But there was another reason that Gray and Cherniavsky reached for images borrowed from eugenics. In those days, it was so embarrassing for most British middle-class readers to contemplate the topic of sexual pleasure that it could find comfortably oblique expression only in scientific metaphors. Viewed through the lens provided by eugenics, there is an obvious analogy between Sibelius’s creative process and that of heterosexual intercourse: tentative foreplay, increasingly sustained sexual engagement, orgasm, and, the ultimate teleology, a healthy new life generated from the male “germ plasm.”
If a cultural squeamishness concerning the eroticism that saturates Sibelius’s music twisted the British critic’s arguments into knots of allusion, the need to tie Sibelius to Beethoven created equally vexing epistemological inconsistencies. The Victorian progressives and their successors prized several traits of Beethoven’s practice and vaunted them as the standard by which all other composers had to be judged, regardless of whether this aesthetic Procrustean bed was appropriate or not. Beethoven, universally considered the manly paragon of composers, exemplified to perfection the desired masculine traits of rugged individuality, originality, abstraction, and ceaseless innovation. Sibelius was considered by Newman, Gray, Lambert, and the rest to possess all of these Beethovenian characteristics, examples of which appear like a ground bass throughout their encomiums. Unfortunately, Sibelius himself threw cold water on attempts to paint him as a self-consciously intellectual composer, insisting repeatedly that he composed instinctively; furthermore, he had the wisdom never to claim publicly Beethoven’s mantle. In addition, the inherent contradiction between the discourse concerning race created by these authors around Sibelius—portraying him as transcending the mere provincialism of nationality to become a racial archetype—and their oft-repeated insistence on his iconoclastic individuality—one of a kind, belonging to no time—created an unbridgeable cognitive dissonance that was never addressed seriously, let alone reconciled.94
Above all, to insure Sibelius’s supreme status as the true heir to the Beethovenian succession, the British had to insist on his modernity. They were untroubled that portraying Sibelius as a modernist might conflict with their poetic evocations of the Finnish composer as a Nordic archetype who stood outside the boundaries of recorded history. In the opening chapter of his biography, Gray places Sibelius in a modern setting by strategically name-dropping some of the most innovative Finnish architects—Eliel Saarinen, Lars Sonck, and Armas Lindgren—as he observes that the streets of Helsinki are “lined with large and sumptuous buildings designed in an aggressively modernistic style of architecture.”95 In order to present Sibelius’s modernist credentials in the most effective possible light, Lambert eschews organicist verbiage, explaining Sibelius’s innovative conceptions of form through an inspired comparison to a particularly contemporary form of popular fiction:
Instead of being presented with a fait accompli of a theme that is then analysed and developed in fragments, we are presented with several enigmatic fragments that only become a fait accompli on the final page. It is like watching a sculptured head being built up from the armature with little pellets of clay or, to put it more vulgarly, it is like a detective story in which the reader does not know until the final chapter whether the blotting paper of the ashtray throws more light on the discovery of the corpse in the library.96
But Lambert’s appeal to the devices used by such popular authors as Agatha Christie and G. K. Chesterton as models for Sibelius’s modernism pales by comparison to the way in which machines were used as a metaphor for Sibelius’s music. Oddly enough, these mechanistic metaphors had their origin in the staging of one of Sibelius’s most popular works, Finlandia, composed to accompany a series of tableaux vivants that celebrated Finland’s propulsive entry into the twentieth century. As James Hepokoski observes:
This busy tableau proclaimed a linear version of self-assertion projected into the future—a new finally awakened Finland greeting the new century (only two months away) equipped with its own history, with its own poetry and legitimised language, with modern resources (education), and with modern technology (the unstoppable locomotive in this tableau, an image of industrial progress—a steam-propelled Finland racing, by implication, toward an even more modern form of eventual self-rule).97
This phallic locomotive, barreling through winter darkness toward the light of a new century, was only the first time a modern machine would be associated with Sibelius’s work. Ernest Newman, for instance, compared Sibelius’s formal procedures to the huge propeller of a sleek ocean liner.98
It was of all people the musical analyst Donald Francis Tovey (1875–1940) who made the most suggestive evocation of a machine to elucidate a score by Sibelius, one that neatly situates the modern over the natural. While Tovey occasionally indulges in natural imagery to make points about music, he generally eschews the organicist vocabulary: no “germs” here. Furthermore, though Tovey worshipped Beethoven as much as anyone at the time, he pointedly refrained from comparing Sibelius to his idol. (In fact, Tovey never published an analysis of the Fourth Symphony.)
Tovey begins his remarks on Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony with a juxtaposition of the natural with the technological:
I confess that I was thrilled when, in its New-Year’s-Eve review of 1933, the British Broadcasting Corporation used a gramophone record of parts of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony as “slow music” during the recital of the flight over Mount Everest. Let this sentence do duty for all further efforts to describe the austere beauty and rare atmosphere of Sibelius’s mature style. Unlike mountain atmospheres, however, that of Sibelius is by no means lacking in oxygen.
Tovey leaves the natural phenomenon (Mount Everest, no less!) on the ground where it belongs, directly symbolic of nothing, while the modernist composer soars confidently overhead. Later in this admirably concise and consistent essay, Tovey enlarges upon his comparison of Sibelius’s music to that most modern of technological advances for 1933:
If the listener feels that unformed fragments of melody loom out of a severely discordant fog of sound, that is what he is meant to feel. If he cannot tell when or where the tempo changes, that is because Sibelius has achieved the power of moving like aircraft, with the wind or against it. An aeronaut carried with the wind has no sense of movement at all; but Sibelius’s airships are roomy enough for the passengers to dance if they like: and the landscape, to say nothing of the sky-scape, is not always too remote for them to judge the movement of the ship by external evidences. . . . He moves in the air and can change his pace without breaking his movement.99
Tovey’s essays on Sibelius sum up the prevailing British attitudes toward the Finnish composer without lapsing into hagiography, racial profiling, or special pleading. Tovey vividly presents the music, using images drawn from nature and mythology where appropriate. (In truth, it would be extraordinarily difficult to write about Tapiola without using a word such as hurricane.) Aside from his discussion of Tapiola, Tovey does not cite Finnish mythology or the legends of the Kalevala, but rather those of the Norsemen. In his essays on both the Third and Fifth symphonies, Tovey invokes Thor, the god of thunder: “The bustling introduction,” he writes of the opening of the finale of the Fifth Symphony, “provides a rushing wind, through which Thor can enjoy swinging his hammer.”100 Once again the Nordic is conflated with the Finnish: Sibelius the Viking composer steps onstage, portraying Thor, that most virile of Norse deities, suggestively swinging his hammer. Newmarch, who surely read this essay, must have been thrilled to her core.
Although it was all very well and good for these British critics to project their prejudices and cultural (and clearly psychological) anxieties upon Sibelius, one wonders whether all this comment had a positive or negative effect on the reception of his music over time. Both Newmarch and Gray knew the composer and were surely aware that personally Sibelius was no Viking. He was a habitually undisciplined, sybaritic connoisseur of potent spirits and expensive cigars, and his fa
stidiousness was reflected in his immaculate clothes. These characteristics are what Gray doubtless meant by “Swedish affability.” The Finnish composer may have been patently heterosexual—he sired five daughters, after all—but he was hardly a “primitive.”101
Contemporary British critical biases affected later reception of the music as well, and not in positive ways. Certainly, Sibelius would have had to have possessed superhuman equipoise not to have basked in the admiration of the English; at the same time, their often excessive praise may have contributed to the long creative silence that followed the Seventh Symphony. What sensitive and insecure composer could have lived up to such adulation? Aside from Tovey’s unpretentiousness and Lambert’s wit, the phrases used to describe this music were often sullied by both snobbery and racism. The jungle of organicist verbiage used by Cherniavksy, for example, gave the impression that Sibelius’s music could only be understood in terms of “germ” analysis. The pernicious tendency toward aesthetic ranking long beloved by British critics did further damage, especially during the reaction against Sibelius that set in during the 1950s and ’60s. At that time, the high claims made by Newman, Gray, and others were discredited largely as a result of the hyperbole in which those critics had indulged. One of the reasons that the Fourth Symphony remains rarely performed today is the undue stress that Newman, Gray, Lambert, and Cherniavsky laid upon its austerity, a critical trope that has been repeated lazily for decades. For all its seriousness, the Fourth displays considerable sonic allure and, in the finale, long passages of brightness and charm. Reading Gray’s daunting descriptions, one would never guess that the gloom lifted for even a moment. (Dissenting from this conventional wisdom, Newmarch protested, “Surely it is impossible to write of the A minor Symphony as conceived in a dull, uniform and colourless scheme?”)102 By promoting the Fourth Symphony, along with the Seventh and Tapiola, as the summit of Sibelius’s achievement, these critics were compelled by their own narrow standards to discredit other scores that are equally superb.
Of course, these writers were not entirely without discrimination: their enthusiasm for Sibelius’s music, though ineptly expressed at times, was not misplaced. They were right about the quality of the works they praised. After a relatively brief eclipse during the darkest days of High Modernism, Sibelius’s music has reemerged as a cornerstone of the orchestral repertory in the twenty-first century. The British critics rightly prized his music as a useful alternative to a Teutonic modernism they deemed, not without cause, as pretentious, decadent, amateurish, and sterile. They admired Sibelius’s formal control as worked out in the persuasive if unorthodox progression of ideas in his symphonies; they honored him as an innovator whose originality was expressed in his own fashion. More controversially, they believed that through being an avatar of the “Nordic race” he channeled the voice of nature itself. In other words, the British admired Sibelius for precisely the opposite reasons—item for item—for which Adorno criticized him to Newman. The “urbane” Newman must have been bemused by the German philosopher’s inversion of the British critical estimate: the diatribe must have seemed straight out of Alice in Wonderland. On the subject of Sibelius and England, as with Stravinsky and jazz (and so much else), Adorno got it wrong.
NOTES
The author wishes to thank Daniel M. Grimley, Aidan Thomson, Lauren Cowdery, Christopher H. Gibbs, Howard Pollack, and Marcus Desmond Harmon for their assistance in the preparation of this essay, which is dedicated to the memory of Felix Aprahamian, critic, bon vivant, mentor, and loyal friend.
1. Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1976), 172–3. Translation amended.
2. Ernest Newman (1868–1959, born William Roberts) was a music critic and biographer who served as chief critic for the (London) Sunday Times from 1920 until his death.
3. Adorno returned to the subject of Sibelius several times over the course of his career, echoing the opinions expressed to Newman. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Törne, B. de, Sibelius: A Close–Up,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 7 (1938), 460–63, repr. as “Glosse über Sibelius” in Impromptus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 88–92, and translated in the Documents section of this volume. See also “Difficulties” in Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, and trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 646–67; and Max Paddison’s essay in the current volume.
4. Granville Bantock, Foreword to Rosa Newmarch, Jean Sibelius: A Short History of a Long Friendship (Boston: C. C. Burchard, 1939), 9.
5.Daily Telegraph, 15 December 1934, in Walter Legge, Walter Legge: Words and Music, ed. Alan Sanders (New York: Routledge, 1998), 74.
6. Newmarch, Jean Sibelius, 27.
7. Over four hundred performances of works by Sibelius were given at the Proms between 1901 and the year of the composer’s death, 1957. See The Proms Archive, http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/archive/.
8. Jean Sibelius to Rosa Newmarch, 2 May 1911, in Newmarch, Jean Sibelius, 36.
9. Frederick Delius to Granville Bantock, 3 June 1912, in Lewis Foreman, From Parry to Britten: British Music in Letters 1900–1945 (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1987), 52. In his commentary on this letter, Foreman writes, “Wood was to have introduced Scriabin’s Prometheus: Poem of Fire to England but it was cancelled after the programme had been announced.” Conducting the Queen’s Hall Orchestra, Wood introduced Scriabin’s work to London audiences on 1 February 1913.
10. Barry Smith, Peter Warlock: The Life of Philip Heseltine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 36.
11. Erik Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, vol. 2, 1904–1914, trans. Robert Layton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 219.
12. Newmarch, Jean Sibelius, 46.
13. Ibid., 47.
14. Smith, Peter Warlock, 36. Author’s emphasis added.
15. Quoted in Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 2:220.
16. Ibid.
17. No Proms performances for Janáek took place during his lifetime: the first performance at a Proms of a work by Janáek was his ValaŠské tance, op. 2, conducted by Wood in 1930. See The Proms Archive: http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/archive/.
18. Ursula Vaughan Williams, R. V. W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 159. The year of the ISCM Festival at which Vaughan Williams heard Píhody LiŠky BystrouŠky is incorrectly given here as 1925, but the Prague/Salzburg festival occurred in 1924, the year of the opera’s premiere in Brno.
19. Peter Franklin, “Sibelius in Britain,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius, ed. Daniel M. Grimley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 187.
20. Ernest Newman, More Essays from the World of Music: Essays from the London “Sunday Times,” selected by Felix Aprahamian (New York: Coward-McCann, 1958), 113–15.
21. Ernest Newman, Essays from the World of Music: Essays from “The Sunday Times” Selected by Felix Aprahamian (London: John Calder, 1956, repr. New York: Da Capo Press, 1978), 128–29.
22. Cecil Gray, Sibelius, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), 10. The first edition of this biography was published in 1931, when the Proms were presenting such popular scores as Finlandia constantly; Gray is clearly speaking here about the Fourth Symphony, the Seventh Symphony, and Tapiola.
23. For a detailed discussion of the reaction by British artists to the Wilde Trials, see William Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1945), 214–15, and Byron Adams, “The Dark Saying of the Enigma: Homoeroticism and the Elgarian Paradox,” in Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, ed. Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 216–44.
24. Quoted in Jerrold Northrop Moore, Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 459.
25. See George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985), 30, 33–37.
26. Dan
Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Inter-war Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), 116.
27. Newmarch, Jean Sibelius, 16.
28. Ibid., 18.
29. Newman, More Essays, 114–15.
30. Gray, Sibelius, 143–44.
31. Constant Lambert, Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline (London: Faber & Faber, 1934; repr. London: Hogarth Press, 1985), 261.
32. David Cherniavsky, “Special Characteristics of Sibelius’s Style” in Sibelius: A Symposium, ed. Gerald Abraham (London: Lindsay Drummond Limited, 1947; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 168–69. (Author’s emphases.)
33. Cecil Gray, A Survey of Contemporary Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1924), 186–88.
34. Ibid., 193.
35. Max Nordau (1849–1923) was an influential author whose major work, Entartung (Degeneration; 1892) is in part an attack on the decadence of the modern metropolis.
36. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 32.
37. Ibid., 183.
38. Newman, More Essays, 128.
39. Gray, Sibelius, 23–24. Describing the strangeness of the Finnish landscape, Gray uses the word otherness, which he mentions he has borrowed from D. H. Lawrence.
40. Ibid., 56. Most of Sibelius’s later biographers dismiss Gray’s racial bifurcation as incorrect; Robert Layton, for example, states that Gray’s assumptions are “highly misleading,” as “Swedish–speaking Finns possess a distinctive and highly developed culture which is purely Finnish.” See Robert Layton, Sibelius (New York: Schirmer Books, 1992), 12n2.
41. Jeremy Dibble, C. Hubert H. Parry: His Life and Music (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 206.
42. Ibid., 121.
43. C. Hubert H. Parry, The Evolution of the Art of Music, 4th ed. (London: Kegan Paul, 1905), 60–61, 74. Parry’s racial assumptions are directed at individual composers as well, as when he writes, “Indeed, the Oriental love of display which is so frequently found subsisting in people of Jewish descent marked Meyerbeer as essentially a man for the occasion” (312).
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