As Tawaststjerna notes, the idea of The Tempest as a musical subject was first suggested to Sibelius by his close friend and confidante Axel Carpelan. In a letter dated 28 February 1901, listing possible future projects for the composer, Carpelan wrote: “The Tempest would suit you ideally. Prospero (the sorcerer), Miranda, the spirits of earth and air, etc.”9 Though Sibelius had set two songs from Twelfth Night in 1909, it would be over two decades before he turned to The Tempest as a serious creative proposition. By then Carpelan had been dead for six years (he died on 24 March 1919). Yet Sibelius’s enthusiasm for Shakespeare in the meantime is further suggested by a piece of evidence preserved in a box marked “Paris 1911, England 1912” held in the Sibelius Collection at the Finnish National Archive in Helsinki. The box contains a souvenir leaflet for Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, including a guide to the stained-glass windows and the epitaphs of the Shakespeare Family memorial in the chancel.10 Sibelius’s tour of Shakespeare country was arranged by Rosa Newmarch in connection with his visit to conduct the British premiere of the Fourth Symphony at Birmingham. In a diary entry dated 18 September 1912, Sibelius noted: “Journey to England. London.—Stratford on Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace.”11 The timing of Sibelius’s visit was significant, as his diary entries vividly reveal: he had begun to experience profound feelings of loneliness and isolation in connection with his composition of the symphony. This sense of alienation, as James Hepokoski and others have argued, was motivated partly by his creative struggles with the symphony, but more deeply by an awareness of a significant shift in the wider European musical climate circa 1910–11.12 As early as 10 January 1910, two years prior to his England visit, Sibelius had noted: “My life’s solitude begins. The trick is to keep working in spite of this ‘Allein gefühl’ [sense of isolation].”13 Yet by 10 July, his mood had shifted significantly, and he wrote pessimistically in his diary: “Awoke with unpleasant worries about the actions of the warmhearted. Fear that one turns to people who are not worth it. Do you really have to endure this? Is it better to sit by the side of the Esplanade in Helsinki and hail the passing capitalists? You know yourself that it was hell. Your time went and your fantasy departed. Something for something. You have given music, so—?!”14 Even when Sibelius could report more positive progress on the symphony, such moments of inspiration were increasingly bound up with a sense of banishment and withdrawal, eliding art and life in a manner that would become paradigmatic in much of his later work. On 5 November 1910 he noted: “Worked splendidly. Forged the finale in the Symphony. Wonderful day—typically Finnish—with ‘snow upon the trees’ branches.’. . . Must break with Helsinki. Never any peace. A symphony is not a composition in the ordinary sense. It is really a confession from different stages of life.”15 Completion of the symphony, following its Finnish premiere preceding the England trip and colored by its mixed critical reception at home, brought little sense of relief. Writing on 19 April 1912 that “I’ve set my mind on a new symphonic mission!” Sibelius lamented, “How little, interminably little understanding and patronage my symphonies have received out in the wider world! It often strikes me now how this whole symphonic struggle is futile. But this work and this struggle have greater educational meaning for me. At present I find myself small and insignificant. A little, insignificant talent! Dear God! Now take bread unto the desert!—Today splendid, summer-like! In the evening—stars, stars!”16
Read retrospectively from the perspective of the Tempest music and the silence that followed in the later 1920s, it is easy to anticipate in such early diary entries Sibelius’s propensity toward a Prospero-like exile, the merging of self and dramatic character that Tawaststjerna later identifies as one of the key components of his interest in Shakespeare’s play. Even if this is not wholly unproblematic, taking into account the musically rich decade between the composition of the Fourth Symphony and the late works, a recurrent crisis of confidence, comparable to that experienced in 1910–12 but significantly intensified, certainly appears to have afflicted Sibelius in the years 1923–25, prior to his work on The Tempest and during composition of Symphonies 6 and 7. On 3 October 1923, for example, he wrote in his diary: “My life is now finished. If I’m sometimes happy and have a glass to drink, I pay for it a long time afterward. This terrible depression that not even Aino can understand, but which I’ve inherited. This ‘sensitivity’ or lack of self-confidence, which means that Aino and the children have never had proper support in their life. This hell upon the earth, which they encounter outside, never to escape. Woe am I, alone, alone!”17 Again, Sibelius’s diary entries suggest that such intense moments of self-doubt and loneliness could become an intrinsic part of his creative process. For example, on 17 February 1925 he confided: “It is blowing a gale outside. How infinitely richer is this [illegible word] unreflected gust than the poetry of Goethe or other gentlemen! I have begun to ‘snap,’ namely to drink in secret. This is one way to take a life. But—a few drinks, at midnight—have a wonderful effect! Those who survive shall see! But the poetry in all of this! Dear Lord! Reflection is intoxicating!”18
Sibelius’s thoughts in the mid-1920s had increasingly turned toward questions of his own mortality. The death of his brother Christian in 1922, the fate of his sister Linda, who suffered from mental health problems throughout her life, and the early death of his father weighed heavily upon Sibelius’s mind, especially following a painful operation on a throat tumor (related to his heavy smoking) in 1923. In 1923–25, Sibelius had no reason to foresee his own remarkable longevity. Yet, as Tomi Mäkelä suggests, such preoccupation with death points back to an earlier symbolist existentialism, cultivated by Sibelius’s association with the Symposium circle in the 1890s. The following day, 18 February 1925, Sibelius explicitly evoked in his diary his symbolist roots, and the mood of works such as Valse triste and “The Swan of Tuonela” from the four Lemminkäinen Legends, op. 22, with their brooding sense of the liminal boundary between life and death: “The lemon table at the Kämp restaurant! The lemon, the symbol of death—for the Chinese. And even here once. ‘Buried with a lemon in the hand,’ sang Anna Marie L[enngren]. One would be hard-pressed to find a more fitting epithet. . . . The whole of winter in summer’s raiment. A nature poetry that drives one mad! If only I will not succumb. I cannot live this miraculously rich life. Must stimulate myself. Afterward remorse [ångern]! Anguish [Ångesten]! I wonder if something lies beneath that alliteration?”19
Sibelius’s whimsical musings on death, isolation, and the natural world had once more become bound up with an acute sense of his own creativity. But such thoughts had also been motivated by a sense of his own mortality. In other words, they had become intrinsically linked artistically with the notion of a “late style”: not merely a chronological category, but rather a whole aesthetic outlook. And here surely lies the attraction of The Tempest as a source text. Such “lateness,” as Gordon McMullen has argued in his study of Shakespeare’s later plays, is paradigmatically “a time of renewal which is also a recapitulation of earlier styles and subject matter, expressed with a childlike simplicity and a certain looseness of painterly technique indicative of a mythopoetic tendency, a whittling down to basics, a return not only to the artist’s youth but also to the youth of art which is at the same time a looking forward to the future after the artist’s death and a kind of self-portraiture which is also a process of citation.”20: a process, I shall argue below, which is also characteristic of Sibelius’s work from the 1920s. As McMullen suggests, such late writing becomes a “borderline activity, a creative response to death, a kind of eschatology.”21 Therefore when Sibelius’s Danish publisher Wilhelm Hansen approached him on 1 May 1925 with the offer “Have you have written music to Shakespeare’s The Tempest?—The Royal Theatre intends to perform this work, and would like to use your music,”22 Sibelius may already have had many of the play’s themes and preoccupations at the forefront of his mind, even though he had not yet written a single note of the score.
As
Tawaststjerna suggests, “Hansen’s letter came at the right psychological moment” for the composer. Drawing on his account of the creative crises in the preceding years from Sibelius’s diary entries, Tawaststjerna explains how
for more than ten years almost without a break Sibelius had wrestled with the symphonic problem. He had refined his material and concentrated its form to an extreme degree in the attempt to attain the ideal of absolute music as he conceived it. Now an opportunity presented itself for him to give free rein to his thematic invention and depict the play’s characters in kaleidoscopically shifting colors, the play of the naiads and spirits of the air, natural catastrophes and a mythological harvest festival.23
The Tempest music thus served as a creative release, and simultaneously acted as a focal point for gathering together and summarizing many of the ideas and processes Sibelius had so strenuously sought to develop in his symphonies from the Fourth onward. In this sense, theater music may indeed have offered a less immediately threatening or confrontational genre for Sibelius’s work, one that was less explicitly bound up with a particularly weighty legacy and burden of aesthetic expectations than the early twentieth-century symphony. But writing music for one of Shakespeare’s plays inevitably brought its own particular anxieties of interpretation and tradition. And, despite his initial attraction to the project, Sibelius’s working relationship with the Royal Theatre’s production in Copenhagen did not proceed entirely smoothly. The Royal Theatre followed Hansen’s letter with a telegram dated 27 March 1925, inquiring whether Sibelius had previously written music for the play, and advising that the Royal Thea tre’s director, Johannes Poulsen, would travel to Helsinki to discuss the project with Sibelius in person.24 Sibelius replied by return to accept and outline his financial terms for the music (3,000 Swedish kronor, plus 5 percent of the ticket receipts and future rights over the music).25 The majority of the music was composed over a remarkably short period of time between the end of May and the beginning of September. As Tawaststjerna observes, Sibelius’s manuscript score (now held in the Sibelius Archive in Helsinki University Library) was notated in a strikingly neat and confident hand, belying the nervous insecurity that marks the sketches for many of his later symphonic works.26 The Royal Theatre’s managing director, Wilhelm Norrie, acknowledged receipt of some of the Tempest material (presumably the songs and chorus music) in a letter dated 22 August, adding. “I expect, as we discussed, delivery of your score by 1 September, when rehearsals of The Tempest will be already under way and the premiere will preferably take place by 1 September [sic: Norrie presumably meant to write October] at the latest.”27 Sibelius finally delivered the manuscript by the middle of October, and in a letter acknowledging receipt, Norrie wrote that “music director [Georg] Høeberg asks me to send his greetings and expresses his pleasure with your splendid music, and I can add that artistic director Johannes Poulsen and the artists who will interpret your tones are greatly excited.”28 In the event, however, the premiere did not take place until 16 March the following year, and Sibelius’s increasing frustration with the theater and associated delays with the production can be followed in an extended correspondence with Gunnar Hauch, music critic of the Danish newspaper Nationaltidende and a fervent supporter of Sibelius’s music.
Hauch first mentioned the project in a letter to Sibelius dated 28 May 1925, the day after the Royal Theatre had telegraphed to canvas Sibelius’s interest in the play.29 And over the following months Hauch served partly as a distant confidant during Sibelius’s work on the score and partly as a discreet intermediary between Sibelius and the Royal Theatre. Sibelius responded to Hauch’s inquiry on 2 June 1925, writing: “Music to The Tempest interests me immensely. Waiting for Mr. Poulsen, who has not yet been in touch. With the Royal Theatre, things are never clear.” As the delay began to accumulate, Sibelius wrote to Hauch on 2 October: “I now come to a highly discreet matter. It concerns music to The Tempest. I sent the first act two months ago. Now I have completed 34 numbers apart from 3, which I will send very shortly. This is dependent upon how my take on the material strikes the authorities. I have not heard a word, not even a reply to anything. Would you kindly ‘sound out the territory’ and see whether my music will be performed or not?”30 Hauch replied on 8 October to explain, with a fine sense of journalistic diplomacy, the reasons for the postponement:
Thank you for your letter about the situation regarding The Tempest and your music at the Royal Theatre. . . . I heard some time ago that Johannes Poulsen was very excited by the music that the Professor had sent, and in a conversation with Director Norrie on Tuesday he emphasized this strongly. I can truly say that we are exceptionally pleased, and grateful for the work that the Professor has accomplished, and that the theatre expects the premiere, which will take place between Christmas and New Year according to the latest decisions, to be a unique occasion. That it won’t take place earlier is because in a month’s time the theatre must perform Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Stravinsky’s Petrouchka. I find it amazing that the Professor has been able to create such a large work in a short space of time—and it will please me more than anything to get to know this work. Is it indiscreet to ask a little about the work’s character? Whether there is an overture, the instrumentation, etc?31
Sibelius wrote again a month later, on 2 November, to say that he would attend the Copenhagen premiere incognito—if Hauch could confirm a date for the performance.32 On 7 January 1926, as the New Year ticked past without further news, Sibelius wrote once more to Hauch, revealing his own anxieties with the project and offering a rare insight into his feelings about the text: “Now I must acknowledge that—despite all my attempts—I cannot recollect anything about Shakespeare. The following day whatever I wrote the previous day strikes me as weak and foolish. Thank God I am not a journalist. You must forgive me. Timon of Athens is dearest to me because of its humanity; The Tempest because of its musicality. Regarding The Tempest, when will it be performed? Will you kindly look into it down there and write to me about it?”33 With the theatre clearly overstretched, Hauch was forced to admit on 2 February that “an unlucky fate has hovered over the preparation of this work,”34 recounting the various accidents and misfortunes that had befallen the company in the meantime. In the event, Sibelius did not attend the premiere, even in disguise, and Hauch reported to the composer on 18 March:
The performance at the Royal Theatre will be without doubt a great success. There were many extremely fine moments in the technical use of the stage, and the execution was supported by a particularly great effort. But it cannot be denied that the actors’ powers at various points were not quite up to Shakespeare’s heights. As a whole it seemed that the lyrical scenes worked least well because of the production’s fragility. But the comic scenes came out well enough. And that the true tone of the play’s poetry and fantasy was heard so often is due to the music.
How wonderful, time after time, to observe how these tones opened up the word’s true soul. The music was conducted by the young music director Johan Nye Knudsen, who is a much more talented music director than Høeberg.35
Despite Hauch’s best efforts, it was hard to conceal the obvious shortcomings with the performance. Sibelius confided to his wife, Aino, at the end of the month that “I have forgotten the whole story with The Tempest. The blunder was that I threw in my lot with Poulsen. He can be fine, but certainly the stage production—as you wrote—is poor.”36 Sibelius subsequently attempted to salvage his music through two concert suites, and when the production was revived at the Finnish National Theatre in Helsinki the following year, his daughter, Ruth Snellman, played the central role of Ariel. Yet Sibelius’s dissatisfaction with the Danish production may not entirely have been the result of the organizational tensions described in his correspondence with Hauch. Rather, his unease could equally have arisen from profound differences over the interpretation of Shakespeare’s play. As Tawaststjerna notes, “In none of the theater pieces he had written music for hitherto had
he been able to live through one of the principal characters as intensively as he now identified himself with Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.”37 But The Tempest offers a uniquely complex and ambivalent text. As David Lindley and others have stressed, The Tempest is marked by some of Shakespeare’s most innovative and experimental theatrical effects, not least its use of masque in the fourth act. From its first recorded public performance on “Hallomas nyght,” 1 November 1611, at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre in London, The Tempest must have presented an alluring dramatic spectacle. As Lindley observes, “In its dramatic shaping, and in its deployment of music and spectacle in particular, The Tempest breaks new Shakespearean ground”—a possible reason why it was printed at the head of the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays in 1623.38 Yet photographs and designs of Poulsen’s Danish production of Edvard Lembcke’s nineteenth-century translation at the Royal Theatre suggests a somewhat more conservative vision of the play: the pervading mood is of a stylized gothic fantasy or fairy tale, with expressionistically twisted rocks and trees to represent the enchanted island. Miranda is rendered as a chaste, pale pre-Raphaelite figure—similar in character to Maeterlinck’s Mélisande (which was, of course, in repertory at the Royal Theatre in the 1925–26 season), and reinforcing her role as an essentially submissive agent under Prospero’s dominion. More striking contemporary echoes of Debussy and Stravinsky can be found in Kai Nielsen’s costume designs for the play (see Figures 1 and 2), including a Nijinskian faun’s attire for Ariel with tabor and pipe (to accompany the catch “Flout ’em and scout ’em,” Act 3, scene 2:120ff) and a Rusalka-style sketch for a winged naiad. Kai Nielsen’s haunting sketch for a masked Caliban, seemingly neither fish nor beast, but closer to Shakespeare’s “freckled whelp, hag-born, not honoured with / A human shape” (Prospero’s description in Act 1, scene 2:283–84) assumed a more conventional bearded form in the production, heightening the comic effect of his dialogues with Stephano and Trinculo in Act 2, scene 2, but robbing Caliban of his threatening force elsewhere. The final tableau (Act 5, scene 1) presents a strange juxtaposition between the fairy-tale quality of Poulsen’s staging and the more colorfully primitivist style of Kai Nielsen’s masked spirits, suggesting the influence of Paul Gauguin (who had briefly been resident in Copenhagen in 1884–85 with his Danish wife) or Japanese ritual theater. Throughout Poulsen’s version of the play, Prospero remains a seemingly statuesque presence, whose reserved formality suggests an emotional detachment from the proceedings. From photographs of the Copenhagen production, it is difficult to discern any of the tensions or ambiguities that motivate Shakespeare’s character beyond a sense of stern authority alone. It was here, perhaps, that Sibelius might have felt at greatest odds with Poulsen’s interpretation. With his strong symbolist leanings, and his urgent desire to understand art and life as troubled and darkly merged, Sibelius is unlikely to have been sympathetic to Poulsen’s more one-dimensional reading of Shakespeare’s principal character.
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 28