Jean Sibelius and His World

by Grimley, Daniel M.

  Americans had even begun to perform Sibelius’s vocal music—hardly a foregone conclusion, given the language question. Minnie Tracey (ca. 1870–1929), a native of Albany, New York, was one of the first foreigners to take up Sibelius’s songs. In her article “Music Masters of Scandinavia,” published in Musical America in 1912, Tracey declared that she had sung all of the Finnish composer’s songs.10

  Minnie Tracey made her career as an opera singer. The evidence for her success is somewhat checkered. She took on the mezzo-soprano role of Rosa Mammai in Francisco Cilea’s L’arlesiana, a part in which she was acclaimed mainly for her “horrible pronunciation”; in 1909, she was hissed off a Geneva stage during a performance of Tristan und Isolde, an episode she put down to professional jealousy.11 Yet when Tracey premiered Sibelius’s orchestral version of “Höstkväll” (Fall evening) in Paris, with Alfred Cortot conducting on 14 January 1905, Le Figaro reported that the work “made a deep impression.”12

  Sibelius came to know Tracey personally during a stay in Paris at the end of 1911. Their relationship was more fraught than that with Morgan or Dayas. In letters written from Paris to Aino (by now the composer’s wife), Sibelius reported meeting Tracey several times; he first described her as not being as great an artist as a person; before long he was referring to her as min fiende (Swedish: my enemy) and eventually as koko tiikeri (Finnish: a real tigress).13 At the very least, Tracey’s letters to Sibelius show her to have been single-minded in her determination to arrange extravagant plans for concertizing with the composer, including a tour in the United States.14 It would not be until another American diva, the contralto Marian Anderson (1897–1993), visited Ainola in the 1930s that the bitter experience with Minnie Tracey would, in a sense, be redeemed.15

  During these years, the violinist Theodore Spiering (1871–1925) resurfaced in Sibelius’s life. Appointed concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic under Gustav Mahler, Spiering stepped in to conduct the last seventeen concerts of the 1910–11 season after Mahler fell ill. Among these was the program on 13 March 1911 featuring “national geniuses”: Johan Svendsen, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Antonin Dvoák, and the Sibelius Violin Concerto.16

  Spiering’s conducting ambitions would benefit Sibelius in other ways. Failing to secure the permanent post as the New York Philharmonic’s chief conductor, Spiering moved to Berlin in 1912. There he became the conductor and adviser to the Neue Freie Volksbühne, for which he had scheduled Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony for the 1914–15 season. In January 1914 Sibelius too was in Berlin. He met Spiering and gave him instructions for conducting the symphony as well as Finlandia.17 The outbreak of war put a stop to the Fourth Symphony plans, but not to Spiering’s conducting of Sibelius’s music. In 1925 when Spiering was appointed the conductor of the new Portland Symphony Orchestra, Finlandia was on his concert programs for school children.18

  “Till America! Avay!”

  In 1913 Sibelius began receiving correspondence from the American composer and Yale University professor Horatio Parker (1863–1919).19 By this time, he had been personally acquainted with Americans for more than two decades. Parker initially approached Sibelius with a request to set three poems to music for American school children. And so the Three Songs for American Schools were born: “Autumn Song,” “The Sun Upon the Lake Is Low,” and “A Cavalry Catch.” All appeared in Parker’s Progressive Music Series, a graded music instruction course published in Boston in 1915.

  It was on Parker’s recommendation that the wealthy music patrons Carl and Ellen Battell Stoeckel invited Sibelius to compose a work for their summer music festival in Norfolk, Connecticut (an event that continues today as the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival). When Sibelius accepted and began the tone poem that would become The Oceanides (or, in Finnish, Aallottaret, op. 73), the couple followed up their commission with an invitation to conduct his works in their modestly named “Music Shed.” Carl Stoeckel wrote a detailed account of this visit, from the docking of Sibelius’s ship in New York harbor to the tours of Niagara Falls and the Housatonic River to the unforgettable performance in the Music Shed and the honorary doctorate bestowed upon Sibelius by Yale University.20

  During this visit Sibelius met some of the most outstanding figures in the musical life of the United States: the conductor and composer Walter Damrosch, who would later commission Tapiola and give its premiere in New York’s Mecca Temple; Maud Powell, for whom the Stoeckels commissioned a work from the African-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor; the soprano Alma Gluck; the choral conductors Arthur Mees and Richmond Park Paine; the composers Horatio Parker, George W. Chadwick, Frederick Shepherd Converse, Charles Martin Loeffler, and Henry Hadley; critics of the likes of Henry E. Krehbiel, Philip Hale, and Olin Downes; and, not least, the recent president of the United States, William Howard Taft.

  In the aftermath of the exuberant reception he was accorded by these and other American luminaries, Sibelius composed the music that many people consider to be his greatest—Symphonies 5, 6, and 7, and Tapiola.

  The World’s First Sibelius Society

  Meanwhile, the ripple effect of Sibelius’s visit had only just begun to be felt in North America. Almost exactly one year after the composer’s New World journey, a group of music-loving Finnish-Americans in the mill town of Monessen, Pennsylvania, began serious discussions about how to advance the cause of Finnish music generally in the New World.21

  Monessen was not just a town of steel mills: its pride and joy was the Louhi Band, which had been established on 14 February 1900, only two years after the town itself was founded. By 1915, George E. Wahlström was the band’s conductor, and as Monessen’s population expanded—to more than 18,000 by 1920—the band under his direction also grew, from the twelve who had played with the first conductor, Axel Ruuti, to a respectable fifty-member ensemble capable of performing Beethoven, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, and Sibelius.

  It is not known exactly how much their famous countryman’s recent visit to their shores may have inspired the cause of Monessen’s Finnish-American residents. What is known is that the outcome of their meetings in July 1915 led to the founding of a nationwide music society. Initially, the founders called their association the Finnish-American Musical Club, but soon they took a bold decision: to ask Jean Sibelius for permission to name the organization for him. On 4 August 1915, the principal officers signed their names to a letter addressed to Sibelius, requesting to call their new organization “Sibelius-klubi”—the Sibelius Club; their purpose, they explained, was to build a bridge between their Finnish homeland and their present place of dwelling. Sibelius agreed, and the world’s first Sibelius society was born.

  The Sibelius Society members were exceptionally active. They intended their organization to be the conduit for supplying Americans with scores and musical arrangements by Sibelius and other Finns and Finnish-Americans. They issued arrangements for a full military band version of Finland’s national anthem Maamme-laulu, as well as patriotic works such as Porilaisten marssi and Suomen laulu. In 1916 the Society decided to undertake a series of songbooks for Finnish choral groups in America, and in 1917 began to publish a periodical called Airut.

  Airut’s debut volume was hugely impressive: large in size, expensively and handsomely produced, it included numerous photographs showing off Finnish-American brass bands and choral societies. Sibelius’s letter permitting the Society to use his name was reproduced in facsimile. There was a poem, “Sibeliukselle” (To Sibelius) by Kalle Koski. And there were caricatures of the board members, which spruced up “serious” articles by Leevi Madetoja. Airut and the Society’s activities were soon curtailed, however, apparently by America’s entry into the Great War.

  But after the war the Sibelius Society members, along with other Finnish-Americans of Monessen, in a sense, came home. In 1920 the Louhi Band announced a concert tour of Finland in honor of the newly independent nation. A contingent of some four hundred Finnish-Americans wanted to accompany the band. On 10 June 1920, when
the steamship Ariadne arrived in Helsinki’s south harbor, it bore the Louhi Band, members of the Monessen Sibelius Society, and the largest group of emigrant Finns ever to return to the homeland.

  That evening in the National Theatre, the Louhi Band gave the first of its twenty-five planned concerts. Sibelius was in the audience. Afterward he came forward to thank the conductor in person. According to Louhi Band lore, the wreath later on display in Monessen’s Finnish Lutheran Church was a gift from the composer himself on that occasion.

  Sibelius and the Eastman School of Music

  After the Great War, many other Americans came knocking at Sibelius’s door. In January of the same year as the Louhi Band’s tour of Finland, the composer received a tempting offer from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. The director of this newly established institution was none other than Alf Klingenberg, Sibelius’s friend from his student days in Berlin. Klingenberg had emigrated to the United States and eventually settled in Rochester. Along with two other musicians—Hermann Dossenbach, a prominent Rochester violinist, and a voice teacher by the name of Oscar Gareissen—Klingenberg had founded the D.K.G. Institute of Musical Art. After a few years the organization, which was floundering financially, was purchased by the wealthy George Eastman, the inventor of the Kodak camera and roll film. Eastman appointed Klingenberg director of the new school, and Klingenberg began to recruit faculty members.

  A long-running fiction—that Sibelius was asked to be the Eastman School’s director—was introduced into the Sibelius lore by Karl Ekman Jr. (the son of the pianist taught by Dayas), who in writing a biography of the composer in the 1930s either misunderstood Sibelius or was misled by him.22 In fact, Klingenberg invited Sibelius to teach composition. His offer is very clear and its terms quite attractive: Sibelius was to teach “the up-and-coming geniuses in America” to compose, “a task that should not be too onerous,” he promised.23 Moreover, Sibelius was to have free time to travel as a guest conductor in order to perform his works with the “many excellent orchestras” in the United States.

  Sibelius said maybe, then he said yes, and then he said he would need to have $20,000. Staggered, Klingenberg came up with that unheard of sum for the 1921–22 academic year. But then, after his acceptance had been announced in the New York Times (on 25 January 1921), Sibelius telegraphed his refusal.

  The reasons seem to have been several, and the one Sibelius gave to Klingenberg—ill health, apparently Aino’s—was perhaps the main one. And so the post of Composition Professor at Eastman was offered to another member of that long-ago Berlin circle, Christian Sinding (1856–1941). Sinding accepted, but vacated the position after some months, and Klingenberg again turned to Finland, recruiting Selim Palmgren (1878–1951), who taught in Rochester for several years.24 Perhaps it was this beginning that disposed the Eastman School to a Nordic outlook, even when its Norwegian-born director was replaced by an American: Howard Hanson (1896–1981).

  Born in Wahoo, Nebraska, a town half Swedish and Lutheran, half Bohemian and Catholic, Hanson belonged to the Swedish-Lutheran half, his parents having been brought to the United States as children from Sweden. Perhaps for that reason their son nurtured a particular fondness for Nordic music. Pulled between music and the ministry, Howard Hanson opted for music and headed to New York, then to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. After graduation he taught at the College of the Pacific in San Jose, California, where he became the Dean of the Conservatory of Fine Arts in 1919. Then he spent three years in Italy.

  It was in Rome that Hanson completed the first of what would be seven symphonies: the austere Symphony no. 1, op. 21, subtitled “Nordic,” a work that, according to its composer, embodies “the solemnity, austerity and grandeur of the North.” Like Sibelius’s first symphony, Hanson’s first is in E minor. Hanson himself conducted the premiere in Rome with the Augusteo Orchestra in 1923. Sibelius was also in Rome that year; in March, he too conducted the Augusteo Orchestra, performing his Second Symphony and movements of the Lemminkäinen Suite. It seems likely that the two composers met on this occasion, although for how long and under what circumstances remains unclear.25 What is clear is that the “Nordic” Symphony brought Hanson to the attention of George Eastman when the composer conducted it in Rochester on 19 March 1924.

  The result was the appointment of a young and untried musician, whose long and eminent tenure as the director of the Eastman School would be distinguished for its enthusiastic and empathetic cultivation of American music. The school also showed distinct Nordic sympathies, evident among a number of Hanson’s faculty and students, one of whom was Gardner Read (1913–2005). Read, who went on to have a respected career as a composer and as the author of several widely used books on musical notation and orchestration, composed his first symphony as a student at Eastman. As he told Sibelius in private correspondence, he was directly influenced by his symphonies 2 and 4.26 Read even chose the same tonality (A minor) as Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony for his own first symphony, a work awarded first prize in a national contest sponsored by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

  Another piece of fiction—widely circulated—is that Gardner Read “studied” with Sibelius.27 Although Read’s correspondence shows that he studied Sibelius’s scores, studying with Sibelius himself was a more difficult proposition. Like hundreds of other Americans during the twentieth century, Gardner Read simply made a visit to Ainola one summer afternoon: the date was 31 July 1939. Read got a great deal of mileage out of that visit. The cachet of saying one had “studied with Sibelius” was so great that the claim appeared in books about American music, in Read’s obituaries, in respected research works, and even on Read’s official website.28 The documentary evidence suggests that Sibelius’s influence on Read may have been more distant than directly personal: there is no reason, however, to question Sibelius’s musical legacy in Read’s work.

  Finlandia and Americans

  The timing of Read’s visit to Ainola and his enthusiasm for Sibelius’s music was no coincidence. By the 1930s, Sibelius was at the height of his North American fame. There were many reasons, among them conductors in the United States dedicated to programming his music, men like Serge Koussevitzky, Leopold Stokowski, and eventually Arturo Toscanini; enthusiastic and influential music critics, especially “Sibelius’s Apostle” Olin Downes, who was well placed at the New York Times; the prevalence and power of radio and the recording industry; and, not least, the musical soundscape of the twentieth century, a world in which the gulf that had opened between listeners and composers was becoming unbridgeable. In 1935, when listeners to radio broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra concerts were asked to cast two votes—one for their favorite living composer and one for their favorite past composer—respondents voted Sibelius in first place as their favorite living symphonist, placing him on a par with Beethoven, their favorite symphonist from the past.29

  Although the seven numbered symphonies were widely known, both inside the concert hall and on the radio waves, Sibelius was most often represented across the United States by two phenomenally popular works, Valse triste and Finlandia. It was Finlandia that Americans embraced as their own, and by the 1930s that embrace had reached extravagant dimensions.

  Composed in 1899, at a time when Finland was still an autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire, Finlandia was first heard during the last of six tableaux vivants staged during the so-called Press Celebration Days, the ostensible purpose of which was to raise money for pension funds of journalists made redundant by the tsar’s censorship and his systematic closing down of Finnish newspapers. The subtext of the event, however, was Finnish resistance to Russian restrictions on freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Finlandia is often referred to as an orchestral tone poem, yet its closing portion is in the unmistakable style of a Lutheran hymn. A few years after the first performances, words began to be written to that hymn. By the 1930s the number of versions, arrangements, and editions of that final section had gro
wn by leaps and bounds. So too had the numbers of texts associated with it. “Accept Our Thanks,” “Beloved Land,” “The Christian Life,” “Dear Friend of Mine,” “Lift Up Your Hearts,” “O Mighty Land”—these were just some of the English words heard to the Finlandia hymn in North America.30 By the end of that decade it was clear that Finlandia had become an established part of American life. Had anyone doubted it before, events in connection with the New York World’s Fair, scheduled to open in 1939, eliminated all uncertainty.

  Already in 1938, the fair’s directors had begun to implement plans for an event that would surpass all previous world fairs. Howard Hughes (1905–76), the fair’s aeronautics adviser, promoted the happening with a record-setting round-the-world flight in his Lockheed 14-N Super Electra, dubbed the New York World’s Fair 1939. On 14 July 1938, Hughes landed his craft in Brooklyn, a mere 3 days, 19 hours, and 8 minutes after takeoff.

  Buildings began going up on the fairgrounds to demonstrate a vision of the “World of Tomorrow.” The Futurama, the Trylon, and the Peri-sphere would be among the most talked about. So would one of the fair’s other major exhibitions, the Westinghouse Time Capsule. Made of cupaloy—an alloy of tempered copper, chromium, and silver believed to be indestructible—the time capsule was buried beneath the fairground at a depth of fifty feet, not to be opened for 5,000 years. To ensure that knowledge of the capsule would not be lost, the exact burial site was entered into The Book of Record with the information inscribed on permanent paper in special ink.31 Some 3,000 copies of The Book of Record were distributed around the world, placed in libraries, monasteries, and other locations.