Jean Sibelius and His World

by Grimley, Daniel M.

  Three questions in particular emerge from any discussion of music and nature. The first concerns what we mean when we say that art can “represent” nature; the second concerns what we mean when we say that art in some way “is” nature, as, for example, drawing on material that is in some way natural, or even “embodying” nature in the sense of its processes or structures or systems as being “natural”; and the third concerns the transcendent meanings we ascribe to nature and in particular to its representation in art, such as feelings of mystery, profundity, awe, freedom, and hope, a sense of being at the origin of all things.4 The first, art as the representation of nature, might appear to be the most straightforward, but is not so, of course, in the case of music, at least beyond the most rudimentary onomatopoetic level. In the case of Sibelius, there are undoubtedly examples to be found at this level—the tone poem Tapiola is an obvious instance, combining the impression of storm and wind in trees through the use of rapid interlaced pianissimo muted string figurations. The second, that music is, or can be “nature,” or “natural,” because its material and processes are in some sense “natural,” is a position that can only be sustained if the artificially constructed aspects of music and its tonal systems are overlooked (that is, the reality that tonality as a system is a highly artificial construct based on a calculated interference in the natural intervallic relations of the harmonic series). Provided that this inbuilt artifice at the core of the Western tonal system can be put to one side, the most profitable way of understanding “music as nature” in relation to Sibelius is probably to regard the use of aspects of instrumental color and texture as in some sense standing in for nature, particularly through the preponderance of long sustained drones, or repeated ostinato figures over lengthy stretches of time, a distinctive use of sustained brass harmonies, especially in the horns, and the use of primary instrumental colors as simply “being” themselves in some elemental and natural sense, to mention just a few possibilities. Indeed, Sibelius’s famous comment about his orchestration offering “pure spring water” as opposed to “cocktails” would appear to support this view.5 The third, the transcendent meanings ascribed to nature and its portrayal in music, might be said to flow from the first two instances, so that the mysterious and the profound, or the elemental and overwhelming effects of the music might be said to be the direct result of the use of such devices and processes.

  I suggest here that such transcendent ascriptions are ideologically loaded, and as a result have always been prone to political exploitation.6 Although in this essay I address all three of these questions to varying degrees, my main emphasis is on the third, the ideological implications of the concept of nature—that is to say, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, the ways in which each age projects its own needs onto the face of nature.7

  Important aspects of the concept of nature in Sibelius, his reception in Germany, and specifically the negative role played by Adorno, to this day, in the reception of the composer there, have been addressed in recent years, in particular by Tomi Mäkelä.8 I have gratefully drawn on his extensive and valuable work. Indeed, a substantial part of his book “Poesie in der Luft”: Jean Sibelius, Leben und Werk (2007) is devoted to a consideration of the role of nature in Sibelius’s music. My focus here, however, is on the concept of nature as an implicitly ideological, which is to say, historical and social notion, and in particular on philosophical aspects of the concepts of nature and the sublime in Sibelius and his literary contemporary, the Nobel Prize–winning Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun.9 It is for this reason that I have chosen to view the idea of nature in the music of Sibelius obliquely, and to do so by considering Adorno’s interpretation of it in the two short essays he wrote as a critique of Sibelius in 1937 and 1938, which, for reasons that will become evident, I have read in conjunction with a celebrated essay by a Frankfurt School colleague of Adorno’s, Leo Löwenthal, written as a critique of Knut Hamsun and published in 1937. I argue from the position that aesthetic judgments are not formulated in a vacuum, and that in particular a concept like “nature” cannot be understood apart from the historical and political context that gives it meaning. My aim is to reconsider Adorno’s Sibelius critique in its context, show the centrality of the concept of nature, and to examine critically the claims Adorno makes in relation to the achievements of Löwenthal’s Hamsun critique. Underlying both Adorno’s and Löwenthal’s positions, I propose, are pivotal arguments concerning nature, the sublime, and the position of the experiencing subject that can be traced back to Kant’s Critique of Judgment, and which go a considerable way toward helping us understand the real motivation behind Adorno’s polemical critique.

  Adorno’s Critique of Sibelius: Context

  To Adorno’s German musical sensibility the value accorded to Sibelius’s music in England, where he arrived in exile in 1934, was difficult to fathom, and the great claims being made for it must have appeared irritatingly excessive, to a degree that made him determined to reveal what he saw as the emptiness of the kind of rhetoric that compared the composer to Beethoven. Indeed, both Erik Tawaststjerna and Tomi Mäkelä have pointed out that in all likelihood Adorno’s barbed attack was really a direct response to Bengt de Törne’s book Sibelius: A Close-Up, which had appeared in its English translation in London in 1937 and had added further fuel to the Sibelius adulation of the time.10 In his brief article “Glosse über Sibelius” of 1938 (translated in the Documents section in this volume), Adorno ruthlessly identified what he considered to be the trivial and commonplace character of the thematic material in the symphonies, what he saw as the conventional and reactionary use of tonal harmony, the tendency to fall back on pedal points and to abandon harmonization completely for lengthy passages of unison or octave doubling, the meagerness of the orchestration and the amateur appearance of the scores themselves, which looked, he says, as if they were composition exercises done by a student. Sibelius had in fact studied composition in Germany and Austria in the early 1890s before returning to Finland, the “land of a thousand lakes,” to become a symbol of the Finns’ national aspirations. Adorno rather unkindly suggests that the composer “buried himself in the land of a thousand lakes in order to hide himself from the critical eye of his [Austro-German] schoolmasters.”11 And he goes on to say, regarding the composer’s initial fame in Scandinavia, that “probably no-one was more astonished than he to discover that his failure had been interpreted as success, his lack of technical ability as necessity.”12 By this I understand Adorno to mean that what he regards as the technical shortcomings manifest in Sibelius’s music quickly became the dominant feature of its distinctive identity, and were interpreted as part of the inner structural necessity that caused his works to unfold in the distinctive and original way they do. Adorno was not convinced by the claim advanced by sympathetic critics like Ernest Newman that the symphonies are highly original and truly integrated works, characterized by movement from an initial statement of fragmentary ideas as part of an organic process toward a final unifying apotheosis.13 He maintained instead: “The resulting appearance of originality is ascribable only to the senselessness with which the motives are put together, without anything to guarantee their meaningful context other than the abstract passage of time.”14 Adorno further deplored Sibelius’s failure to depart from the relatively traditional use of tonality: no doubt a factor that contributed to the Finnish composer’s great popular success. For Adorno, to write tonal music in the twentieth century was an anachronism, and was interpreted as a sign of regression.

  Adorno’s own theory of new music, particularly as formulated in the book he began writing in 1941, Philosophy of New Music, was founded, of course, on a Schoenbergian notion of historical necessity, a historical dialectic driven by the convergence of the most advanced stage of expressive needs in relation to the most advanced technical means at any particular historical period. In principle this meant that tonality had been historically superseded, and that the attempt to employ tonal means in the twentieth century wa
s a sign of reaction, implying an absolutist claim that tonality itself was the natural state of music—indeed, that the tonal system itself was “nature.”

  Regressing to tonality did not, however, offer an escape from the upheavals that characterized modernism, according to Adorno: the cracks and fissures that are a feature of the modernist work also find their place in those works that attempt to ignore its effects. The result, he claimed, is that under the new conditions even tonal works no longer retain their coherence and consistency. As he put it in “Glosse über Sibelius”: “The earthquake that found its expression in the dissonances of the great works of the new music did not spare the little works that remained with the old-fashioned style. They became torn and false.”15 Whatever the claims made for the composer in Nordic and Anglo-Saxon countries, Sibelius’s failure was, for Adorno, threefold. First was Sibelius’s erroneous belief that the dialectic of musical material could be circumvented or ignored, and tonality restored. Second was what Adorno regarded as the sheer technical incompetence displayed by Sibelius in working with such regressive materials. Third, and perhaps most important, was the dangerous and overarching claim made by the music to heroic profundity and sublimity in its relation to nature—a claim that served both to mask the commonplace character of the music itself and the falsity and incompetence of its technical means, while at the same time placing itself at the service of the dominant authoritarian mythologies of its time, namely Fascism and Nazism. Adorno writes:

  His followers want to know nothing about this. Their song is stuck on the refrain: “It’s all nature; it’s all nature.” The great Pan, and as required Blood and Soil too, appears promptly on the scene. The trivial is validated as the origin of things, the unarticulated as the sound of unconscious creation.16

  And he continues:

  Categories of this kind evade critique. The dominant conviction is that nature’s mood is bound up with awe-struck silence. But if the concept of “nature’s mood” should not remain unquestioned even in the real world, then surely not in works of art. Symphonies are not a thousand lakes, even when riddled with a thousand holes.17

  In Sibelius, Adorno saw the representation of nature as that which overwhelms and excludes critique and self-reflection. Clearly, he also had in mind the same points about such a use of the idea of nature made in Leo Löwenthal’s article on Knut Hamsun published a year earlier, in 1937, in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Adorno had written what was in effect an extended footnote to that article, in which he said: “The obscurity, a product of technical awkwardness, feigns a profundity that does not exist.”18 In this he is referring especially to the similarity Löwenthal had identified between Hamsun’s habit of creating characters in his novels who are types rather than individuals (the Peasant, the Vagabond, the Shepherd Girl) combined with his penchant for vague generalizations that evoke a sense of profundity, and what Adorno saw as Sibelius’s use of generalized tonal materials: familiar and in themselves commonplace and reassuring but, being set in a vague and abstract context (that is, the peculiar structure of Sibelius’s symphonies) evoking a similar air of the profound, the mysterious, and, indeed, “nature.”

  Adorno’s claim that Sibelius seeks to represent “the sound of nature” through the use of materials and processes that are in themselves commonplace, trivial, and familiar, takes us back to the issues raised at the outset: I could reformulate these here as: (1) Can music represent nature? (2) If so, are the materials of music in some way inherently natural, so that they can “be” nature, and not simply mimic the processes of nature? And (3), are the transcendent meanings we ascribe to the experience of nature, for example mystery, profundity, freedom, and hope, a sense of being at the origin of all things, evoked by the very “naturalness” of such musical materials? In her Elective Affinities Lydia Goehr makes a number of points that are relevant here. Essentially, she characterizes Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s argument in Dialectic of Enlightenment as describing “a dialectic between nature and art, according to which nature came, in the civilized name of reason and art, to be dominated by humanity at the same time that it was reincorporated into an uncivilizing discourse of myth. Enlightenment . . . ‘as [als] mass deception.’”19 Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s account of the Enlightenment turning into its opposite is located in the 1930s and ’40s, and pertains to the rise of Nazi Germany and of Fascism in Europe. Goehr’s reading also places Adorno and Horkheimer in relation to another very different account of modernism—that of the American philosopher Arthur Danto. In the 1930s and 1940s, Goehr argues, the dominating motif characterizing the relation between art and nature was the heroic—something that survives in the ethic of the Darmstadt composers of the 1950s as heroic modernism. In the conceptualist and minimalist art of 1960s as interpreted by Danto, however, the dialectic between art and nature is nature “under the guise of the commonplace.”20 Danto’s and Goehr’s idea of the commonplace comes out of the 1960s, yet the concept is remarkably appropriate for considering Adorno’s Sibelius critique, where the impression of the heroic is created, he claims, by banal means. As we have seen, Adorno argues that the commonplace dominates Sibelius’s music, that it is employed to evoke “the sound of nature,” presented as if it were nature itself, in a way that excludes and rejects the human. This equation of nature and the banal fits aptly with aspects of Löwenthal’s critique of Hamsun, which Adorno introduces into the following passage from his “Fußnote zu Sibelius und Hamsun”:

  The constructed opaque repetitions lay claim to an eternal rhythm of nature, which is also expressed by the lack of a symphonic consciousness of time; the nullity of the melodic monads, which is carried over into unarticulated pitches, corresponds to the contempt for humanity to which an all-embracing nature [die Allnatur] subjects the Hamsunian individual. In this respect Sibelius, like Hamsun, is to be distinguished from Impressionist tendencies, in that all-embracing Nature is formed from the dessicated remains of traditional bourgeois art, rather than seen as the primal vision of a protesting subjectivity.21

  The Representation of Nature and the Evocation of the Sublime

  Adorno recognizes that representing “nature” in music has much to do with what is not expressed, with what is not defined—in effect, what is not actually presented, as Jean-François Lyotard was to put it later.22 Music is particularly good at this because of its lack of referentiality. At the same time, the “sound of nature” in art has to do with the silence of nature, even in the case of a “sounding art” like music. In the late Aesthetic Theory (1970) Adorno writes: “What in artworks is structured, gapless, resting in itself, is an after-image of the silence that is the single medium through which nature speaks.”23 As I have already suggested, Adorno is really referring not so much to the representation of nature in Sibelius as to the evocation of the sublime, even if his focus is almost exclusively on the concept of “nature.” Indeed, it is difficult not to think of the identification of techniques designed to achieve the effects of the sublime in the different arts in Edmund Burke’s 1757 compendium-like treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Burke refers, for instance, to the use of the color black, to darkness and obscurity, and above all to the need to create a sense of fear and terror through a use of indistinctness and vagueness. Obscurity, not clarity, is required if you want to create the effect of the sublime, insists Burke. Seen in such a context, Sibelius might appear to be a master of such effects in music. Yet strangely, though Adorno shows great awareness of the implications of the sublime in his Aesthetic Theory, particularly in relation to modernism, he does not emphasize the distinction between the representation of nature and the evocation of the sublime in the case of Sibelius in his two 1930s articles on the composer. Löwenthal, however, does just this in relation to Hamsun, and makes the point very clearly by contrasting Hamsun’s evocation of the sublime in his description of a violent storm in his novel The Last Joy (1912) to Kant’s famous description of the power of na
ture and the experience of the sublime in his Critique of Judgment.24 Löwenthal writes, in comparing the words of Hamsun and Kant:

  At first sight there seems to be no essential difference between the two passages. For Kant, however, the sublimity of nature and the experience of man’s helplessness before it are counterbalanced by the concept of nature as subordinate in the face of humanity. It is man’s own knowledge and imagination which creates the conception of the grandiosity in nature that dwarfs him. In the end, the rational faculties of man are of a higher order than the elemental force of nature, and they allow him to see it as sublime, instead of simply terrifying. . . . For Kant, nature is not to console man for frustrations, but to stimulate his moral and intellectual development.25

  Yet in Hamsun, Löwenthal argues, “the relation of man to nature takes on an entirely different cast.” The differences he identifies, it seems to me, could be applied equally to Sibelius in Adorno’s reading of his music, even though Adorno himself does not actually formulate these points with comparable clarity, and thus does not bring his argument to an equally convincing conclusion. Löwenthal, in referring to a passage from the novel Pan where the solitary narrator stands in the shelter of an overhanging rock, asking questions of the boiling and foaming sea, formulates the issue like this: