The locus of knowledge has become nature itself, mysterious and beyond man’s capacities to know. Hamsun’s questions are framed so they cannot be answered; his tired individuals seek to silence themselves as quickly as possible. They really have nothing to say, and they welcome the storm that can roar loudly enough to drown out their own silence. The relationship of man to nature as seen by Kant is reversed; for Hamsun, the storm serves as an occasion for increasing the individual’s awareness of his own insignificance.26
In Kantian terms, the experience of the “dynamic sublime” may be overwhelming and make us feel our insignificance, but we nevertheless retain a definite sense of self, a subject who is preserved and who does not disappear in the experience. The distinction is an important one, because it is the defining aspect of the human experience for both Löwenthal and Adorno.
Kant writes:
Though the irresistibility of nature’s might makes us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical impotence, it reveals in us at the same time an ability to judge ourselves independent of nature, and reveals in us a superiority over nature that is the basis of a self-preservation quite different in kind from the one that can be assailed and endangered by nature outside us. This keeps the humanity in our person from being degraded, even though a human being would have to succumb to that dominance [of nature]. Hence if in judging nature aesthetically we call it sublime, we do so not because nature arouses fear, but because it calls forth our strength.27
According to Löwenthal, Hamsun’s novels represent the retreat from modernity into the myth of nature. In Adorno’s reading, Sibelius’s music may be characterized in a similar way. The sacrifice of a historically hard-won autonomy to the mysterious and overwhelming aspects of nature is not “first nature,” assert both Löwenthal and Adorno, but a “second nature” that is itself the projection of the helplessness of the individual capitulating to overwhelming and violent forces it does not understand. Adorno attempts, with only partial success, to discuss this in Sibelius in technical musical terms as the destruction of the hard-won technical control over the historically determined musical material. Sibelius’s material, he claims, is arbitrary, lacks “historical necessity,” and the clumsiness of his technique masquerades as nature. Adorno ends his essay: “But such destruction masks itself in his symphonies as creation. Its effect is dangerous.”28
Problems with Adorno’s Sibelius Critique
Adorno’s evaluation of Sibelius’s music has not worn as well as Löwenthal’s evaluation of Hamsun. The criticisms of Sibelius are difficult to demonstrate and support musically in the convincing way that Löwenthal’s critique of Hamsun has succeeded in literary terms. This has partly to do with the nature of music and any attempt to pin down its social or political content. But the accuracy of Löwenthal’s critique of Hamsun’s writing was borne out by history in a way that Adorno’s of Sibelius was not. Löwenthal’s 1937 analysis of Hamsun’s novels concluded that his work showed motivic affinities with the symbolism of Nazi Germany. When the Nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling came to power in Norway in 1941, Hamsun was quick to reveal himself as a Nazi sympathizer, much to the surprise and dismay of the many admirers of his novels.
Adorno made no such claims with Sibelius, although he warned that these are the implications, even in those areas of art-as-nature where we perhaps feel most justified in retreating from the stresses and responsibilities of modernity. In conclusion, I offer some observations on the problems I perceive in Adorno’s attempt at musical ideology critique in these early essays on Sibelius (in some respects a sketch for what he was later to try again on a larger scale with the case of Stravinsky in Philosophy of New Music). I address four main issues.
First of all, I suggest that Adorno makes his task difficult from the outset by clouding his main aim, which is to indicate the ideological content (that is, Gehalt) of Sibelius’s music by starting off with the emphasis on a musical-aesthetic critique of his work. He does this because on one level he insists that the aesthetic quality and technical consistency of a work is an indicator of its truth content (Wahrheitsgehalt), though he does not actually employ this concept in the Sibelius essays. Adorno had not greatly developed the idea of truth content at this stage, but it does nevertheless underlie his critique of Sibelius. Thus, because of what he claims are the music’s aesthetic and technical flaws, it necessarily follows, from Adorno’s point of view, that the composer’s musical work is also ideological—either through the ease with which it will be appropriated by the culture industry, or by the forces of political reaction and domination, or indeed both.
Second, Adorno’s attempts to support his claim that the music is aesthetically flawed because it is technically flawed are themselves seriously flawed. His examples are too general, too cursory, and lack convincing detail. Given a sympathetic reader who knows both Adorno and Sibelius’s music, it is possible to deduce what he means and to fill in the gaps in his critique, and even to provide musical examples in support. However, this asks too much of any reader/listener, and suggests a do-it-yourself approach that would not find a sympathetic reception from most philosophers or from most musicologists or music analysts today.
Third, Adorno’s claims, with or without evidence, are impossible to verify or validate in philosophical terms given the relativity of aesthetic values that became the norm in the second half of the twentieth century. Adorno came to witness this by the 1960s, when he acknowledged that the Schoenbergian notion of the historical dialectic of music driven by “historical necessity” had disintegrated. In such a context the fact that Sibelius wrote tonal music can simply be seen as part of the prehistory of such disintegration. After all, Schoenberg himself wrote tonal and tonally inflected works in his late period in the United States during the 1940s, which undermines the case Adorno made for a “dialectic” characterized by a process of the ever increasing rationalization of “musical material.” The exclusiveness of Adorno’s scheme has always depended for its justification on an accompanying aesthetics of modernism. Adorno allowed some well-known exceptions such as Bartók and Janáek (given special dispensation in a famous footnote in the 1949 Philosophy of New Music).29 Less well known are the allowances made for Berg and Satie. Little allowance, however, was made for either Stravinsky or Sibelius.
Finally, it has to be recognized that Adorno’s dialectical approach, whatever its shortcomings in any particular instance, always locates its claims in specific historical situations and conditions.30 And so it is, I suggest, with his Sibelius critique. Debates on art and nature and their social and political implications took on a particular urgency in the period between the two world wars, when claims for the legitimacy of political systems became closely linked with claims for their rootedness in nature as some kind of “natural order” of things, and in associated ideas of folk, tradition, community, and their locatedness in ties of blood and soil, as well as in the naturalness of human beings if uncorrupted by “unnatural” or alien ideas such as those associated with modernism. Though the origins of this particular turn can be traced back to the beginnings of German nationalism in the early years of the nineteenth century, and especially in Herder, its ramifications in music were especially tied up with a combination of specific technical issues and of what constituted “natural musical material.” To philosophers and critics with particular ways of listening and hearing music regarded in some way as “natural,” aesthetic modernism posed a clear threat.
The striking point about the use made of the idea of “nature” in the period between the 1920s and the 1940s is that it is characterized culturally by a flight into nature as an escape from modern society. Given the long-standing tendency since the nineteenth century for art to act in a similar way as a point of escape from the difficulties of modern life, and as a retreat to Innerlichkeit, it is not difficult to see distinct affinities between nature and art in this respect. True, art, as artifact, is clearly not “natural.” At issue here is precisely the appearance of
nature, or Schein, and not nature itself. I suggest, furthermore, that music in particular has best exploited this affinity in representing the appearance of nature, even down to the detail of presenting us with the appearance of organic unfolding, and the imitation, as John Cage put it, of nature “in her manner of operation.”31 The height of Sibelius’s popularity in the late 1930s coincided with the political obsession with nature that Adorno was quick to identify. The reception of Sibelius, whatever else it might have been, was undoubtedly part of this relapse into the myth of nature that accompanied the rise of authoritarianism in the first half of the twentieth century. I think it is to Adorno’s credit, notwithstanding his failure to grasp other features of the composer’s music, that he sought to identify why this was the case.32
NOTES
1. Leo Löwenthal, “Knut Hamsun” (1937), repr. in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), 320.
2. Tomi Mäkelä, “Sibelius and Germany: Wahrhaftigkeit Beyond Allnatur,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius, ed. Daniel M. Grimley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 173.
3. Ernest Newman, Foreword, in Karl Ekman, Jean Sibelius: His Life and Personality, trans. Edward Birse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938), xx.
4. There is also a fourth question, which concerns what are claimed to be the natural physiological limitations of our organs of perception, as for instance our hearing apparatus. That is to say, if we are prepared to argue, as Roger Scruton has done, that some systems of music (e.g., tonality) and some ways of listening to music (i.e., dictated by the natural physiological limits of our ears and the way in which our brains process what we hear) are more natural, and therefore more “correct” than others. The latter condition is the state of what Roger Scruton calls “the natural bourgeois man,” which, for some reason, he refuses to acknowledge as in any way historical, regarding it as the natural and absolute measure of how we hear music. Amusing and important as this might be, it will not be my focus here, though I have addressed it elsewhere in “Die vermittelte Unmittelbarkeit der Musik: Zum Vermittlungsbegriff in der Adornoschen Musikästhetik,” in Musikalischer Sinn: Beiträge zu einer Philosophie der Musik, ed. Alexander Becker and Matthias Vogel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 175–236, at 177–78.
5. The originality of Sibelius’s innovations in the timbral and textural use of the orchestra has been explored by Ron Weidberg, especially in his article “Sonic Design in Jean Sibelius’s Orchestral Music,” in Sibelius Forum II: Proceedings from the Third International Jean Sibelius Conference, Helsinki, 25–29 November, 1995, ed. Matti Huttunen, Kari Kilpeläinen, and Veijo Murtomäki (Helsinki: Sibelius Academy, 2003), 216–26.
6. I have addressed some of these issues in philosophical terms in my chapter “Nature and the Sublime: The Politics of Order and Disorder in Twentieth–Century Music,” in Jonathan Dunsby, Joseph N. Straus, Yves Knockaert, Max Paddison, and Konrad Boehmer, Order and Disorder: Music-Theoretical Strategies in Twentieth-Century Music (Leuven: University of Leuven Press, 2004), 107–35.
7. Walter Benjamin actually wrote: “The word ‘history’ stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience.” Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977), 177.
8. See Tomi Mäkelä, “Sibelius and Germany: Wahrhaftigkeit Beyond Allnatur,” in Grimley, The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius, 169–81, and especially Mäkelä’s book “Poesie in der Luft”: Jean Sibelius, Leben und Werk (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2007).
9. Mäkelä records that Hamsun and Sibelius met in Helsinki in 1897–98. See Mäkelä, “Poesie in der Luft,” 132.
10. Erik Tawaststjerna, “Über Adornos Sibelius-Kritik,” in Adorno und die Musik, ed. Otto Kolleritsch (Graz: Universal Edition, 1979), 112–13. See also Tomi Mäkelä, “Poesie in der Luft,” 360.
11. Theodor W. Adorno, “Glosse über Sibelius” (1938), in Impromptus. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 17, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982), 248. Translations in the essay are the author’s own.
12. Ibid., 248.
13. This was the claim put forward by a number of British music critics and musicologists in the 1930s, including Cecil Gray, Gerald Abrahams, and Neville Cardus.
14. Theodor W. Adorno, “Fußnote zu Sibelius und Hamsun” (1937), in Vermischte Schriften II. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 20.2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 804.
15. Adorno, “Glosse über Sibelius,” 249.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Adorno, “Fußnote zu Sibelius und Hamsun,”, 804; this note also appears in translation in the Documents section of this volume.
19. Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2008), 81.
20. Ibid., 82.
21. Theodor W. Adorno, “Fußnote zu Sibelius und Hamsun,” 804; this note also appears in translation in the Documents section of this volume.
22. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
23. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone Press, 1997), 74. See Ästhetische Theorie. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Gretel Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 115.
24. See Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), Werke in Zwölf Bänden, vols. 9 and 10, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1957), sec.28. In English as Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), sec. 28, esp. 120.
25. Löwenthal, “Knut Hamsun,” 327–28.
26. Ibid., 328.
27. Kant, Critique of Judgment, sec. 28, 120–21.
28. Adorno, “Glosse über Sibelius,” 252.
29. See Adorno, Philosophie der Neuen Musik. Gesammelte Schriften, vol.12, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 41–42n3. In English as Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 176n4.
30. I expand on this point in “Die vermittelte Unmittelbarkeit der Musik,” 175–86.
31. John Cage, Silence (London: Marion Boyars, 1968), 173.
32. It needs to be emphasized that it was Adorno’s intention to demonstrate how historical, social, and ideological tendencies manifested themselves in purely musical terms, whether or not the composers or their audiences were conscious of their significance. He was not interested in the political beliefs or affiliations of artists themselves, and whether, for example, Sibelius as an individual harbored any Nazi sympathies. In view of this, Adorno’s claims should not be read as ad hominem arguments. Adorno, like Löwenthal in his critique of Hamsun’s novels, focused on an ideology critique of art works “in themselves,” not on the political views of the artists who had created them. This distinction is important.
Storms, Symphonies, Silence:
Sibelius’s Tempest Music and the
Invention of Late Style
DANIEL M. GRIMLEY
The last thirty years of Sibelius’s life have cast a long shadow over writing on the composer and our understanding of his music.1 The creative silence that effectively followed the completion of his final tone poem, Tapiola, in 1926, remains a deeply ambivalent episode in Sibelius’s career and his critical reception. For some contemporary English writers in the 1930s and ’40s, most notoriously Cecil Gray and Constant Lambert, waiting (in vain) for the appearance of the long-promised Eighth Symphony, Sibelius’s late works presented an elliptical spiritual language at its optimum point of refinement and expression, a ne plus ultra that permitted no form of imitation or further development.2 For more recent critics, the silence has become a tragic gesture, an ultimate teleology: the irrevocable shading into nothingness of an earlier once virile phase of musical modernism.3 This pattern of shadow and de
cline remains a problem of Sibelius biography. As Veijo Murtomäki, for example, has pithily expressed it, “Sibelius’s late period contains an enigma.”4 For Glenda Dawn Goss, in the preface to her recent cultural history of the composer’s life and work, the silence of the final years is presented in the form of a detective story: the “murderer” is unveiled in the final chapters not so much as Sibelius’s own addictive personality (his fabled alcoholism and chronic self-criticism), but rather as the complex trace of a fading subjectivity and artistic milieu, one that had become increasingly strained and unsustainable in the face of a rapidly shifting political environment.5 As Goss argues, Sibelius threatened to become an anachronism or monument in his own lifetime. But this image, Goss emphasizes, is problematic, not least given the prevalence of Sibelius’s influence on more recent music in Finland and abroad. His legacy, in that sense, is acutely doubled-edged. And the idea of the monumentalized composer invokes a more complex narrative of musical creativity, meaning, and authorial intention. The extent to which, even in his apparent silence, Sibelius acted as an agent in his own reception remains provocative. Sibelius’s silence serves both as a leave-taking and as a summation. But it also suggests a creative twist, one in which the idea of a “late style” emerges strongly as a performative category: a particular role or character that Sibelius played out reflexively in his work. “Late style” here is not concerned with a purely chronological sense of time, but rather, following Theodor W. Adorno, Edward Said, and others,6 with an attitude or tone of voice: a mode of musical utterance that both engages with a rich critical legacy and also unfolds new creative space.
Greater insight into the nature of this late style, and into the possible meanings of Sibelius’s “silence,” can be gained from attending more closely to his music from the late 1920s, especially after the premiere of the Seventh Symphony in Stockholm on 24 March 1924. A key work here is Sibelius’s music for a Danish production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, directed by Johannes Poulsen and premiered at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen on 16 March 1926. Sibelius’s Tempest music is one of his most evocative and enigmatic late scores. The music’s stylistic diversity and range of expression, in contrast with the celebrated unity and concision of works such as the Seventh Symphony, has often puzzled and divided critics. Goss, for example, laments, “The Tempest is no symphony. Nor is it a tone poem. Despite flashes of brilliance, it is not a work of sustained inspiration.”7 The piece remains a rarity in live performance, despite the relative success of the concert suites that Sibelius drew from his own music. Yet the complete score, in terms of page length and performing duration alone, was by far Sibelius’s most substantial work after 1900, and it demands critical reevaluation. Furthermore, many of the play’s themes—artistic isolation, enchantment, nature mysticism, and Prospero’s paternal bond with his daughter, Miranda—strongly appealed to aspects of Sibelius’s creative imagination. As Erik Tawaststjerna suggests, “For Sibelius, Prospero became a symbol of the creative man and therefore of his own self, just as Ariel symbolized his inspiration and Caliban his demonic side.”8 The ambiguity of Shakespeare’s text, especially the equivocal sense of closure in its final pages, seems closely attuned to the tone of much of Sibelius’s later work, and to the idea of late style in particular. This essay will explore some of these themes in greater depth, examining the play’s relationship with other late works including the Sixth and Seventh symphonies. Drawing on archival work in Denmark and Finland, this essay will shed new light on the genesis and realization of Sibelius’s score, and suggest that, far from being a creative diversion or cul-de-sac, his music for The Tempest became one of Sibelius’s most eloquent achievements, a summing up that offers unique insight into the problem of Sibelius’s silence.
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 27