Figure 1. Kai Nielsen’s sketch of costume design for Ariel, Sibelius’s Tempest.
Figure 2. Sketch of costume design for winged naiad.
Sibelius’s reading of the text, and his idea of Prospero in particular, may rather have been informed by an existing Scandinavian academic tradition of Shakespeare scholarship, especially through the work of Danish literary critic Georg Brandes, whose three-volume study of Shakespeare was published in Copenhagen in 1895–96 and widely read across the Nordic region.39 The basis for Brandes’s interpretation, as Niels B. Hansen has observed, lay partly in his studies of European literature, particularly Hippolyte Taine’s Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863), and the German translations of Schiller and A. W. Schlegel.40 But the most important source of information for Brandes was Edward Dowden’s seminal Shakespeare: A Critical Study of His Life and Art (1875), which exerted a strong influence over all late-Victorian readings of Shakespeare up to and including writers such as George Bernard Shaw and A. C. Bradley. Like Sibelius after him, Brandes visited London and Stratford-on-Avon, making the same journey to Holy Trinity Church to view the Shakespeare memorials. But, as Hansen suggests, it was his close reading of Shakespeare’s play texts that distinguished Brandes’s study: “The Shakespeare [Brandes] looked for and found in the texts was a personality who in many respects reflected Brandes’s concept of himself. In constructing the psychobiography of the Renaissance genius, he was in a sense working in an autobiographical vein, or at least engaged in a process of identification—a poetic rather than a scientific project.”41 Shakespeare, through this process of self-reflection, became a model for the modern man: a central category in Brandes’s literary criticism. And the defining characteristic of modernity, as Brandes understood it and defined it elsewhere, lay precisely in its sense of belatedness: the cultivation of a late style that was somehow out of step with its time and sought to break the boundaries or barriers of its own epoch, yet was simultaneously marked by a melancholic sense of loneliness or self-exile. Hence the opening of Brandes’s third volume, starting discussion of the late plays with Hamlet, begins a section pointedly titled “Discord and Scorn” by echoing the lines of the play itself, eliding Shakespeare (as both autobiographical subject and author) with Brandes’s own worldview: “Out of tune! Out of tune! Out of tune the instrument whereon so many enthralling melodies had been played—glad and gay, plaintive or resentful, full of love and full of sorrow. Out of tune the mind which had felt so keenly, thought so deeply, spoken so temperately, and stood so firmly ‘in the very torrent tempest, and as I may say, whirlwind of your passion.’”42 For Brandes, Hamlet was marked both by a creative rage and also a turning-away from the world: a new ludic sensibility in Shakespeare’s work that signaled a significant change of emphasis in his writing. The Tempest occupies an even more privileged position in Brandes’s discussion, as in other nineteenth-century surveys, principally on account of its assumed historical status as Shakespeare’s last single-authored work. For Brandes, however, The Tempest served as both a carefully calibrated summation and a farewell. “Never, with the exception of Hamlet and Timon,” Brandes argued, “had Shakespeare been so personal.” Brandes read the work partly through a Darwinian-Nietzschean lens, claiming, “In Caliban we have the primitive man, the aboriginal, the animal which has just evolved into the first rough stages of the human being. In Prospero we are given the highest development of Nature, the man of the future, the superhuman man of spirit.”43 Prospero thus becomes a Zarathustra-like figure, both a prophet at the dawn of a new age (or “brave new world,” whose imminence Miranda famously announces in Act 5, scene 1:183) and also a lone wanderer: roles that Sibelius himself would also happily embrace at various points in his diary entries. In a critical turn characteristic of Shakespeare’s other later plays, notably Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, Brandes argued that “tired by suffering, Prospero proves its strengthening qualities. Far from succumbing to their blow, it is not until it has fallen that he displays his true, far-reaching, and terrible power, and becomes the great irresistible magician which Shakespeare himself had long been.”44
For Brandes, and other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics, Prospero merges with the biographical figure of Shakespeare himself, and with the condition of modernity. “It is Shakespeare’s own nature which overflows into Prospero,” he maintains, “and thus the magician represents not merely the noble-minded great man, but the genius, imaginatively delineated, not, as in Hamlet, psychologically analyzed.” Both Prospero and Shakespeare dissolve into mere manifestations of the will, a creative force whose ebb and flow can be felt through the shifting tensions of the drama almost like a tidal current. “Audibly and visibly does Prospero’s genius manifest itself, visible and audible also the inward and outward opposition he combats.”45 This sense of a tidal stream also runs powerfully through the play’s seasonal setting. “The scenery is autumnal throughout, and the time is that of the autumn equinox with its storms and shipwrecks,” Brandes observes. “With noticeable care all the plants named, even those occurring merely in similes, are such flowers and fruit, &c., as appear in the fall of the year in a northern landscape. The climate is harsh and northerly in spite of the southern situation of the island and the southern names. Even the utterances of the goddesses, the blessing of Ceres, for example, show that the season is late September—thus answering to Shakespeare’s time of life and frame of mind.”46 For Brandes the play thus becomes a last act, audibly and visually delineated, the spirit of Prospero’s “Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves” speech (Act 5, scene 1:35–57), read as Shakespeare’s own departure from the stage, comparable in tone to the mood of the Night watchman’s song, “O Mensch, gib acht!” (Oh mankind, take heed!) in Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra, 4:12 (1883–85).
Sibelius responds to this richly late vision of the play on several levels. His music for the production falls broadly into four archetypal categories or modes (listed in Table 1), which correspond to different groups of characters and strategic moments in the plot, as well as fulfilling the more familiar dramatic functions of supplying mood, continuity, or commentary upon the drama. The first, and most prominent of these modes is nature music, which sounds either wild and untrammeled (as in the opening prelude and the interludes accompanying Ariel’s arrival and departure from the stage), or hushed and barely audible (the “Chorus of the Winds” in Act 1, scene 2:224). Such aeolian (wind-based) sounds, whether high-pitched and intense or subdued, permeate much of the music throughout the play, serving almost as an auditory background or grain for the whole score. Closely related is the second category, which consists of a stylized, archaic music, usually modal (Dorian) in color and associated with aristocratic figures such as Miranda (Act 1, scene 2:186), Prospero (the entr’acte between Acts 1 and2), or Alonso (the intermezzo between Acts 3 and 4, illustrating the King’s grief for his drowned son). For Robert Layton, the slow sarabande meter and restrained dynamic level of this music gains a “Purcellian grandeur,” but Sibelius might equally have been thinking of Fauré, or his own music for Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1905). The third, broadest, category is pastoral music, associated both with spirits and the masque (Act 4, scene 1:60), and also with the comic scenes in Acts 2 and 3. The conventional affective connotations of the pastoral (images of Arcadia, idyll, and a lost golden age) strengthen the play’s autumnal tone. But the pastoral also provides one of the characteristic modes for Ariel’s songs, especially the first, “Kom herhid på gule sand” (Come unto these yellow sands, Act 1, scene 2:37–87) and the fifth, “Med bien drikker jeg af krus” (Where the bee sucks, there suck I, Act 5, scene 5:88–94), which serves also as an overture to the final act. The last category is associated principally with Caliban, whose two solo numbers (the Interlude, Act 2, scene 2, and his mock-triumphant song of independence, “Farvel, min husbond” [Farewell, my master], Act 2, scene 2:176–81) are characterized by a greater degree of chromaticism, strong rhyth
mic ostinato figures, and heavy percussion scoring: qualities conventionally associated in much nineteenth-century theatrical music with stereotypical evocations of the Orient. At a crude level, Sibelius therefore reinforces the received image of Caliban as a primitive subhuman savage or animal, as Brandes and other critics suggest. But Sibelius blurs the immediate boundaries of this stereotype by bleeding elements of such musical Orientalism into other numbers, notably the whirling “Dance of the Shapes” that provides the high point of Act 3, scene 3:18. Caliban’s bestiality, it seems, points toward a more general (base) level of the human condition, one that is no less essential than Prospero’s elevated detachment elsewhere and whose presence can be felt across the island.
Closer attention to the individual numbers in Sibelius’s score of The Tempest offers further insights into his reading of the play. Though extensive sketches do not survive, the Sibelius archives in Helsinki University Library do contain an early draft of no. 4, “The Chorus of the Winds,” which conflates material that eventually appeared in no. 2 (Miranda, Act 1, scene 2:186), as well as a version of the “Winds” music that differs significantly from its final form (see Example 1).47 The music is directed to be played “Hoch oben, über d. Bühne” (High above the stage), a marking that occurs at several comparable points throughout Sibelius’s manuscript score, suggesting a physical as well as figurative evocation of distance. Sibelius’s striking scoring, for wordless chorus, con bocca chiusa (with closed mouths), accompanied by harp and harmonium, which he retained in one version of no. 2 and the final version of no. 4, suggests both enchantment and also the nature sounds that form the play’s basic acoustic background. Both voices and harmonium here become “wind instruments,” a hybrid aeolian harp, intaking and exhaling air alternately in a wave-like manner whose undulation is reinforced by Sibelius’s envelope hairpin dynamic markings and melodic contours. The harmonium might equally well evoke memories of its use in some of Schoenberg’s early works, notably Herzgewächse, op. 20 (1911), where it assumes a more sultry, breathy quality. Harmonically, this preliminary draft is remarkable for the sudden enharmonic shift in measure 17 (C-D), prompted by the incursion of the E‘s into the Dorian context in mm. 13–16, and the haunting tritone progressions descending by whole tones of the following page (D–G, mm. 26–28; C–F, mm. 29–32; B–E, mm. 33–36). Sadly, none of this affective sequence of diminished-fifth steps was retained in the final version. No less notable is the allusion to the swinging fifths of the “Swan Hymn” from the finale of the Fifth Symphony in mm. 37–37, underpinned by shadowy bass notes in the harp (the C in mm. 46–48 is especially effective and, enharmonically reinterpreted once more, becomes the grounding tone for the B7 chord with which the number gradually fades away into nothingness). Was the directness of this allusion to the symphony perhaps the reason Sibelius eventually reconceived the passage, dividing Miranda’s restrained aristocratic berceuse and the “Chorus of the Winds” into separate numbers? The “Swan Hymn” fifths recur elsewhere as a fingerprint, not least in the swirling gale that accompanies Ariel’s dramatic entries and exits from the stage.
Example 1. Unpublished draft for nos. 2 and 4, “Miranda” and “Chorus of the Winds,” Sibelius’s Tempest (National Library of Finland).
The first of Ariel’s songs, “Kom herhid på gule Sand,” is essentially a pastoral in D major, the key of the Second Symphony and The Oceanides, but the music’s radiant diatonicism is increasingly clouded by the incursion of B, a chromatic element that points back toward the (predominantly flat-side) storm music of the Overture. Ariel’s dramatic association with the elements, and with the wild nature sounds of the opening number, is therefore made harmonically explicit. After an orchestral play-over, the first strophe is sung by the “Chorus of the Winds” alone, reinforcing precisely the association established by Ariel’s flat-side chromaticism. Sibelius’s autograph manuscript marks the chorus “Hinter d. Bühne” (Behind the stage), once again suggesting a literal and figurative distancing, whereas the harmonium is marked Come coro (Hoch oben, über d. Bühne), so that the overall impression would almost have created a surround-sound effect: a glowing aura of noise rather than a sharply focused timbral signal. Ariel’s first entry is almost parenthetical, the mood darkened by the presence of a rolling wave-like chromatic figure in the cellos and basses—more an undertow than a functional harmonic element (a musical illustration of the evocative line “the wild waves whist,” though, as Lindley notes, “whist” here refers to “becoming silent,” one of the recurrent thematic tropes in Sibelius’s music).48 Ariel’s stanza is harmonically and texturally cut short at rehearsal letter C (measure 51), Poco a poco stretto, by the entry of the chorus as watchdogs: this is sparked by a moment of chromatic disruption, the heavy brass and percussion audibly recalling the wave-tossed storm sonorities of the Overture. It also serves to negotiate an awkward moment in Shakespeare’s text: line 380, “And sweet sprites bear the burden/the burden bear,” can be read alternatively as a lyric in Ariel’s song, or as a stage direction marking the entry of the chorus, “the burden.”49 Sibelius, presumably unconsciously, thus highlights a moment of textual as well as dramatic rupture: the revelation that beneath the idyllic pastoralism of Ariel’s lyric a much darker layer is constantly present.
This more shadowed tone is even more evident in Ariel’s second song, “Fem favne dybt” (Full fathom five, Act 1, scene 2, 396–403). Sibelius’s use of the trombones here suggests a funeral solemnity rather than the raw nature sounds of the Overture. Similarly, the music’s angular melodic contour (with prominent flattened second and raised fourth—the Locrian mode characteristic also of passages in Tapiola) likewise evokes an atmosphere of mourning, loss, and painful remembrance: “Slet intet af ham er spildt eller tabt” (Nothing of him that doth fade). As in Ariel’s first song, Sibelius again exploits the expressive potential of the chorus: the voices of the sea nymphs who “hourly ring his knell” become a drone in the second half of the setting, underlying Ariel’s inverted pedal (which moves at half speed).50 The strange disorienting effect of the chorus’s swinging bell sounds is intensified by Sibelius’s metrical modulation—the expansion of the initial common-time meter into a more spacious 3/2 creates the illusion of stretching time, even while the underlying pulse remains constant. Closure is signaled by a descending chromatic sequence (Ariel’s symbolic B pitch from the first song is resolved by register displacement in the strings), and by a gradual shading into silence: Ariel’s vision sinking once more into the gloom.
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 29