14. Wolfgang Welsch, Unsere postmoderne Moderne (Weinheim: VCH Acta humaniora, 1987).
15. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. Dennis Redmond, http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/MinimaMoralia.html (2005), aphorism 140 (‘Consecutio temporum’).
16. Tomi Mäkelä, “Die ‘poetische Dissonanz’ in der Symphonik von Jean Sibelius: Kompositionstechnische Metamorphosen des Neudeutschen in der nordischen Moderne,” Liszt und Europa, ed. Detlef Altenburg and Harriet Oelers (Laaber: Laaber, 2008), 343–63.
17. First published in Allgemeine Musikzeitung 38/42 (20 October 1911): 1088–90; later published in Arnold Schoenberg, Stil und Gedanke: Aufsätze zur Musik. Gesammelte Schriften 1, ed. Ivan Vojtch. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 169–73.
18. Mäkelä, “Arnold Schönberg,” 265–69.
19. On extraterritoriality, see Mäkelä, “Poesie in der Luft,” 351.
20. The phrase “Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen” was elaborated by Ernst Bloch in Tübinger Einleitung in die Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963). For further discussion, see Carl Dahlhaus, “Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen,” Musica 41 (1987): 307–10.
21. Paddison, “Centres and Margins,” 66.
22. Ibid., 68.
23. Ibid., 78.
24. Ibid., 69.
25. Mäkelä, “Poesie in der Luft,” 265.
26. Jean Sibelius, The Hämeenlinna Letters: Scenes from a Musical Life 1874–1895, ed. Glenda Dawn Goss (Esbo: Schildts, 1997), 176.
27. Sibelius’s translated manuscript appears in the Documents section of this volume.
28. Lionel Pike, “Tonality and Modality in Sibelius’s Sixth Symphony,” Tempo 216 (April 2001): 6–16. On modality in Sibelius’s works, see the special Sibelius issue of the French magazine Musurgia 15/1–3 (2008).
29. Fabian Dahlström, Jean Sibelius: Thematisch-bibliographisches Verzeichnis seiner Werke (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2003), 435.
30. “Sinfonin är ‘färdig’. Iacta alea est! Måste! Det fordras mycken mänlighet att se lifvet i hvitögat. Alltså.” Sibelius, Dagbok, 74.
31. “Ich war gerade zurückgekommen aus Berlin, wo ich zwei Monate verweilte. Wie gewöhnlich, bekam ich einen unüberwindlichen Ekel für die ‘moderne Richtung.’ Und daraus wuchs ‘alleingefühl’. . . . Zu meinem Erstaunen sehe ich dass man sehr viele meiner Compositionen aufführt auf dem Continent, obwohl die doch nichts von ‘Modernität’ in sich haben.” See also Rosa Newmarch, Jean Sibelius: A Short Story of a Long Friendship (Boston: Birchard, 1939), 24; the original can be found in the Sibelius Family Archive in the NA.
32. Erik Tawaststjerna, Jean Sibelius: Åren 1904–14 (Stockholm: Atlantis, 1991), 220–21, quotes Carpelan’s article in Helsingin Sanomat.
33. James Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 15.
34. Paddison, “Centres and Margins,” 68.
35. On the concept of “Life-givingness” in music, see Marjorie Stoddard in a letter to the composer on 1 January 1938, National Library of Finland, Coll. 206, 37. See also Mäkelä, “Poesie in der Luft,” 6–70.
36. Sibelius, letter to Newmarch, 2 May 1911, quoted in Tawaststjerna, Sibelius: 1904–1914, 221.
37. Sibelius, letter to Carpelan, 20 July 1909, quoted in Dahlström, Högärade Maestro! 246.
38. Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5, 15.
39. Edgard Varèse, “The Liberation of Sound” (1936), in Perspectives on American Composers, ed. Benjamin Boretz and Edward T. Cone (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 25–33, quote at 25.
40. Most recently, in Brigitte Pinder, Form und Inhalt der symphonischen Tondichtung von Sibelius (Berlin: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Berlin, 2005), 422–32.
41. Joachim Brügge, Jean Sibelius: Symphonien und symphonische Dichtungen: Ein musikalischer Werkführer (Munich: Fink, 2009), 62.
42. Reinhold Brinkmann and Wolfgang Rihm, Musik Nachdenken (Regensburg: ConBrio, 2001), 141.
43. For an analysis of musical modernism as an evolution of scale, see Max Weber, Die rationalen und soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik (Munich: Drei Masken, 1921).
44. The German original reads: “Für Sibelius bezeichnende, schattenhaft-versponnene Melodiebögen . . . die sich wie im Nichts zu verlieren scheinen.”
45. Brügge, Sibelius, 66.
46. Ibid., 72.
47. Carpelan’s letter to Sibelius, 27 December1909, in Dahlström, Högärade Maestro! 261–62. See also the context in Mäkelä, “Poesie in der Luft,” 142.
48. Erik Tawaststjerna Archive, National Archives of Finland.
49. Sibelius, Dagbok, 35.
50. Quoted in Tawaststjerna, Sibelius 1904–14, 148.
51. Sibelius, Dagbok, 43.
52. Ibid.
53. Sibelius Family Archive, NA, Box 46.
54. Ibid.
55. Ruth-Maria Gleißner, Der unpolitische Komponist als Politikum: Die Rezeption von Jean Sibelius im NS-Staat (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002), 71.
56. Tawaststjerna, Sibelius 1904–1914, 153.
57. Erkki Salmenhaara, Uuden musiikin kynnyksellä 1907–1958. Suomen musiikin historia 3 (Porvoo: Werner Söderström, 1996), 54.
58. “Ich verfolge den Lisztschen Satz: ‘Auf jeden Akkord kann jeder Akkord folgen’ eben konsequent.” Reger letter to Constantin Sander, 17 July 1902, quoted in Else von Hase-Koehler, Max Reger: Briefe eines deutschen Meisters: Ein Lebensbild (Leipzig: Koehler und Amelang, 1928), 94.
59. See Mäkelä, “Verunglückt auf der Reise: Das ‘Erste Concert’ (Fragment) von Max Reger mit Blick auf sein Klavierkonzert opus 114,” in Musikalische Moderne und Tradition, Reger-Studien 6, ed. Alexander Becker, Gabriele Gefäller, and Susanne Popp (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2000), 37–54, quote at 39–40.
60. In his pioneering article on the genre, “Der Orchestergesang des Fin de siècle: Eine historische und ästhetische Skizze,” Die Musikforschung 30 (1977): 425–52, Hermann Danuser does not discuss it at all; and Annegret Fauser in her Der Orchestergesang in Frankreich zwischen 1870 und 1920 (Laaber: Laaber, 1994), only mentions it in passing (173). The most extended discussion to date is Hepokoski, “The Essence of Sibelius: Creation Myths and Rotational Cycles in Luonnotar,” in The Sibelius Companion, ed. Glenda Dawn Goss, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 121–46.
61. Breslau, formerly in Germany, is today Wrocław, in Poland.
62. Werner Helwig, Capri: Magische Insel (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1962).
63. “Das Gedicht im Anfang finde ich sehr schön. Vom Herzen danke ich Ihnen.”
64. Suvi Sirkku Talas, Syysilta: Aino ja Jean Sibeliuksen kirjeenvaihtoa 1905–1931 (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2007), 346–52.
65. “‘Tapiola,’ eine wilde nordische Einöde, wo Waldgott und seine Waldnymphen verweilen.” Tawaststjerna, Jean Sibelius: 1920–1957, 240.
66. Santeri Levas, Järvenpään mestari (Porvoo: Werner Söderström, 1960), 129; Erkki Salmenhaara, Tapiola (Helsinki: Suomen musiikkitieteellinen seura, 1970), 23.
67. Carpelan to Sibelius, 28 March 1901, and Sibelius’s diary entry, 1 May 1912, Sibelius Family Archive, NA.
68. The latter work is, of course, connected with the literary traditions of the saga, ballade, and legend, but elements of composed landscapes and nature spaces can be isolated in many other compositions, not least the symphonies. Mäkelä, “Poesie in der Luft,” 289.
69. See Schoenberg, Stil und Gedanke, 169–73. For a more recent discussion of Liszt’s influence, see Leon Botstein, “A Mirror to the Nineteenth-Century: Reflections on Franz Liszt,” in Franz Lizst and His World, ed. Christopher H. Gibbs and Dana Gooley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 516–65, especially Section VII, “Modernity and Meaning,” 547–57
70. Timothy Howell, “Sibelius’s Tapiola: Issues of Tonality and Timescale,” in Sibelius Forum, Proceedings from the Second International Jean Sibelius Conference in Helsinki, 25–29 November, 1995, ed. Veijo Murtomäki, Kari Kilpeläinen
, and Risto Väisänen (Helsinki: Sibelius Academy, 1998), 237–46, quote at 245–46; Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5, 28. The authors introduced the concept of minimalism in Tapiola as a heuristic vehicle. Hepokoski mentions “proto-minimalist sound sheets,” and in his article on Sibelius in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell [London: Macmillan, 2001], 23:319–47) he writes “quasi-minimalist in effect” (338).
71. Salmenhaara, Tapiola, 35.
72. Friedemann Sallis, “Reading György Ligeti’s Lux aeterna: An Exercise in Musicological Border-Crossing,” Muualla, täällä: Kirjoituksia elämästä, kulttuurista, musiikista, ed. Helena Tyrväinen, Seija Lappaialinen, Tomi Mäkelä, and Irma Vierimaa (Jyväskylä: Atena, 2001), 137–52.
73. Salmenhaara, Tapiola, 56.
74. Karl Heinrich Wörner, Karlheinz Stockhausen: Werk und Wollen 1950–1962 (Rodenkirchen am Rhein: Tonger, 1963), 56–72.
75. Lorenz Luyken, “. . . aus dem Nichtigen eine Welt schaffen . . .”: Studien zur Dramaturgie im symphonischen Spätwerk von Jean Sibelius (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1995), 249.
76. Ernst Tanzberger, Die symphonischen Dichtungen von Jean Sibelius: Eine inhalts- und formanalytische Studie (Wurzburg: Triltsch, 1943), 59. See also Mäkelä, “Sibelius and Germany—Wahrhaftigkeit Beyond Allnatur,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius, ed. Daniel M. Grimley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 169–81.
77. Reinhold Brinkmann, Arnold Schönberg: 3 Klavierstücke op. 11: Studien zur frühen Atonalität Schönbergs (Tutzing: Schneider, 1969).
78. Cecil Gray, Sibelius (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 89.
79. Harold E. Johnson, Jean Sibelius (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), 201.
80. See the interview with Ligeti in “György Ligeti und Manfred Stahnke: Gespräch am 29. Mai 1993,” in Musik—nicht ohne Worte: Beiträge zu aktuellen Fragen aus Komposition, Musiktheorie und Musikwissenschaft, ed. Manfred Stahnke (Hamburg: von Bockel, 2000), 121–52.
81. “Die Landschaftsmalerei schafft Symbole für die Einsamkeit des Menschen, für seine Unterlegenheit gegenüber den elementaren Kräften und für die rätselhafte Allmacht Gottes, die sie im unendlichen Raum und im Wirken kosmischer Kräfte zu versinnbildlichen sucht . . ., ‘Ursymbol der faustischen Seele im Gegensatz zum apollinischen Symbol des sinnlich gegenwärtigen Einzelkörpers.’” Hans H. Hofstätter, Symbolismus und die Kunst der Jahrhundertwende: Voraussetzungen, Erscheinungsformen, Bedeutungen (Cologne: Du Mont, 1965), 162.
82. Sibelius to Aino Järnefelt, 29 October 1891, Box 95, Sibelius Family Archive, NA.
83. Quoted in Riitta Konttinen, Sammon takojat: Nuoren Suomen taiteilijat ja suomalaisuuden kuvat (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2001), 219.
84. Sibelius, Dagbok, 78 and 324.
85. The term “the pastness of the present” is Richard Taruskin’s, from his Text and Act (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
86. “Man komponiert nicht, man wird komponiert.” Quoted in Hermann Danuser, Gustav Mahler und seine Zeit (Laaber: Laaber, 1991), 54.
87. “Ich halte es übrigens besonders pfiffig von mir, dass ich mir beim Spazierengehen Melodien einfallen lasse.” Letter to Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, quoted in Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel mit Heinrich und Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, ed. Max Kalbeck (Berlin: Deutsche Brahms-Gesellschaft, 1908; repr. Tutzing 1974), 2:149.
“Thor’s Hammer”:
Sibelius and British Music Critics, 1905–1957
BYRON ADAMS
“The Spirit of the Age” is in reality an exceedingly loose expression; indeed, it would be truer to say that each generation is inspired, not so much by one great spirit or Zeitgeist, as by the antithesis, and sometimes conflict, of several contrasted attitudes towards life.
—David Cherniavsky, “Special Characteristics of Sibelius’s Style”
Yielding to an ill-advised impulse for self-revelation, the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) retailed the following anecdote in print: “More than thirty years ago I once asked Ernest Newman, the initiator of Sibelius’s fame, about the qualities of the Finnish composer. After all, I said, he had adopted none of the advances in compositional techniques that had been made throughout Europe; his symphonies combined meaningless and trivial elements with illogical and profoundly unintelligible ones; he mistook esthetic formlessness for the voice of nature. Newman, from whose urbane all-round skepticism someone bred in the German tradition had much to learn, replied with a smile that the qualities I had just criticized—and which he was not denying—were just what appealed to the British.”1 Certainly Adorno seems to have understood nothing about the British art of pulling an interlocutor’s leg. He must have understood even less about this particular music critic, a pugnacious man who felt no compunction whatsoever about engaging publically in verbal fisticuffs, but who in this instance decided to have a bit of fun. Newman himself never appears to have alluded to this colloquy, but it is easy to conjure up a picture of the relish with which he must have told the story of this Teutonic bore to his fellow critics at the Wigmore Hall bar. How Newman must have enjoyed imitating Adorno’s obtuseness while the philosopher’s dismissal of Sibelius—a composer whose music Newman had long championed—was being rebuked in such a sly fashion. That Adorno, blinkered by his own perceived superiority, failed to see that the joke was on him must have provided Newman with a final, delicious twist of the knife.2
Whatever one might think of Adorno’s opinion of Sibelius or his smugness as a self-appointed arbiter of modernism, his grasp of Newman’s role in the growth of the Finnish composer’s reputation in Great Britain was wanting.3 The prime instigator of Sibelius’s English reputation was not Newman, although he played a pivotal role later, but Sir Granville Bantock (1868–1946). Bantock was a distinguished composer, conductor, and pedagogue; in 1908 he was Elgar’s successor to the Peyton Chair of Music at the University of Birmingham. Bantock enjoyed presenting new music to his students and his audiences: he was always on the alert for the appearance of exciting new composers on the horizon. Of Sibelius’s four trips to Great Britain, made in 1905, 1909, 1912, and 1921, Bantock served as impresario for the first three. (Bantock recalled the Finnish composer’s quiet satisfaction when the first music he heard in London upon arriving in 1909 was his own Valse triste.)4 As a gesture of thanks, Sibelius dedicated his Third Symphony to Bantock. During an interview with Walter Legge published in 1934, Sibelius paid tribute to his British colleague: “To Bantock I owe more than I can say; as a young man he did more than a dozen men could do to get a hearing for my works, and best of all he induced orchestras to let me conduct them.”5
Bantock did Sibelius an enormous favor by introducing him to Rosa Newmarch (1857–1940), a gifted linguist and author who proved a loyal champion. A rare woman among professional music critics, Newmarch provided the program notes for the Promenade Concerts conducted by Sir Henry Wood (1869–1944) from 1908 to 1926. She studied art history in Saint Petersburg with Vladimir Stasov and was an authority on Russian and Czech music. Her abridged translation of Modest Tchaikovsky’s biography of his brother (1905) discreetly revealed the composer’s homosexuality to the British. She was also a prolific and expert translator. With Sibelius’s assistance, she translated many of his songs into English, thus insuring their dissemination beyond Scandinavia. Newmarch could be trying at times—in 1910, she arrived for a visit at Sibelius’s home in Järvenpää and, to the dismay of the composer and his family, blithely stayed for several weeks. However, her advocacy spread the news of this gifted Finnish composer in a particularly effective fashion.6
In 1912, Bantock was responsible for persuading the Birmingham Festival to program Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony, op. 63 (1909–11). By the premiere, Newman and other discerning musicians had already heard of the Finnish composer. From this point, until the rise of the avant-garde in the late 1950s and ’60s, Sibelius held a place at the very center of British concert life. English conductors such as Wood and Sir
Thomas Beecham (1879–1961) were fervent advocates for his music. Wood in particular proved an indefatigable champion; he introduced Sibelius’s work to Proms audiences when he conducted the composer’s incidental music for Adolf Paul’s play King Christian II, op. 27 (1898) on 26 October 1901. The trickle of Sibelius’s scores programmed at the Proms widened into a stream—especially performances of Finlandia, which Wood conducted twice during the 1906 Proms season and often thereafter—that broadened into a river. In 1937, for example, the Proms season included a comprehensive orchestral cycle that included all of Sibelius’s symphonies.7
As unlikely as it may seem, it was the 1912 premiere of the Fourth, this less than ideal Birmingham performance of Sibelius’s most overtly modernist symphony, that marked the crucial turning point for his reception in England. The astonishment that greeted the symphony gave way to a new sort of appreciation, as Sibelius was transformed in the eyes of the British from a piquant nationalist of exotic origin into a modernist master.
Given the strenuous nature of the marathon concerts then favored by the organizers of British music festivals, the auguries for the positive reception of a complex new symphony were not propitious, especially for a score that even its composer described to Newmarch as having “nothing, absolutely nothing, of the circus about it.”8 Among the works originally scheduled to be presented at this festival were the premiere of Elgar’s The Music Makers (1912), the first British performance of Scriabin’s Prometheus: Poem of Fire, as well as Delius’s Sea-Drift for baritone, chorus, and orchestra (1904). Delius was appalled that his work was to be performed under such conditions and wrote a letter of protest to Bantock: “Wood wrote to me that he is doing ‘Sea-drift’ at the Birmingham festival—On the Programme I see they have put it on the 4th day morning at the very end of a 4 hours Concert –Who is responsible for this friendly act? Sea-drift is unknown in Birmingham & requires some mental effort, & ought to be at the end of the first part or at the beginning of the 2nd Part –after the interval.”9 (Delius’s complaint was effective, by the way, as Sea-Drift appeared on the opening concert of the four-day festival alongside the new works by Elgar and Sibelius.)
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 18