Jean Sibelius and His World

by Grimley, Daniel M.

  Whereas Gray’s fakir is an image drawn from fantasies of the crumbling Raj, Newman’s Sibelian athlete is a Nordic—or perhaps a Nietzschean—superman who anticipates those virile blonde young men who would pose, hurtle, and race through Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 film Olympia, and whose model may well have been the superstar Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi (1897–1973).68 The other phallic metaphors mentioned above—the prehistoric stones rising out of the earth, the rising overwhelming climaxes, the rooted granitic substratum of the Finnish soil, fall into place as a homo-erotic variant of the Lacanian “gaze.” Here, indeed, is Grant’s “great race” in its Nordic glory.

  For all its potency, this virile body is serene due to its self-imposed restraint, the virtually superhuman poise that Gray found in the Sixth Symphony and, especially, in its successor: “The Seventh shows him at the summit of his powers in respect of fecundity of invention . . .” (Yet more Sibelian fecundity!) “It is not merely a consummate masterpiece of formal construction, however, but also a work of great expressive beauty, of a lofty grandeur and dignity, a truly Olympian serenity and repose which are unique in modern music, and, for that matter, in modern art of any kind.”69 But this serenity exacts a fearsome price. As Mosse observed, “Manliness was based upon the Greek revival which accompanied and complemented the onslaught of respectability and the rise of modern nationalism . . . Indeed, those rediscovering their bodies at the end of the nineteenth century would continue to invoke Greek models as examples of physical beauty stripped of all sensuousness and sexuality . . . Greece was conjoined with nature. The urge to be natural, to integrate oneself with an unspoilt setting, was thought to free the human body of its sexuality.”70

  Gray’s ambition to place Sibelius among the Olympians was just one of several strategies used by critics to contain and even abjure the powerful eroticism in Sibelius’s symphonies and tone poems, to which, as revealed by the extravagant phallic metaphors that appeared in their writing, he and his British colleagues were responsive. Any acknowledgment of this eroticism must occur only through metaphor, or, better yet, be avoided altogether: “No sex, please, we’re British!”

  Another common strategy was to deny that the symphonic tradition allowed for the expression of sensuality in any form, for, as Gray opined, “The symphonic style is averse to the picturesque, the opulent, the highly coloured, preferring rather a certain austerity, dryness, asceticism even . . . . The ideal symphony—the symphony in the mind of God, to speak Platonically—avoids as a rule the luscious, the sensuous, and impressionistic, as foreign to its nature.”71 This curious statement hardly constitutes an isolated instance of such aesthetic premises, for Gray’s construction of the “ideal symphony” was extolled by many other British critics, as well as by the practice of Edwardian composers such as Parry and Stanford. Furthermore, the laudatory critical reception of Sibelius’s least ingratiating symphony testifies to the general acceptance of this anhedonic view of the proper symphonic style. As apparent from the terms of praise given to austerity that pervade the critical reception of the Fourth Symphony, Gray speaks for many other British critics when he regards the “complete absence of sensuous appeal” as a positive virtue that elevates this score to “Sibelius’s greatest achievement.”72

  But the eroticism of Sibelius’s music could not be conjured away completely through appeals either to ancient Greece or to Platonic philosophy. Images of masculine potency have a way of reemerging even in passages of musical analysis. Specific “scientific” terms used by eugenicists were employed as tools to elucidate the Finnish composer’s creative—or, one might say, generative—process. (This in turn was part of a broader expropriation of language drawn from science that music theorists used to legitimize the intellectual basis of their discipline throughout the twentieth century: organicist metaphors drawn from eugenics were succeeded in the 1950s and ’60s by positivistic terminology loosely derived from higher mathematics.) When Cherniavsky, following Gray, Simon Parmet, and, indeed, the composer himself, used the word germ to characterize the melodic fragments from which he believed Sibelius generated music by a process of elaboration and accretion, he is not referring to microorganisms in general but to what the educated knew was a stage in sexual reproduction.73

  Writing shortly after the Second World War, and thus a member of the last generation that could do so with impunity, Cherniavsky expropriates for use in musical analysis the short form (“germ”) of an organicist concept that eugenicists and early geneticists called “germ plasm.”74 This is an outmoded term that, as Spiro notes, “we know today as the genes inside the egg and the sperm cells.” Husbanding the male germ plasm was an obsession of eugenicists, for they believed that “reformers who were serious about improving the human race . . . would do better to devote their efforts to eugenic programs that strove to eliminate defective germ plasm from the population.”75 Even artistic ability was determined by the germ plasm, and the American eugenicist Charles Benedict Davenport (1866–1944) posited that musical ability was the result of a single recessive gene.76 In his theoretical musings, Cherniavsky used the terms “germ motives” and “thematic germs” to describe Sibelius’s motives. The writer spins his unabashedly organicist—and sexual—musical metaphors further and further as the “thematic germs” replicate toward larger forms of musical “life,” just as cells do to create large organisms. Cherniavsky reveals his reliance upon eugenics for theoretical models when he writes, “The influence of nature, which can be so strongly felt behind nearly all his works, is revealed not only in the impressionism, in the colour and mood awakened in his tone-poems, but also in the organic growth, in the vitality and elemental power of the music itself—music which often seems to have been inspired by that same natural force from which the organic world itself draws its unceasing life and fertility.”77

  For the British, Sibelius’s cavalier treatment of his musical germ plasm was a cause for consternation. Gray found that anything that deviated from the healthy, masculine directness of the symphonic works—such as the “necrophilistic ardours” of the Valse triste—was unclean, the debased result of the Finnish composer’s onanistic abuse of his creative germ plasm.78 Sibelius’s charming popular works clearly aroused Gray’s revulsion even as he tried to explain away the composer’s “immense fecundity” as “one of the signs of his true greatness.”79 Gray was also anxious to excuse any popular elements that might sully the aesthetic purity of the symphonies, as when he observes that the “Swan Hymn” theme of the Fifth Symphony is “almost note for note identical with a popular music-hall song of some ten years or so ago, but in Sibelius’s hands it is endowed with a grandeur and a dignity that banish entirely from our minds its dubious associations.” (If Sibelius has banished this “dubious association” so effectively, a skeptic might well wonder why Gray felt compelled to point it out in the first place.)80

  Such inconsequential perversities as the Valse triste aside, Sibelius was lauded for his integrity as a symphonist. With an enthusiasm worthy of Madison Grant hailing the racial homogeneity of his beloved Nordics, Gray proclaims, “Sibelius, in fact, alone in modern times, has preserved inviolate the purity and integrity of the true symphonic style.” By setting up Sibelius’s practice as a standard by which all others are to be judged, Gray weighs the achievements of the Finnish composer’s contemporaries in the balance and finds them wanting: “It will be found that the symphonies of such composers as Bruckner and Mahler, Tchaikovsky and Elgar, and indeed of every important practitioner of the form in modern times, sin in one or more crucial respects against the symphonic spirit—either through the employment of the device of the thematic interconnexion of all or some of the movements, through the excessive sensuousness of harmony, melody, or orchestration, or through formal invertebracy and redundance, and sometimes through all of them.”81 For Gray, as for many of his colleagues, deviation from the “purity and integrity of the symphonic style” was tantamount to a moral failing—a “sin.”

  Coupled with
the use of the word germ to describe the motives used by Sibelius is an insistence on the “simplicity” and “directness” of his finest work. Such adjectives are used to differentiate Sibelius sharply from effete decadent exoticism while attesting to his masculine probity. Unsurprisingly, these qualities, thought to be particularly masculine at the time, are often tied to Sibelius’s racial origin, a rhetorical move that Gray in particular used as a way to sidestep the aesthetic problem posed by Sibelius’s early, untrammeled nationalism. For differing reasons, Newman, Lambert, and Gray were uncomfortable with a musical expression of nationalism based on folk traditions. Despite their acutely individual outlooks, all shared a visceral reaction against the use of folk materials of any kind within art music, for anything extraneous to the composer’s personal “germ plasm” would fatally sully the purity of a work’s conception. Recall that Gray struggled to keep the distinction between “nationalistic” and “Nordic” when he described Sibelius’s music; the “nationalistic” works were those that drew upon Finnish legends or some other overtly national source, and were thus to be faintly deplored, while the Nordic works were the essential expression of a racial homogeneity that arose from deep within the composer’s psyche. These critics believed that an unself conscious expression of racial consciousness irradiated Sibelius’s “abstract” works as well his tone poems, no matter how often the composer protested, “My symphonies are music conceived and worked out in terms of music and with no literary basis. . . . A symphony should be first and last music.”82 Ernest Newman simply contradicted Sibelius: “The musical faculty does not exist in a watertight compartment, shut off from the rest of the mind and the nature and experience of the man.” To Newman, as the final sentence of his obituary tribute makes clear, the nature of this particular man was bound up inextricably with his race: “No one could ever imagine any other signature, personal or racial, upon any page of his music other than that of Jean Sibelius.”83

  Finnish Modern

  The only other composer who had previously possessed such control over his creative germ plasm was, of course, that ne plus ultra of compositional virility, Ludwig van Beethoven. Flattering comparisons between Sibelius and Beethoven abound in the writings of these English critics. Constant Lambert wrote that the “almost unbearable spiritual and technical concentration” exemplified by the coda of the finale of the Finnish composer’s Fourth Symphony “may be held to form a modern parallel to the posthumous quartets of Beethoven.”84 Cherniavsky stated, “It was left for Sibelius to develop the really organic matter of imparting unity originated by Beethoven—the use of motivic germs.”85 Although this statement may be a touch hyperbolic, it pales in comparison to Gray’s proclamation: “The symphonies of Sibelius represent the highest point attained in this form since the death of Beethoven.”86

  But Lambert’s invocation of Beethoven was part of an agenda to position the Finnish composer as a modern, even prophetic, voice who would lead the way into the future. Throughout Music Ho! Lambert mocks the various fads of Continental modernism as well as the mere idea of nationalism (British or otherwise) as he seeks to refashion modernism through the construction of a new canon. He was hardly alone, for both Newman and Gray had their own ideas of what a twentieth-century British canon might contain. To position Sibelius as Beethoven’s true successor allowed the British to jettison the decadent post-Wagnerian and post-Wildean aesthetics as well as the entire Teutonic symphonic tradition now tainted by German aggression. In an amazing display of historical insouciance, Gray blithely tosses the entire nineteenth-century repertory of German symphonies after Beethoven—including those of Brahms—onto the ash heap of history:

  [Brahms] achieved the symphonic style through a kind of self-immolation. One always feels with him, in the symphonies, a sense of effort and constraint, a continual striving after an ideal that was foreign to his innermost being. He was not a symphonist by natural aptitude or inclination, in fact, and on the whole this is true of all the most eminent German composers of the nineteenth century and of modern times. 87

  The most astonishing aspect of Gray’s argument is that he couches the peroration in racial terms, with the sentimental Teuton defeated by the hardened Nordic who displays those very qualities of heroism, individuality, and power that were attributed to him by ethnologists like Madison Grant:

  The Teutonic genius in music, indeed, as in everything else, is preeminently lyric, contemplative, philosophic, and fundamentally opposed to the dramatic, the heroic, the epic, which constitute the essence of the symphonic style. The old academic theory of the superiority of the Teuton over all other races in respect of large-scale constructive capacity is simply a myth based upon one or two great exceptions such as Beethoven; but Beethoven was no more a typical German than Goethe. . . . The truth is, therefore, that the Germans are in reality the last people in the world who have the right to arrogate to themselves, as they do, the supremacy over all other races in symphonic music, and to claim that they alone possess the secret of musical construction on a large scale. It is the one thing of which, as a race, they are fundamentally incapable, and this makes their patronizing attitude towards the symphonies of Sibelius particularly laughable . . . His entire art, in fact, follows on straight from that of Beethoven, without intermediary influence of any kind; one can pass from one to the other without feeling that there is the intervening gap of a century.88

  Such wholesale revisionism concerning German musical hegemony had begun well before the war, accompanied by the construction of a putative English Musical Renaissance. This loose confederation was in part a new-found resistance to German cultural imperialism and a reaction to the newly unified German nation’s challenge to British political and economic domination. It was during precisely the most politically fraught period before the war that the man from the North, Jean Sibelius, stepped ashore at Dover and provided the British a very attractive alternative connection to the Beethovenian symphonic tradition. Just as Grant placed the Nordics at the apex of his bogus pyramid of races, so the British critics found in Sibelius the solution to the vexing problem of whom to place at the top of their reconstituted canon. Deliciously, according to the tenets of eugenics and scientific racism fashionable at the time, the Nordic genius Sibelius racially outranked composers who hailed from the adulterated Alpine and Teutonic races, who then could be put firmly in their place.

  Gray’s ambition to turn the tables on the German tradition through racial arguments of course proved futile. However, his invocation of race to create a new canon laid bare the aesthetic Social Darwinism inherent in the endeavor. Coincidentally or not, since the middle of the nineteenth century the accepted canon of Western art music has been organized as if designed by a musical Madison Grant. It is heavily weighted in favor of the superiority of white males from northern climes. Like Grant, who dismissed Mediterranean men as effete creatures who “can work a spindle, set type, sell ribbons or push a clerk’s pen,” the progressive Victorians, such as Parry and Sir George Grove (1820–1900), who created the prototype of the modern canon, relegated composers from indolent warmer climes to secondary positions. Certain exceptions might be made for the occasional Italian or Frenchman—or even a “primitive” Slav—but these could never reach the higher status accorded to Austrians and Germans.89

  This bias toward composers from Northern Europe has never faded, but it was certainly in force when Gray, Lambert, and other British critics were writing in the years just after the First World War. A turn away from Germany toward a country whose population was adulterated by the Mediterranean races, such as France, was unthinkable. (Italy, whose composers wrote opera—a genre that Parry considered the musical equivalent of the Whore of Babylon—never came into serious consideration during this period; even Verdi was suspect.)90 Although Vaughan Williams had taken the daring step of studying with Maurice Ravel for several months in 1907–8, such Francophilia was rare within the British establishment. In his chapter on Debussy in A Survey of Contemporary Mu
sic, Gray asserts, “This soft, enervating, female, boudoir prettiness has always been the disease against which French artists have had to fight.”91 Discussing Debussy as a “key-figure,” Lambert announces confidently, “The French as a race have a remarkably poor sense of rhythm.”92 Just after stating unequivocally that he is “not a believer in rooted and inalterable race-characteristics,” Newman declares, “It is the fact, however, that the French musicians have never shown much capacity for architecture on the great scale . . . Debussy and his fellows have laboured under the delusion that form could be replaced by style.”93

  So, with rare exceptions such as Edwin Evans (1874–1945) and M. D. Calvocoressi (1877–1944), British critics never considered the French as a replacement for the Teutons within the canon. By the 1930s, however, when Lambert published Music Ho! and Gray produced his biography of Sibelius, ominous developments within Germany made the need for an alternative to the German tradition even more urgent. Their books were prompted by an impulse similar to that which led Ernest Newman in search of a composer who promised continuity of the symphonic tradition, masculine health, and an alternative modernity. For these writers, Sibelius’s modern renewal of the symphonic tradition was made possible because his innovative formal procedures employed Beethovenian motivic logic in reverse. From the Second Symphony onwards, Sibelius developed a technique in which thematic, rhythmic, and harmonic fragments accumulate power over longer and longer spans of music in a relentless forward trajectory. The English critics found in the eugenicist and organicist vocabulary an up-to-date language to describe Sibelius’s technique of musical tension and release, and they wanted it to be a special sign of the repudiation of decadence after the devastation of the war.