77. “Ich könnte Sie, hochverehrter Freund, in mein Werk einweihen, aber ich tue es aus Prinzip nicht. Mit den Kompositionen ist es wie mit den Schmetterlingen. Wenn man sie einmal berührt hat, ist ihr Zauber weg. Sie können zwar noch fliegen, aber sie sind nicht mehr so hübsch wie früher” (175).

  2. Ibid. “Nicht die analytischen Methoden—falls einfühlsam und gekönnt durchgeführt—verleiden dem jungen Menschen die Freude an der Musik. Seine mangelnde Vorbildung verwehrt ihm das Verständnis für die Analyse, die ihm Schlüssel zum Werk sein will.”

  3. Walter Legge, in “Conversations with Sibelius” (The Musical Times 76/1105 [March 1935]: 218–20) quotes Sibelius using a similar metaphor concerning unfinished works: “You know how the wing of a butterfly crumbles at the touch? So it is with my compositions; the very mention of them is fatal” (219). Sibelius obviously used the metaphor frequently over the years.

  4. “Jag skulla nog gerna inviga Dig, förstående människa, i mitt arbete, men gör det af princip ej. Enligt min tanke är det med kompositioner som med fjärilar: tag i dem en gång, då är stoftet borta—de kunna nog flyga, men äro ej mera lika skära.” Sibelius Collection, National Archives of Finland, Helsinki (henceforth NA). See also Fabian Dahlström, ed., Högtärade Maestro! Högtärade Herr Baron! Korrespondensen mellan Axel Carpelan och Jean Sibelius 1900–1919 (Helsinki: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2010), 75.

  5. Erik Tawaststjerna, Jean Sibelius: Åren 1865–1893, ed. Gitta Henning (Helsinki: Söderström, 1992), 57.

  6. Bengt de Törne, Sibelius: A Close-Up (London: Faber & Faber, 1937) 51, 59. For an analysis of this problematic book and its negative effect on Adorno, see Tomi Mäkelä, “Poesie in der Luft”: Jean Sibelius, Studien zu Leben und Werk (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2007), 360–67.

  7. On the structure of butterfly wings, see Satoshi Kishimoto, Qinghua Wang, Huimin Xie, and Yapu Zhao, “Study of the surface structure of butterfly wings using the scanning electron microscopic moiré method,” Applied Optics 46/28 (2007): 7026–34.

  8. See Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution (London: Abacus 1962; repr. 1996), 270. For a recent analysis of musical modernism in relation to this development see Max Paddison, “Centres and Margins: Shifting Grounds in the Conceptualization of Modernism,” in Rethinking Musical Modernism, vol. 122, book 6, ed. Dejan Despíc and Melita Milin (Belgrade: Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 2008), 65–81, quote at 74. See also Paddison’s essay in the present volume.

  9. See “Arnold Sch
önberg” in Mäkelä, “Poesie in der Luft,” 265–69.

  10. Jean Sibelius, Dagbok 1909–1944, ed. Fabian Dahlström (Helsinki: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2005), 183.

  11. The entire original German reads: “Der von keiner Konvention gebändigte Ausdruck ungemilderten Leidens scheint unmanierlich: er vergeht sich gegen das Tabu der englischen Gouvernante, der Mahler in die Parade fuhr, als die ‘don’t get excited’ mahnte.” Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Bloomster (New York: Seabury Press, 1973; repr. 1987), 41.

  12. Lois Oppenheim, “Clarifications, Elucidations: An Interview with Milan Kundera,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 9/2 (1989): 9.

  13. Ronald Stevenson, letter to Sibelius, 25 October 1948, National Library of Finland, Collection 206, box 37. On Sibelius and Stevenson, see Mäkelä, “Poesie in der Luft,” 59–63, including a manuscript Stevenson dedicated to Sibelius.