The Book of Record includes requests that its contents be translated into new languages as these supersede old ones; it has instructions for making instruments to locate the time capsule electromagnetically; and it contains an ingenious key to the English language to aid future archaeologists and linguists should knowledge of English be lost.
The Book of Record also explains that items for the time capsule were chosen for how well they represented American life in 1939. The items included ordinary things—a fountain pen, a pack of Camel cigarettes—and extraordinary things, such as statements from Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann. And they included “American” music: John Philip Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever, the swing piece Flat Foot Floogie, and not least, phonograph recordings and scores of Jean Sibelius’s Finlandia.
Finlandia has shown up time and again at America’s most historic moments and has been integrated into the religious life of the nation. In the grieving aftermath of 9/11, the hymn from Finlandia was sung in services around the country.32 The Mormon Tabernacle Choir—the choir of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the ensemble Ronald Reagan called “America’s Choir”—sings Finlandia as a staple of its repertory, sometimes to the words “On Great Lone Hills,” and has recorded the work on the CD conspicuously titled Faith of Our Fathers. One of its arrangements, for voices and orchestra with unctuous harmonic twists, transforms the Sibelian sound into the unmistakable tone and style of an American church choir.
Americans have not all treated Finlandia with solemn veneration. William Saroyan (1908–1981), irreverent author and playwright (The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Time of Your Life), visited Helsinki in 1935 and brashly decided to call on Sibelius. “Who am I to see Jean Sibelius? . . . I am a punk writer, and he is a great composer, Jesus Christ.”33 Yet visit he did, recording his impressions in an essay pointedly titled “Finlandia.” Saroyan’s first reaction on hearing Sibelius’s Finlandia, he said, was to get up from his chair, push over a table, knock some plaster out of the wall, and yell, “Jesus Christ, who is this man?”34
Closer to home, both in time and space, was the appearance in Helsinki in July 2006 of “the most dangerous band in the world,” as Guns N’ Roses has been called. The band may well be dangerous: it has been dogged by controversy almost since its beginning in Los Angeles in 1985, criticized for its members’ flagrant use of drugs and alcohol, their messy lives and offensive lyrics, and for founder Axl Rose’s habit of wearing Charles Manson T-shirts. Yet it is also tremendously popular: Guns N’ Roses is believed to have sold an estimated 100 million albums worldwide. On that July evening in 2006, the band’s guitarist, Robin Finck, who grew up in Marietta, Georgia, the part of the country’s Bible Belt saturated with the Finlandia hymn (to the words “Be Still My Soul”), treated the crowd to nothing less than a hard-rock version of Sibelius’s Finlandia.35 The crowd cheered. The Internet bloggers went to work. And one of them summed up the prevailing sentiment in two words: “Sibelius rules.”
It is undeniable that Sibelius’s “rule” over Americans has been aided in part by immigrant elements, certainly by immigrant Finns, but also perhaps by many others who find themselves in exile. For along with the extraordinary intelligence that shines through in works of stunningly original design, the power of Sibelius’s music lies in its creator’s ability to connect with listeners emotionally. Among American composers today, John Adams (b. 1947) has been foremost in his appreciation of that power. Adams has singled out Sibelius (along with Beethoven) for the exceptional skill with which the Finn so effectively achieves “a sense of emotional change when a modulation occurs.”36 Passages in Adams’s works such as the gigantic harmonic struggle at the end of Harmonielehre (1985), which the composer ultimately resolves with a breakthrough into tonality (in this case, E-flat major), owe a serious debt to similar battles in Sibelius’s music, most notably the Fifth Symphony. As an adolescent, Adams kept Yousuf Karsh’s brooding photograph of Sibelius from Life magazine taped on the wall facing his bed; as an adult, his music has been described as sounding “like Sibelius superimposed on a Eurorock rhythm track.”37 It seems somehow fitting that just as Sibelius made the most of diversity in his own music—setting both Finnish-language and Swedish-language texts, merging features of symphony and symphonic poem, amalgamating the resources of folksong, Lutheran hymn, fugal process, and Grieg-like orchestral techniques in his works—that some of his most creative American admirers have emulated his reach across musical and cultural barriers and forged new musical paths of their own.
NOTES
1. The book appeared in Finnish in 1960 as Jean Sibelius Amerikassa (Åbo: Förlaget Bro, 1955), but there is no English translation.
2. The Sibelius-Downes book was published in Boston by Northeastern University Press; the Finnish book was brought out by WSOY in Helsinki. Its text is currently being revised and expanded for publication in English. There is also a monograph on Sibelius and his Masonic music, which directly involved the composer with Freemasons in the United States. See Hermine Weigel Williams, Sibelius and His Masonic Music: Sounds in “Silence” (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1998).
3. Paul Morgan’s letter to Sibelius, dated 5 September 1890, National Archives of Finland (henceforth NA), Sibelius Family Archive, Box 23. On the quartet, see Fabian Dahlström, Jean Sibelius: Thematisch-bibliographisches Verzeichnis seiner Werke (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2003), 13–15. The evidence for the quartet’s performance and the responses to it come from a letter written by Adolf Paul to Sibelius on 16 February 1891 (NA, Sibelius Family Archive, Box 25), with lavish tributes to Henriques and quotations of Sinding’s ful-some praise of the composer; afterward, Morgan held a party for the musicians and their friends. On their return to the United States, the Morgans formed the Geraldine Morgan Concert Company with the soprano Inez Grinelli (see New York Times, 4 November 1894). Paul Morgan eventually became first cellist in the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra. When he heard that Sibelius was coming to the United States, he invited the composer to his country home in Westchester County, New York, both for old times’ sake and hoping that they could go through the composer’s cello and piano work, Malinconia (op. 20). These later Morgan letters, dated 27 May and 14 June 1914, are preserved in the National Library of Finland(Helsinki University Library, henceforth HUL, Collection 206.25).
4. For more about Dayas, see Carl Lachmund, Living with Liszt: From the Diary of Carl Lachmund, an American Pupil of Liszt, 1882–1884, edited, annotated, and introduced by Alan Walker (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1995), esp. 236–38, 367–69. Fabian Dahlström gives details of Dayas’s activities at the Music Institute (today the Sibelius Academy) in Sibelius-Akademin 1882–1982 (Helsinki: Sibelius-Akademins pub., 1982), 358–61. Dayas was remembered fondly in Helsinki, both as a teacher and as a composer; when he died unexpectedly in 1903, although he was no longer in Finland, obituaries appeared in a number of Finnish newspapers, including Päivälehti and Uusi Suometar (both on 12 May 1903).
5. Sibelius to Aino Järnefelt, 27 August 1891, NA, Sibelius Family Archive, Box 94.
6. The other numbers on the program were Wagner’s Albumblatt, David Popper’s Elfentanz, op. 39; Beethoven’s Quartet in E-flat, op. 74 and Sonata in G Minor, op. 5.
7. Sibelius to Aino Järnefelt, 2 November 1891, NA, Sibelius Family Archive, Box 94.
8. Dahlström lists the concerts and their programs in Sibelius-Akademin 1882–1982, 358–61. In 1892 the dates were 24 October, 7 November, 11 November, and 16 December; in 1893, dates were 7 and 26 April.
9. Powell’s letters to Sibelius are preserved in NA, Sibelius Family Archive, Box 26. Her descriptions of both the New York and the Chicago performances come from a missive dated 17 June 1906.
10. Musical America 26/10; see Jean Sibelius, Dagbok 1909–1944, ed. Fabian Dahlström (Helsinki: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland/Stockholm: Atlantis, 2005), 386n242. By the end of 1911 Sibelius had composed approximatel
y 80 of his more than 100 solo songs, although not all of them had been published. For biographical information on Tracey, see K. J. Kutsch and Leo Riemens, Großes Sängerlexikon, 4th rev. ed. (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2003), 7:4751.
11. See Alan Mallach, “L’arlesiana: Francisco Cilea,” Opera Quarterly 11 (1994): 162–65; and Mallach, “American Singer Hissed,” New York Times, 1 April 1909.
12. Le Figaro quoted in Helsingfors-Posten, 26 January 1905.
13. See Suvi Sirkku Talas, ed., Syysilta: Aino ja Jean Sibeliuksen kirjeenvaihtoa 1905–1931 (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2007), 219, 260. Other letters mentioning Tracey are found on 211, 213, 218, 257, 260.
14. Tracey’s letters to the composer (fourteen in all plus three postcards) are preserved in HUL Coll. 206.39. Sibelius’s reactions are recorded in his diary; see Dagbok, 4 December and 19 December 1911; 26 August, 2 September, and 6 September 1912; 16 May and 28 August 1914; 15 August 1915.
15. Miss Anderson’s accompanist, the Finnish pianist Kosti Vehanen, recalled Sibelius saying that the contralto’s recording of “Kom nu hit, död!” (Come away, death!) was the most satisfying by any singer of any of his lieder; see Vehanen, Vuosikymmen Marian Andersonin säestäjänä (Porvoo: WSOY, 1949), 37. Anderson and Sibelius are dealt with in my Vieläkö lähetämme hänelle sikareja? Sibelius, Amerikka, ja amerikkalaiset (Are we still sending him cigars? Sibelius, America, and Americans) (Helsinki: WSOY, 2009), 177–83.
16. Reported in the New York Times, 14 March 1911. For biographical information on Spiering, see the extensive entry in the Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Dumas Malone (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1935), 17:457.
17. According to the composer’s Dagbok, 24 January 1914.
18. As he told Sibelius in a letter dated 21 June 1925; he also asked for a new work that could be performed for the first time in America. This and other Spiering correspondence is preserved in NA, Sibelius Family Archive, Box 30; two other missives as well as one from Spiering’s wife, Frida Mueller Spiering, are found in HUL Coll. 206.36.
19. Sibelius, Dagbok, May 1914, 189.
20. Carl Stoeckel, “Some Recollections of the Visit of Jean Sibelius to America in 1914,” Scandinavian Studies 43 (1971): 53–88. The article includes annotations by Prof. George C. Schoolfield and his transcriptions of the composer’s correspondence with Horatio Parker.
21. This and the following vignettes on the Eastman School and Finlandia are drawn from my Vieläkö lähetämme hänelle sikareja? They are retold here with the kind permission of the publisher WSOY and Finnish Music Quarterly. In that publication a portion of the Sibelius Society essay appeared as part of “The World’s First Sibelius Society” (no. 4 [2008]: 66–67). Paul Sjöblom appears to have been the first person to call attention to Monessen’s historic society, in “Out of the Past: A Forgotten Chapter of Finnish-American History,” Suomen Silta, no.1 (1970); his article has been reprinted in Finland from the Inside: Eyewitness Reports of a Finnish-American Journalist, 1938–1997, edited with introduction and commentary by Glenda Dawn Goss (Helsinki: New Bridge Press, 2000), 37–43.
22. Karl Ekman Jr., Jean Sibelius: En konstnärs liv och personlighet (Helsinki: Holger Schildts, 1935), 251. The English translation, Jean Sibelius: His Life and Personality, trans. Edward Birse (London: Alan Wilmer, 1936), 242, repeats the same misinformation.
23. Klingenberg to Sibelius, 19 January 1920, NA, Sibelius Family Archive, Box 22. The Eastman invitation is dealt with in the context of Sibelius’s life in the 1920s in my Sibelius: A Composer’s Life and the Awakening of Finland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 426–28.
24. See Kimmo Korhonen, Selim Palmgren: Elämä musiikissa (Helsinki: WSOY, 2009), 414–25.
25. Sibelius does not mention Howard Hanson in his diary. However, Andrea Sherlock Kalyn, in “Constructing a Nation’s Music: Howard Hanson’s American Composers’ Concerts and Festivals of American Music, 1925–71” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 2001), 79, mentions several “highly acclaimed musicians,” including Sibelius, whom the young Hanson encountered during his Prix de Rome years. I would like to express my gratitude to David Peter Coppen, special collections librarian and archivist in the Sibley Music Library, for consulting this dissertation on my behalf.
26. Two letters of Gardner Read to Sibelius are preserved in HUL Coll. 206.31: in the first, dated 29 March 1939, Read introduces himself, asks permission to visit Sibelius, and tells about his own first symphony; the second, dated 1 August 1939, is discussed below in note 28. No letters from Read have been found in the National Archives of Finland.
27. See, for example, Virgil Thomson, American Music Since 1910, with an introduction by Nicolas Nabokov (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 167; and Mary Ann Dodd and Jayson Rod Engquist, Gardner Read: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996).
28. See http://www.composergardnerread.org/biography/, and the obituary in The Independent, 14 December 2005. The purely social nature of Read’s visit is clear from his letter of thanks written to Sibelius the following day (1 August 1939, HUL Coll. 206.31), in which Read expresses his gratitude for the composer’s hospitality and also asks for a signed photograph. He mentions nothing, however, that could be construed as “studying,” not even discussion of his own music, whose scores he allegedly brought along. Although Read seems to have maintained that he returned to Ainola at a later date, just when such a visit would have taken place or what its nature might have been is unclear. The outbreak of war in Finland on 30 November 1939 and the ongoing hostilities worldwide would have prevented any such visit until after 1945. By then Sibelius was eighty years old and had not taken on any composition students since 1916–17, when Bengt de Törne was his pupil. On Read’s side, the correspondence preserved in connection with him in the National Library of Finland suggests that he was eager to connect his name with the greatest living composers; a courteous letter of reference on Read’s behalf written to Sibelius by Ildebrando Pizzetti states that Read had studied with the Italian master “pendant quelques jours” (29 March 1939, HUL Coll. 206.29). Another letter of reference to Sibelius, this one from Read’s benefactress Mary A. Cromwell (HUL Coll. 206.9, 30 March 1939), states that Read wanted to get to know Finland and show Sibelius two scores he had just published (in which case any corrective from Sibelius would be coming too late). Perhaps for Read, simply to meet and converse on music with a world-class composer was enough to constitute studying with the great man.
29. See “Sibelius, Composer, Leads in Radio Vote,” New York Times, 2 December 1935.
30. For an idea of the astonishing number of Finlandia arrangements, see Dahlström, Werkverzeichnis, 113–21, where a “selection” takes up some eight pages.
31. The Book of Record of the Time Capsule of Cupaloy: Deemed capable of resisting the effects of time for five thousand years, preserving an account of universal achievements, embedded in the grounds of the New York World’s Fair 1939, September 23, 1938 (New York: n.p., 1938).
32. Jouni Mölsä, “Finlandian kaksoiselämä” (Finlandia’s double life), Helsingin Sanomat, 13 October 2002.
33. William Saroyan, “Finlandia,” The William Saroyan Reader (New York: George Braziller, 1958), 130.
34. Ibid. Saroyan’s essay was originally published the year after his meeting with Sibelius, in the volume Inhale and Exhale (New York: Random House, 1936). It has been reprinted in The William Saroyan Reader (New York: Braziller, 1958), 126–32.
35. Robin Finck’s Helsinki performance of Finlandia was available on YouTube as of this writing (January 2010).
36. Adams’s comment was made in an interview with Jonathan Cott, in liner notes to John Adams Harmonielehre, San Francisco Symphony conducted by Edo de Waart, None-such Digital 7559-79115-2, 1985.
37. Adams’s autobiography, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 19–20, is the source for the information about the Karsh photograph; see als
o 104, 129–30. The “Eurorock” comment is David Schiff ‘s, in “Memory Spaces (On the Transmigration of Souls) (2002),” The Atlantic, April 2003; repr. in The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer, ed. Thomas May (Pompton Plains, NJ: Amadeus Press, 2006), 189.
Art and the Ideology of Nature: Sibelius, Hamsun, Adorno
MAX PADDISON
The meaning of nature in almost every age is inseparable from social considerations.
—Leo Löwenthal, “Knut Hamsun”1
It is a long-established view that the music of Sibelius portrays nature and landscape, together with a specific sense of place and the spirit of its people—Finland, a land of sparsely populated forests and lakes. This view dominated the reception of the composer, particularly in Scandinavia, Britain, and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century; furthermore, as Tomi Mäkelä has shown, it was also the case in Germany in the early years of the century, and then, after a period of disdainful neglect between the wars, it surfaced again in the late 1930s, when it fitted conveniently with aspects of Nazi ideology. As Mäkelä has put it, Sibelius “was widely thought to represent the nature and people of the North,” while the early twentieth-century reception of the composer in Germany emphasized “the link between Sibelius and Finnishness as a fundamental expression of the pure Nordic spirit.”2 There is plenty of evidence that the composer himself also thought of his work in this way. That great advocate of Sibelius in England, Ernest Newman, wrote in 1938 that the composer “has told us that the origins and the working-out of his musical thoughts are determined by ‘mental images’: that is to say, his work wells up from definite impressions of nature and of human life,” although Newman was also careful to stress that Sibelius “develops the resultant musical ideas not in pursuance of any programme that could be put into words but according to their true nature as music.”3 The music of Sibelius is often seen as brooding and introspective, wherein a contemplative and lonely subjectivity is absorbed and overwhelmed by the immensity of nature, engendering an experience that borders on the sublime.
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 25