44. Newman’s abjuration of “unalterable race-characteristics” comes from an essay entitled “Wagner, Debussy and Form” originally published in an April 1918 issue of The New Witness, and reprinted in Ernest Newman, The Testament of Music: Essays and Papers by Ernest Newman, ed. Herbert Van Thal (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 200. Newman’s review of Bloch’s Sacred Service appeared in the Sunday Times, 3 April 1938, and was reprinted in Newman, Essays from the World of Music, 139–40. This review is hardly the sole instance in which Newman resorts to racial essentialism. As he once wrote of Bruckner, “The basis of this music is a certain racial or ancestral mentality that is nourished by a strong feeling for nature.” See Newman, More Essays, 60. It must be pointed out that Newman published a scathing condemnation of the Nazis’ racial policies just after the Anschluss: see “Racial Theories and Music: Whither Is Germany Tending,” Sunday Times, 20 March 1938, repr. in Essays from the World of Music, 185–88.
45. Gray, Sibelius, 170. On the very next page, Gray, who was clearly taken with prolific composers, pays tribute to “the exuberant fecundity of Sibelius” which he sees as “a positive quality, even if some of its by-products are purely negative; it is a necessary condition of the highest creative achievements” (171).
46. Ibid., 170.
47. Herbert Spencer first used the phrase “survival of the fittest” in his The Principles of Biology, vol. 1 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1864), 444–45. Sir Francis Galton shared a common ancestor, Erasmus Darwin, with the great biologist and was thus related, more distantly, to Darwin’s great nephew, Ralph Vaughan Williams. For the cordial relationship between Darwin and Galton, see Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2009), 118–19.
48. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 107.
49. All quotes by Galton are found in Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 119–21. As Spiro notes pointedly, “Galton’s ideas on eugenics were fully sanctioned by his admiring cousin. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin extolled the ‘remarkable’ and ‘ingenious’ work of Galton, and affirmed the central tenet of eugenics” (122). G. K. Chesterton was one of the few British intellectuals of the time to challenge the conclusions of the eugenicists. Eugenic programs were espoused by George Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and H. G. Wells, among others. In a speech delivered at the Eugenics Education Society on 3 March 1910, Shaw publicly proposed the eventual use of a “lethal chamber” to prune humanity of the weak and disabled; see Stone, Breeding Superman, 127. Chesterton argued against eugenics from an ethical rather than a scientific position and thus found few supporters at the time; later historical and scientific developments proved him correct. See G .K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils (London: Cassell and Company, 1922).
50. Thomas Henry Huxley, “Emancipation—Black and White,” originally published in the Reader, 20 May 1865, repr. in Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews (New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1910), 20. Notice that Huxley does not allow African Americans into the same genus as himself and his (presumably) white readers.
51. Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 168.
52. The staggeringly rich and powerfully connected widow of the railroad baron E. H. Harriman sponsored the Cold Harbor Project of the American eugenicist Charles Benedict Davenport (1866–1944); see Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 127, for Theodore Roosevelt’s interest in eugenics, especially his fears of “race suicide” if the members of his own class did not overcome their “selfishness” and procreate like barnyard animals (Spiro, 99, 112). The Republican Party was anti-immigration and nakedly anti-Semitic during this era.
53. Like a surprising number of those eugenicists who urged the white races to procreate industriously, Grant lived in an exclusively male environment. A prominent Republican, an unwavering anti-Semite, and the founder of the American Galton Society, Grant was the guiding force behind the creation of the Bronx Zoo, several national parks, and the passage of draconian laws that imposed strict quotas upon immigration. See Spiro, Defending the Master Race, a volume that examines the history of the American eugenics movement through an investigation of Grant’s life and career. For the sales of The Passing of the Great Race, see Spiro, 161. 355–56.
54. Spiro erroneously claims that few “people realized that the term ‘Nordic,’ which was universally accepted and employed by laymen and scientists alike, was a neologism introduced by Grant in 1916.” See Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 167–68. This is incorrect: Joseph Deniker (1852–1918) expropriated the term from literary criticism and used the word Nordique in his racial classifications. The economist and ethnologist W. Z. Ripley used Nordic in a “scientific” context in 1898.
55. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History, 4th rev. ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921), 167–68.
56. Ibid., 169, 236.
57. Ibid., 228.
58. Ibid., 170.
59. Emily Greene Balch (1867–1961) was a pacifist, a professor of sociology and economics at Wellesley College from 1896 to 1918, and the editor of The Nation; she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946. For information on Balch and other reviews of Grant’s book, see Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 158–61.
60. Ibid., 355,
61. Ibid., 158, 301–2. John Galsworthy (1867–1933), author of The Forsythe Saga, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934. W. J. Sollas (1849–1936), whom Spiro identifies as an anthropologist, was appointed to the Chair of Geology at Oxford in 1894.
62. Stone, Breeding Superman, 5–6.
63. Gray, Sibelius, 183.
64. Ibid., 55. I have been unable to trace the source of Gray’s descriptive quotation, which may well be a composite of the author’s own devising. These blithe comments on his subject’s physique are particularly jarring as they are made immediately after Gray’s declaration that it was unnecessary “to intrude in unmannerly fashion upon [Sibelius’s] private life.”
65. Not everybody was impressed with Sibelius’s appearance, however: Bantock’s daughter Myrrha was reminded of a “Nordic troll.” Quoted in Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 2:42.
66. Gray, Sibelius, 141–42.
67. Published in the Sunday Times, 1 October 1939, repr. in Newman, More Essays, 119.
68. Nurmi won his first medals at the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp, and went on to win 12 Olympic medals in total. He was barred from competing in the 1932 Los Angeles Games because of claims he had received money for appearances—in other words, that he had become a professional. After he retired from athletics, he struggled with health problems, and later attacked the sporting establishment.
69. Gray, Sibelius, 151.
70 Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 13, 49.
71. Gray, Sibelius, 157.
72. Ibid., 144.
73. Gray, for example, writes of the first movement of the Second Symphony: “One can detect several distinct groups of thematic germs. . . . [Sibelius] then breathes life into them, bringing them into organic relation with each other and causing them to grow in stature and significance with each successive appearance, like living things” Sibelius, 135–36). If Walter Legge’s translation from the original German used in the interview is accurate, Sibelius claimed that “the germ and fertilisation of my symphonies has been purely musical” (Legge, Words and Music, 73). While earlier British composers and writers, such as Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924), employed the word germ to denote a musical motive, only later was the term placed within the context of an organicist vocabulary and its meaning expanded significantly. See Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, Musical Composition: A Short Treatise for Students (London: Macmillan, 1911), 66.
74. Cherniavsky’s early death was the result of complications to his health while on active service during the Second World War.
75. Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 124–25. Grant
mentions the “germ plasm” as well, in The Passing of the Great Race, 15.
76. Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 129.
77. Cherniavsky, “Special Characteristics of Sibelius’s Style,” in Abraham, Sibelius, 144.
78. Gray, A Survey of Contemporary Music, 185.
79. Gray, Sibelius, 175.
80. Ibid., 146. Gray disdains to give the reader even the slightest hint of what this low music-hall song might be, but he may have been alluding to the similarity of the “Swan Hymn” to the American popular song “The Band Played On,” written by Charles B. Ward (1879–1946) in 1895, that begins, “Casey would waltz with a strawberry blonde.” Any connection between Sibelius’s “Swan Hymn” and this song seems to have originated in Gray’s perfervid imagination. For the reasons why Sibelius himself called the great melody of the finale of his Fifth Symphony the “Swan Hymn,” as well as a sketch analysis of the melody that casts severe doubt upon Gray’s facile assertion, see James Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 36–37.
81. Gray, Sibelius, 188–89.
82. Legge, Words and Music, 73.
83. Newman, More Essays, 124, 128.
84. Lambert, Music Ho! 272. The use of late Beethoven to complement Sibelius’s music was a common device used by both Gray and Cherniavsky; see Gray, Sibelius, 201, and Cherniavsky, “Special Characteristics of Sibelius’s Style,” in Abraham, Sibelius, 146.
85. David Cherniavsky, “The Use of Germ Motives by Sibelius,” Music and Letters 23/1 (January 1942): 2. It must be remembered that Cherniavsky was serving in the British armed forces, at one of the darkest moments in the Second World War, when his article was published: it was amazing he managed to write it, or, for that matter, that the valiant editors of Music & Letters managed to publish an issue at all.
86. Gray, Sibelius, 187, 201.
87. Ibid., 190.
88. Ibid., 190–91, 201.
89. Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, 209.
90. Parry denounced the contemporary operas of his day in no uncertain terms: “It is only in the crudest phases of modern theatrical music that mere appeals to sensation are dignified by the name of art. . . . In modern opera climaxes of sound are often piled up one after another without doing anything but excite the animal side of man’s nature.” See Parry, The Evolution of the Art of Music, 180.
91. Gray, A Survey of Contemporary Music, 110.
92. Lambert, Music Ho! 49.
93. Newman, Testament of Music, 200, 203.
94. Newman spoke for many of his critical peers when he opined, “Nationalism in music is like dialect in speech: the only means we have of detecting it, indeed, is by some peculiarity of melody or rhythm.” See Newman, Testament of Music, 185. Predictably, such opinions brought Newman into conflict with Vaughan Williams.
95. Gray, Sibelius, 24, 28.
96. Lambert, Music Ho! 271.
97. James Hepokoski, “Finlandia Awakens,” in Grimley, The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius, 89–90. The event at which the first version of Finlandia was performed to accompany these tableaux vivants was the Helsinki Press Celebrations that took place in November 1899.
98. Newman, Essays from the World of Music, 130–32.
99. Donald Francis Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis, (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 6:89–90.
100. Donald Francis Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis, (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 2:128.
101. Indeed, Sibelius had a marked distaste for disorderly dress: he recalled Brahms as “an unsavory-looking fellow, untidily dressed in a shabby suit that bore evidence of many a previous meal and grey with cigar ash.” He was no more approving of Bruckner’s slovenliness. See Legge, Words and Music, 72.
102. Newmarch, Sibelius, 74.
Jean Sibelius and His American Connections
GLENDA DAWN GOSS
Conventional wisdom has often held that Jean Sibelius’s most vital musical connections outside Finland were primarily with the Austro-German world. Yet, as ever with topics both Finnish and Sibelian, the reality is far more complex. For one thing, two of Sibelius’s greatest tone poems—The Oceanides and Tapiola—were composed for the United States of America. For another, there is evidence to suggest that this composer’s only trip to the United States, in the year 1914, was among the high points of his professional life. And it seems never to have been pointed out that, throughout his adult life, Sibelius cultivated connections with musical Americans.
Unfortunately, the paucity of scholarship on this topic has reinforced an oversimplified view. One of the few scholars to deal with the theme during the composer’s lifetime was Otto Andersson (1879–1969), the music professor who founded the Sibelius Museum in Turku (Åbo), in southwestern Finland. After two visits to the United States, in 1950 and 1954, Andersson published his Jean Sibelius i Amerika (Jean Sibelius in America).1 Since then, there have been only two book-length forays into the subject, both under my authorship: Jean Sibelius and Olin Downes: Music, Friendship, Criticism (1995) and Vieläkö lähetämme hänelle sikareja? Sibelius, Amerikka ja amerikkalaiset (Are we still sending him cigars? Sibelius, America, and Americans; 2009).2 Yet all three studies show that Sibelius’s connections with Americans ran deep and suggest how much is still to be learned in this area.
The discussion that follows is too brief to afford an all-encompassing view of Jean Sibelius vis-à-vis American musicians, composers, music lovers, and the many aspects of American life on which the Finn exerted an influence. The purpose here is rather to establish a framework for the scope and quality of these connections and then to provide a few vignettes to illustrate something of the nature of this relationship. Just as a new route to a well-known place can refresh our outlook, a different approach to a familiar subject can reveal unsuspected connections between people on different sides of a vast ocean, show curious ways in which the histories of Finland and America have intertwined, and even suggest new ways of hearing Sibelius’s music.
Early Links
Sibelius’s links to the New World are usually associated with the year 1914, when the composer spent several weeks in North America. Yet his connections with Americans had their beginnings at least as early as 1889. In that year, a government stipend to study composition in Berlin brought the twenty-three-year-old Hämeenlinna musician into contact with other foreigners aspiring to musical careers and converging on what was probably the most famous capital in the world for their art. While these foreigners included such Nordic musicians as Alf Klingenberg, Christian Sinding (both from Norway), and Fini Henriques (of Denmark), Americans were also among them: a sister and brother, violinist Geraldine and cellist Paul Morgan, and the violinist Theodore Spiering, who, like Geraldine Morgan, was studying with Joseph Joachim at the Königliche Hochschule für Musik. Sooner or later, all of these young musicians would play a part in Sibelius’s life and career.
A few months after Sibelius left Berlin in 1890, Paul Morgan wrote to remind him of a promise to send a copy of his G-Minor Piano Quintet, which Morgan wanted to play for Joachim. Whether Sibelius followed through on his promise is unclear, but on 15 February 1891, the two Morgans together with Spiering and Henriques did play Sibelius’s Quartet in B-flat Major (op. 4, completed the previous September), prompting enthusiastic accolades from Sinding, who was in the audience.3
By the time Sibelius began to settle down in Finland after his study years abroad, an American had even stepped onto the musical scene in Helsinki. William Humphrys Dayas (1863–1903), one of Franz Liszt’s American pupils, had succeeded Ferruccio Busoni as the piano teacher at the Helsinki Music Institute. Dayas, known among the Finns as a “competent and enthusiastic teacher,” would teach in Finland from 1890 until the middle of 1894.4 Among his pupils was Karl Ekman (Sr.), who with his wife, Ida, became a great interpreter of Sibelius’s songs.
At the end of August 1891, Sibelius was planning to meet Dayas because “I want to consult with him about one or two th
ings.”5 The “one or two things” may have had to do with his solo songs, because on 2 November 1891, Dayas accompanied the leading Finnish baritone Abraham Ojanperä (1856–1916) in the premieres of “Hjärtats morgon” (The heart’s morning), “Drömmen” (The dream), op. 13, nos. 3 and 5, and “Fågellek” (The play of the birds), op. 17, no. 3.6 The following year, on 16 December 1892, the same musicians premiered “Under strandens granar” (Beneath the fir trees of the shore) and “Till Frigga” (To Frigga), op. 13, nos. 1 and 6. Both times the composer was in the audience. After the first of these concerts, Sibelius was writing exuberantly to his fiancée, Aino Järnefelt, that hearing these songs performed gave him new life.7
At a surprisingly early stage, then, Sibelius’s career was being advanced by American performers. But how much Sibelius in turn was exerting an influence on Americans is yet to be determined. Dayas, for one, was a composer as well as a pianist, and the importance of Sibelius’s works to his music has not been explored. Certainly, the two men were, if not friends, at least colleagues. During 1892–93, Sibelius was playing the violin regularly with the Music Institute’s string quartet, an activity that placed him on the same concert program with Dayas at least seven times. On one of these evenings, 17 March 1893, they even played together in a somewhat unusual work: Camille Saint-Saëns’s Septet for trumpet, string quintet, and piano (op. 65).8
Among the most distinguished Americans to take up Sibelius’s music in the first decade of the twentieth century was Maud Powell (1867–1920), another violinist who had studied with Joachim. Powell made her European debut with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1885 with Joachim conducting, and knowledgeable contemporaries eventually placed her in the same league as Fritz Kreisler and Eugène Ysaÿe. Only a year after Sibelius had revised his Violin Concerto, Maud Powell gave the work its American premiere. On 30 November 1906, she performed the concerto with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Wassily Safonoff (1852–1918). The reception was disappointing, but when she repeated the work in Chicago a few months later, the evening was “a triumph,” as she put it; the conductor, Frederick Stock (1872–1942), she said, was completely in sympathy with her interpretation and with Sibelius’s composition.9
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 23