A similar expressive and textural arc is traced by no. 23, “The Rainbow” (Act 4, scene 1:58), which serves as an overture to the masque (which Sibelius sets as a melodrama) and Juno’s song that follows. Tawaststjerna comments on Sibelius’s use of a pitch collection that Messiaen would later describe as one of his “modes of limited transposition”: octatonic collection II.51 In reality, the pitch organization is more complex and subtle. The number begins with a bass drone or pedal (bassoons, horns, double basses) that strongly recalls the opening of the Fourth Symphony: the prominent pitch classes C, D, and G refer explicitly to the symphony’s basic motto. This dark timbral layer provides an acoustic ground while simultaneously blurring any firm sense of tonality: as in the symphony, the low scoring creates a rich spectrum of overtones and resonant upper partials. The imitative entries of the cellos and upper strings fill in the C–Gpitch space with the whole step–half-step pattern of octatonic collection II; the double basses, however, invert this intervallic space, descending toward G in purely whole-tone steps. Sibelius thus establishes a distinct modal layering (octatonic above, whole tone below) to emphasize the symmetry of the underlying tritone pair C–G (see Example 2). The enharmonic transformation of this G (F) in measure 12 marks the approximate midpoint of the number, and the beginning of the rainbow’s brightening (intensified by the entry of the timpani, trombones, trumpets, and upper wind). The rising upper string figure now ascends from F, while the bass descends toward C, although, characteristically, the final measures remain anchored on a first inversion chord, suspending any definitive sense of tonic arrival: indeed, the whole number is properly a study in modal contrast, intervallic space, and timbral modulation.
“The Rainbow” exemplifies, in highly compressed form, a structural and formal dynamic that is characteristic of much of Sibelius’s later music. For James Hepokoski, such structures suggest “the bypassing of traditionally mediated thought and external control in favor of more potent, archetypal urges that were believed to strike more deeply than the schematic methods of an ‘artificial’ rationality—the trusting embrace of the apparently mythic or pre-rational claims of intuitive impulse, blood, and nature (including raw sound itself).”52 The modal-timbral design of “The Rainbow” is indicative of this urge to access or uncover a more elemental sense of sonority, or Klang. The revelatory atmosphere of the closing measures is both an enigmatic moment of withdrawal and also a gateway to the mythic ritual of the masque that follows. Yet one of the most powerfully modernist characteristics of Sibelius’s music is the tension between such apparently intuitive structures and their carefully calibrated musical design. As Sibelius’s Tempest music repeatedly reveals, the invocation of such mythic or pre-rational claims to impulse and intuition is rarely straightforward or trusting. On the contrary, any appeal to blood, nature, or raw sound, Sibelius’s music insistently suggests, swiftly becomes threatening or destabilizing. Indeed, one of the central dramatic themes in The Tempest, which Sibelius’s music brings vividly into the foreground, is the extent to which notions of creative agency and control are stretched to breaking point by the incursion of such natural forces or elemental powers: a dissolution of self toward which the whole score constantly returns.
Example 2. “The Rainbow” (opening), no. 23, Sibelius’s Tempest.
This sense of a structural and expressive breaking point is rendered most clearly audible in two numbers that effectively frame the play’s dramatic action: the Overture with which the play begins and the “solemn music” that accompanies Prospero’s monologue in the final Act 5, scene 1:33–57. As previous commentators have noted, Poulsen followed the nineteenth-century convention of omitting the opening scene’s dialogue and substituting Shakespeare’s text for an independent tableau vivant, illustrating the storm and shipwreck that initiates the play’s action.53 At one level, Sibelius’s music can be heard as a naturalistic portrait of the storm itself, a genre piece in the tradition of earlier nineteenth-century Romantic dramatic music such as Berlioz’s “Royal Hunt and Storm” from Les Troyens. At a deeper level, however, the piece can be understood as a timbral study in wild aeolian sonorities: the rushing sounds of wind, rain, and crashing waves. The Overture’s percussively edged chromatic saturation, its roaring plenitude of white noise, can thus be heard as a kind of musical meteorology, an attempt to move beyond simple illustration toward a more phenomenologically grounded engagement with the nature and affect of the shifting weather—a reading to which we shall return below. At a third level, Sibelius’s Overture reveals the extent of his debt to Debussy, and in particular to works such as “Voiles” and “Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Ouest” from the Préludes, Book 1, pieces similarly concerned with spectral sonorities and complementary modal collections. The shifting emphasis between the two basic transposed collections of the whole-tone scale, allied to larger-scale variations in textural, melodic, and dynamic density, provides the music’s wave-like sense of structure and drama: spiraling in increasingly tight curves toward a plunging climax, and then gradually unwinding once more to an unsettled, but near-static conclusion.
In this sense, the work exemplifies, to an especially condensed and intensified degree, Hepokoski’s three-stage model of rotational form in late Sibelius: “1) a gradual ripening or phenomenological Coming-into-Being;2) an attainment of a peak followed by an immediate overripening; 3) crisis, distortion, and decay.”54 At a more immediate level, however, the work initially resists a straightforward teleological reading. Indeed, it is hard for the listeners to orient themselves within the music’s whirling textural density. On closer listening, the rich micropolyphony of the opening measures presents different ways of partitioning the complete chromatic aggregate using whole-tone scales. The individual string parts, for example, articulate the complete chromatic set horizontally, rising and falling in a complex series of local wave shapes that rapidly generate a reflective contrary motion and imitative counterpoint. The way that the double basses turn downward a beat early in measure 1, echoed by the upper strings a beat later as the basses turn upward again, for example, reveals the music’s characteristic undulating weave of interlocking patterns, falling and dipping to create an animated curtain or tapestry of sound. But the figuration is assembled vertically from stacked whole-tone groups (four-note [0268] tetrachords), which alternate the two basic transpositions of the whole-tone set (collections I and II). These tetrachords can also suggest octatonic patterns—an important modal resource elsewhere in The Tempest music. The initial emphasis here, through rhythmic stress alone, is on whole-tone collection I, which effectively serves as a modal “tonic.” Reinforced by bass B in the timpani, and the subsequent entry of lower brass in measure 2, the music accumulates a resonant E7 sonority with a strongly Lydian flavor—a modal coloring similar to that which later opens “The Rainbow.”
The next textural layer (introduced from measure 3, rehearsal letter A), is a more readily perceivable horizontal-melodic element: a strict two-part canon in the wind. This process of textural accumulation through imitation is borrowed from the opening string figuration, but the wind lines offer a purer form of whole-tone collection I (at least until the decorative sixteenth-note cadential tail at the end of measure 4). The eruptive entry of the horns is initially dissonant, but similarly lands on collection I. From here, the music commences its second rotational cycle or strophe: the canon and eruptive horn figure is repeated, mm. 6–11, but this time the music’s wave energy overshoots, and the Overture dramatically plunges onto whole-tone collection II for the first time, at measure 12. This is a moment of decisive modal reorientation, signaled by the curling woodwind fanfare in triplet thirty-second notes. The tuba slips down to E and builds a new harmonic foundation, until the music begins to mix collections more playfully, lurching back to whole-tone collection I on the final dotted quarter-note beat of measure 13.
The central section of the Overture (rotation 3) is a sickening swaying between the two whole-tone collections, with associated brass chroma
tic glissandi and shrill woodwind fanfares (like thunderbolts or the crackling discharge of St. Elmo’s fire, as described by Ariel in Act 1, scene 2:195–206), the opening tetrachords climbing upward threateningly in augmentation in the heavy brass. It is at the start of precisely this phase of greatest structural crisis or activity that Sibelius notes the curtain up (Tæppe) in his manuscript score: Poulsen’s tableau vivant was therefore synchronized carefully with the Overture’s most vertiginous plunge between whole-tone collections I and II in measure 15, initiating the final approach toward the Overture’s registral and dynamic ‘breaking point’ in measure 21. From here, the music gradually begins to subside in a reflective echo of the accumulative first half. The two-part woodwind canon begins again in measure 22 (rehearsal letter F), led by the upper rather than lower parts, but the Overture’s energy irresistibly drains away like a retreating storm or ebb tide. The slow repeated E–D–C descent in the tuba grounds the music at the very bottom of the brass register. On the final page, from rehearsal letter H, the music is reduced to its elemental component parts: the string figuration finally gives way to a shivering tremolando and distant sustained bell-like chords in the brass and woodwind. The Overture closes on a mysterious spectral chord: a “root” form of the earlier aeolian sounds built from whole-tone collection I, but scored so that it suggests a softly glowing spectral harmony: an E-major triad plus raised fourth, flattened seventh, and major ninth degrees (Example 3). Closely related again to the Overture’s opening tetrachord, the final measures do not so much offer a resolution of the music’s unstable modal tensions as settle on a referential sonority associated both with nature and also with the idea of the supernatural.
The illustrative quality of The Tempest Overture serves an obvious dramatic function in Sibelius’s response to Shakespeare’s play. But it is instructive to compare the music’s structural and expressive qualities with similar storm passages in Sibelius’s other closely contemporary works, notably the Sixth and Seventh symphonies and Tapiola. In the Sixth, the strongly circular rotational cycles of the opening half of the finale are concerned with a gradual process of textural and harmonic accumulation, driven, as Hepokoski notes, by the instability of the symphony’s underlying Dorian “tonic” and the various modal, diatonic, and chromatic pressures that the work brings to bear upon its basic material. The finale opens in a straightforwardly ballad-like manner, with a series of eloquent antiphonal exchanges that seem to promise a renewed sense of modal cadential order: the timpani’s hollow “V–i” in D Dorian in mm. 36–37 apparently signals a regained musical balance. But the sequential cycles that follow from measure 53, struggling to reattain this D-Dorian collection in its full range and depth of expression, swiftly become overburdened with chromatic elements, and the final cycle, from measure 114, reaches saturation point, overshooting its intended goal and landing on a formidably dark B in measure 144, a point that corresponds exactly with a parallel moment of harmonic arrival in the symphony’s opening Allegro. As Hepokoski suggests, “The most compelling telos of this [symphony’s] finale, it seems, is one of crisis, not one of affirmation.”55 The storm here, as in The Tempest Overture, presages a decisive moment of rupture in the musical fabric, a point at which the work’s underlying processes and patterns appear to break down, even as they are foreshadowed by an earlier, seemingly more stable event (that point of arrival in the first movement). Indeed, it is not until measure 205 that the finale is able to reach its originally intended target: a subdued climactic statement of the opening measures in D Dorian. What follows is a gradual decline, or dying of the light: a slow acceptance of a seemingly inevitable harmonic goal rather than its triumphant accomplishment. As Hepokoski concludes, “Sibelius might have been pleased for us to meditate upon the process structure of the Sixth as a kind of elemental archetype: a natural cycle rising to a peak (and into a centered tonic, D Dorian), then declining into extinction, in the manner, perhaps, of a day, a season, a year, or a person’s life. In thus contemplating the general shape of rise, full flowering, and inevitable decay, Sibelius, as nature-mystic, may have been inviting us to brood on the elemental cycles that structure our own lives.”56 The Sixth thus charts a broad narrative arc similar to that which many critics (including Brandes) have read in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and which may powerfully have informed Sibelius’s response to the text.
Example 3. Sibelius’s Tempest Overture, conclusion, mm. 36–39, “spectral” chord (brass, strings doubling).
The Seventh Symphony offers an even more complex working-through of these structural and expressive tensions. The underlying structural issue is not the fragility of a basic D-Dorian collection, as in the Sixth, but rather the idea of C major as a tonal and symbolic reference point, embodied in the noble trombone theme first heard at measure 60. The symphony opens characteristically with a “misfired” cadence: an interruptive A-flat minor sonority (measure 3) whose local implications Sibelius temporarily resolves via chromatic stepwise voice-leading progressions, but whose modal coloring (particularly the “dark” shade of the A and C components) inflects much of the music that follows. When the trombone theme emerges for the first time, it serves both a symbolic and tonal-harmonic function: emblematic, perhaps, of an aristocratic Prospero-like presence within the work, surveying the symphony’s domain as if from an elevated height or distance. This reading is strengthened by an obvious (though previously unnoted) intertextual reference to the Alphorn theme in the finale of Brahms’s First Symphony—a work likewise concerned with the structural-expressive idea of C major and associated chromatic tensions (especially A-flat). This reference is also closely bound up with the idea of late style, since, for Reinhold Brinkmann, Brahms’s symphony is already a profoundly “late” work, one shaped not just by the symphony’s relationship with its inherited musical tradition or legacy, but by a wider aesthetic outlook or sense of belatedness. For Brinkmann, the full weight of this historical burden can be felt when the Alphorn theme returns at the end of the development (measure 284). “This passage is not only the structural culmination of a purely thematic process” Brinkmann notes, “it marks the dynamic climax of the evolution of the entire form, and the alphorn call is sounded at the point where, as a result of the development, one expects the start of the recapitulation, and with it, in line with the orchestral climax, a powerful main theme heard in the full orchestra.”57 What should follow is the reprise of the string’s broad melody from the start of the Allegro non troppo, ma con brio, measure 61, the idea that famously invoked comparisons with the “Ode to Joy” theme from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. But crucially, as Brinkmann points out, “instead of reappearing it is emphatically replaced. Here the alphorn call transcends an adaptation of a Beethovenian theme, quelling it, effacing it.”58 Brahms’s finale hence becomes a “taking-back” of the Ninth, to adopt Thomas Mann’s phrase, a moment of historical return that is simultaneously a rewriting, erasure, or withdrawal—a gesture, Brinkmann suggests, that points to the essential condition of Brahms’s modernity. In Sibelius’s symphony, the initial return of the Alphorn/Prospero trombone theme (measure 221) is swept away in a swaying storm of chromaticized string figuration: an expected moment of decisive structural realignment hence becomes a crisis, much like the deflected climax at measure 144 in the finale of the Sixth. When the theme returns a second, and final time, in measure 475, signaling the symphony’s closure, it is therefore already marked by a strongly retrospective quality—the poignant awareness of previous events and the earlier sense of a profound structural misalignment or loss. For Brinkmann, this kind of gesture, in Brahms, evokes what Ernst Bloch described as the “melancholy of fulfillment”:
Moreover there is everywhere a fissure, indeed an abyss in the very realizing, the actuated-actual arrival of that which was beautifully foreseen and envisioned; and this is the abyss of uncomprehended existence itself. Thus the surrounding dark also provides the ultimate basis for the melancholy of fulfillment: there is no earthly paradise which doe
s not have, at its entrance, that shadow which the entrance still casts.59
The closing measures of Sibelius’s Seventh offer a similarly melancholy vision, despite their seemingly radiant tone: a sense of harmonic and tonal order is restored, but at considerable expressive and emotional cost. The storm or tempest at the heart of the Seventh Symphony, whose rushing winds can be heard even in the strained, high-string writing of the pre-penultimate page (measure 500), resolving the symphony’s disruptive A-flat elements for almost the final time, abates to offer the glimpse of an enchanted island, a domain of “marvelous sweet music” (Act 3, scene 3:18) embodied in the Prospero-like tone of the trombone theme. But it is a vision already shadowed by the awareness of its own contingency, a melancholy that, following Brinkmann, “signifies more than just a personal self-diagnosis, private and artistic. It is—as well as that—a historical signature.”60
This sense of rupture, which Brinkmann suggests marks the idea of late style in Brahms, and which, I’ve argued above, can be heard also in Sibelius’s Sixth and Seventh symphonies, is most forcibly expressed in The Tempest by Prospero’s monologue in Act 5. For many commentators, including Brandes, Prospero’s “Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves” speech is an autobiographical window that serves as both a summation and also a farewell to the dramatic stage, Shakespeare’s evocative drawing down of the blinds on his own creative career. For Sibelius, however, the process becomes an anguished and enraged leave-taking, a snarling sequence of chromaticized nature sounds—the most dissonant music in the whole work—interrupted suddenly at measure 11, the moment when Prospero breaks his staff and resigns his magic powers, returning ambivalently to his former role as Duke of Milan (see Example 4). The music that follows is a 16-measure adagio, the simplest music in the whole score, a cadential hymn in B major, and a passage that returns to the austere aristocratic mode associated with Prospero in the entr’acte between Acts 1 and 2 (no. 8). Yet the passage is already marked by a strongly retrospective tone: the music might be heard as a threnody as much as a celebration of humanity regained. This unexpected hymnic turn exemplifies in almost schematic form one of the principal qualities of late style as understood by Gordon McMullen. “Late period work is typically depicted not as a steady development towards an epic climax in the way of the Virgilian model,” McMullen explains, “but as a kind of coda, a supplementary phase of the creative life manifesting itself at the same time as a renewal, a rediscovery, a renaissance, characterized in particular ways by a looseness of facture, a tendency toward intense color or expression, a certain difficulty and abstraction of manner, and by a distinct style which is in a way childlike and yet at the same time—and this is frequently the key authenticator of true lateness—predicative of styles yet to be established by the artist’s successors, of future developments in the particular art-form in question—as work, in other words, that stands outside its own time.”61 Sibelius’s setting of Prospero’s monologue can be heard in precisely this vein—as a coda that is already a rediscovery of earlier sounds and modes of utterances in the work. It combines textual density and remarkable concision with a sense of looseness—of being, in some ways, little more than a sketch for a much larger, imaginatively conceived but physically unrealized work. But it also marks a point of closure: the music is followed by Ariel’s song, and the final cortège (incongruously, a polonaise) that Sibelius borrowed is taken wholesale from his music for Kaarlo Bergbohm’s retirement from the Finnish National Theatre. Even the closing epilogue (no. 34bis) that Sibelius supplied for the 1927 Finnish production is reworked from his earlier orchestral work Cassazione. To all intents and purposes, in other words, the final measures of the monologue mark the actual end of the whole work just as the end of Prospero’s monologue in a sense marks the end of the play’s principal drama.
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 30