Example 4. Sibelius’s Tempest, Prospero’s monologue, no. 32, mm. 8–15.
Yet it could be argued that the restful B-major triads at the close of the monologue do not wholly succeed in banishing memories of the violence with which the number begins, nor definitively resolve the music’s tensions and instabilities. The pervading aural impression of the score surely remains the wild nature sounds of the Overture and the storm with which Prospero’s monologue opens, not the more dignified aristocratic music with which it concludes, just as the audience’s imagination remains with the barely controlled fury of Prospero’s “Ye elves” speech, even after the festive reunion of the play’s final pages. Ironically, given his profound antipathy to Sibelius’s music, assessed elsewhere in this volume, it is Theodor Adorno who best captures this Sibelian sense of instability and rage. Adorno wrote dismissively of Sibelius’s “Caliban-like destruction of all the musical results of mastery over nature” in his infamous Gloss of 1938, explicitly equating the nature symbolism of Sibelius’s score with the most bestial reading of Shakespeare’s dramatic character. Yet Adorno’s penetrating analysis of late style in Beethoven arguably offers more compelling insights into Sibelius’s Tempest music and the two last symphonies. Writing of Beethoven’s late style, Adorno argues that “the force of subjectivity in late works is the irascible gesture with which it leaves them. It bursts them asunder, not in order to express itself but, expressionlessly, to cast off the allusion of art. Of the works it leaves only fragments behind, communicating itself, as if in ciphers, only through the spaces it has violently vacated. Touched by death, the masterly hand sets free the matter it previously formed.”62 Late work, according to Adorno, thus remains fundamentally fissured, stubbornly fractured and incomplete, even as it tends toward silence. This would account for the beat’s rest that Sibelius places at the heart of the monologue in measure 12, or the reverberant after-echo once the strings’ resonant chord has died away at the close of the Adagio (significantly, there is no pause over the held chord of the final two measures). In Beethoven’s late work, Adorno suggests, “he no longer draws together the landscape, now deserted and alienated, into an image” invoking the idea of landscape both as an imaginary and as a physically perceived world. “The fragmented landscape is objective, while the light in which alone it glows is subjective.” Yet, Adorno continues, “[Beethoven] does not bring about their harmonious synthesis. As a dissociative force he tears them apart in time, perhaps in order to preserve them for the eternal. In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.”63
A similarly wasted landscape frames Sibelius’s Tempest music, and his other late works, from the Sixth and Seventh symphonies to Tapiola. Following the principles of Adorno’s Beethoven analysis, this might have pointed to the music’s underlying tendency toward fracture or collapse, a sense of cataclysm realized most vividly in the storm with which Tapiola concludes. It is hard to retain any sense of Prospero-like authority at the end of this work, even though it concludes with precisely the same B-major chords as his monologue in The Tempest. Yet these passages also bring into sharp focus questions of agency and intention in Sibelius’s music. They force us to reconsider ideas of nature and the natural world in Sibelius’s work not as an ideologically conceived mold for deeply regressive notions of purity and elementalism, as Adorno insisted in the closing page of his critique. Rather, landscape, and particularly the storm, emerges as a mode of immanent critique. It is concerned precisely with the dissolution and breaking apart that Adorno believes Sibelius’s music attempts to conceal. Sibelius’s late works repeatedly evoke forms of spatial perception, imaginatively shaping our perception of auditory space by tracing an expressive arc that curves initially upward (and outward) from an opening feeling of concealment or veiling toward moments of rupture, luminescence, or actualization, and leading ultimately to a distant, intangible horizon or point of dissipation in their final measures. This basic trajectory, charting a process of emergence, arrival, and redeparture across parallel but contrasting time frames, is shared by the two last symphonies, Tapiola, and the Tempest music. All of these late works, in other words, suggest different journeys across the same basic terrain. But they also suggest a sense of instability or flux, of a continual motion to and fro: the symbolism of the shifting tides to which Shakespeare’s The Tempest repeatedly alludes.
This sense of motion leads us away from Adorno’s analysis of late style toward social anthropologist Tim Ingold’s recent critique of sound studies and the notion of soundscape.64 For Ingold, sound, and by extension music, is akin to visual perception. But just as sight is more properly a function of light and illumination, rather than of objects themselves, Ingold claims, so sound “is not the object but the medium of our perception. It is what we hear in.” Sound, Ingold writes, “is neither mental nor material, but a phenomenon of experience—that is, of our immersion in, and commingling with, the world in which we find ourselves.” This immersion prompts a fundamental shift of perspective or attitude, away from questions of materiality or ground, toward something more mobile: the shifting patterns of the weather. For Ingold, “Weather is no mere phantasm, the stuff of dreams. It is, to the contrary, fundamental to perception.” Hence, “we do not touch the wind, but touch in it; we do not see sunshine, but see in it; we do not hear rain, but hear in it. Thus wind, sunshine and rain, experienced as feeling, light and sound, underwrite our capacities, respectively to touch, to see and to hear.” From his phenomenological standpoint, Ingold argues that “we should therefore turn our attention skywards, to the realm of the birds, rather than towards the solid earth beneath our feet. The sky is not an object of perception, any more than sound is. It is not a thing we see. It is rather luminosity itself. But in a way, it is sonority too.” In a remarkably Prospero-like gesture, Ingold thus turns us back toward a more mythic account of the origins of music, in the Orphic sounds of nature: the rushing of the wind, the crying of birds, and the flow of water across the landscape. But in proposing his musical meteorology, Ingold suggests that “the wind is not so much embodied as the body enwinded.” By extension, “we should say of the body, as it sings, hums, whistles or speaks, that it is ensounded. It is like setting sail, launching the body into sound like a boat on the waves or, perhaps more appropriately, like a kite in the sky.”
Ingold’s idea of enwindment offers a radical new reading of The Tempest, one in which Prospero is revealed not as a magus, or superhuman being, far less as a dramatic representation of Shakespeare himself, but rather as a mere agent for a more powerful and elemental medium: the rushing winds of the storm. By turning our gaze upward and attending to the sounds of the weather around us, we also become aware, like Prospero, of our own contingency and transience. We are shaped by the meteorological environment just as much as we seek to control the elements around us. Sibelius seems to have shared precisely this perception in his recurrent crises of confidence and moments of self-doubt and creative angst, and in his repeated descriptions of the natural world and his fascination with landscape. This is perhaps the defining quality of Sibelius’s “late style.” In a diary entry dated 23 November 1924, the year before he began his Tempest music, he wrote: “How infinitely difficult it is to age as an artist—above all as a composer.” Turning again to a landscape metaphor, he added: “It is perhaps wise not to have friends. One dies alone and that is certainly easier. It might be that I should ‘descend from the mountain’—life is little other than waiting for death.”65 Here is the key to Sibelius’s reading of Prospero, in his resignation as he descends to the earthly sphere from the exalted heights and “cloud-capp’d towers” of his creative imagination. But it prompts an even deeper act of self-reflection and abandonment. As we listen to the closing measures of Sibelius’s setting of Prospero’s monologue, or the conclusion of the Seventh Symphony or Tapiola, it is as though we ourselves inhabit Prospero’s mind as he waits to leave the desert island—his stage—at the end of Shakespeare’s Tempest. Nothing lies beyond e
xcept obliteration. Yet for a seemingly infinitely prolonged moment, before the silence begins, we hear intensely the crashing of the waves against the shore, the roaring of the wind among the pines.
NOTES
I would like to thank the staff of the National Archives of Finland (NA) and the Music Manuscript Reading Room in the National Library of Finland (HUL) for their assistance with research for this essay. I am indebted to Glenda Dawn Goss, Gitta Henning, Timo Virtanen and Lilo Skaarup at the library of the Royal Theatre, Copenhagen. Haydon Lorimer first brought Tim Ingold’s work to my attention, and Tiffany Stern read a preliminary draft of the essay and made many corrections and improvements.
1. The idea of a shadow is problematic and is invoked cautiously here, since it suggests both a sense of anxiety and also a patrilineal model of inheritance and tradition that demands further critical scrutiny. Sibelius’s “shadow” is frequently cast in writing about more recent Finnish music, for instance in Ilkka Oramo’s essay “Sub umbra Sibelii: Sibelius and His Successors,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius, ed. Daniel M. Grimley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 157–68.
2. Cecil Gray, Sibelius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), 150–51; and Constant Lambert, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (London: Penguin, 1934; repr. 1948), 237–41. The date of the two volumes, the same year as the death of Elgar, Holst, and Delius, is itself significant given currents in English music at the time. See also Byron Adams’s essay in the present volume.
3. For a trenchant example, see Arnold Whittall, Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 64.
4. Veijo Murtomäki, liner notes to Sibelius: The Tempest, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, cond. Jukka Pekka Saraste, Ondine, ODE 813–2 (1993), 7.
5. Glenda Dawn Goss, Sibelius: A Composer’s Life and the Awakening of Finland (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), 3–6 and 438–41.
6. The key texts are Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1993; repr., Cambridge: Polity, 1998), and Edward W. Said’s posthumous On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2006). For other musical discussions of late style, see Rose Rosengard Subotnik’s seminal article, “Adorno’s Diagnosis of Beethoven’s Late Style: Early Symptom of a Fatal Condition,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 29/2 (Summer 1976), 242–75, and, for a more recent survey, Marianne Wheeldon’s Debussy’s Late Style (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009).
7. Goss, Sibelius, 424.
8. “För Sibelius blev Prospero en sinnebild för den skapande Människan och därigenom för honom själv, liksom Ariel fick symbolisera hans inspiration, Caliban åter hans demoni.” Erik Tawaststjerna, Jean Sibelius, vol. 5: 1919–1957 (Stockholm: Atlantis, 1997), 204. All references to Erik Tawaststjerna’s Sibelius biography in this essay are drawn from his 5-volume Swedish original (published in Stockholm and Helsinki), rather than Robert Layton’s heavily abridged (3-volume) English edition. All translations below are mine unless otherwise acknowledged.
9. “Just Stormen borde ligga för Er. Prospero (Trollkarlen), Miranda, jord—och luftandar m.m.” Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 5:202
10. The box includes a visiting card for H. Orsmond Anderton, head of the Midland Institute, Birmingham, in addition to the guide leaflet (ticket no. 28676). Box 52, “Pariisi, 1911, Englanti 1912,” Sibelius Family Archive, National Archives of Finland (henceforth NA), Helsinki.
11. “Resa till England. London.—Stratford on Avon Shakespeares födelsebygd.” Jean Sibelius, Dagbok 1909–1944, ed. Fabian Dahlström (Stockholm: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, Atlantis, 2005), 153.
12. As early as 21 May 1909, in Berlin, Sibelius had remarked “En stilförändring?” (A change of style?; ibid., 35), prefiguring, as Hepokoski suggests, the later crisis of identity that would occur the following year. James Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 10–18.
13. “Mitt lifs solitude börjar. Konsten är att hålla arbetsmodet uppe trots ‘alleingefühl.’” Sibelius, Dagbok, 39.
14. “Vaknade med de ohyggligaste grämelser öfver de varmhjärtades åtgöranden. Fruktar att de vände sig till personer, hvilka icke äro värda förtroendet. Skall du verkligen lida af detta! Är det bätre att sitta på esplanadesofforna i H:fors och preja an förbigående kapitalister. Du vet sjelf att det var helvetet. Din tid gick og din fantasi led. Något för något. Du haf gifvit musik, alltså––?!” (ibid., 48). As Dahlström notes, Sibelius alludes here to the famous point at which Lear begins to dismiss his daughter Cordelia—“Nothing will come of nothing, speak again”—in King Lear, 1.1.94.
15. Sibelius, Dagbok, 59
16. “En ny symfonisk uppgift leker mig i hågen! Huru liten, oändligt liten förståelse och uppmuntran har ej mina sinfonier erhållit ute i store verlden! Ofta förekommer det mig numera som vore hela denna sinfoniska sträfvan lönlös. Men deta arbeta och denna sträfvan har nog sin stora uppfostrande betydelse för mig. För närvarande finner jag mig liten och obetydlig. En liten, obetydlig talang! Herre Gud, ja! Ta nu bröd i öknen!—Dagen härlig, sommarlik!—Om aftonen stjärnor! Stjärnor!” Dagbok, 134.
17. Lifvet är nog slut för mig. Är jag nå’ngång glad och tar mig ett glas, får jag lida långa tider efteråt. Denna fruktansvärda depression—hvilken Aino ej kan förstå, men som jag nog har ärftlig. Denna “blödighet” eller att man saknar själftillit, som gör att Aino och barnen aldrig får rigtigt stöd i lifvet. Dette helvete på jorden, som de råkat uti, aldrig slippa. Ve mig ensamma, ensamma!” Ibid., 319.
18. “Det blåser ute. Huru oändligt rikare är icke [illegible word], denna orefleterade blåst än Göthe’s och de andra herrarnas poesi! Jag har börjat ‘knäppa’ D.v.s. supa i hemlighet. Också ett sätt att ta lifvet av sig. Men—några supar, midnattstid—ha en förunderlig verkan! Den som lefver får se! Men poesien i allt detta! Herre Gud! Reflexionen är bedårande!” (ibid., 324). As Tawaststjerna notes, Sibelius’s alcoholism eventually prompted an ultimatum from his wife, Aino, that had a significant rebalancing effect upon their relationship and also, Tawaststjerna implies, may have impacted Sibelius’s creativity during the later 1920s and early ’30s.
19. “Citronbordet på Kämp! Citronen, dödens sinnebild—hos kineserna. Äfven här fordom. ‘Gravlades med citron i hand’ sjunger Anna Maria L[enngren]. Ett mera passande epitet får man leta efter. Etta skrev jag äfven i går [diary entry 17 February]. Hela vintern i sommarens tecken. En poesi i naturen som gör en galen! Måtte jag ej gå under. Kan ej lefva detta underbara rika lif. Måsta stimulera mig. Efteråt ångern! Ångesten!! Ligger det något under alliterationen?” Sibelius, Dagbok, 324–25.
20. Gordon McMullen, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 26.
21. Ibid., 10.
22. “Ang. Shakespear ‘Stormen’/Kære Sibelius,/Vi tillader os hermed at forespørge, om Du har skrevet Musiken til “Stormen” af Shakespear.—Det Kgl. Theater agter at opføre dete Stykke og vilde da eventuelt benytte Din Musik.–/Vi hører derfor gerne fra Dig desangaaende og tegner/Med venlig Hilsen/[signed] Wilhelm Hansen.” Box 45, NA.
23. “Hansens brev kom i det psykologiskt riktiga ögonblicket. Under mer än tio år hade Sibelius nästan oavbrutet brottats med det symfoniska problemet. Han hade sovrat sitt material och koncentrerat formen till det yttersta i syfte att uppnå den absoluta musikens ideal sådant han uppfattade det. Nu yppade sig för honom ett tillfälle att ge fritt utlopp åt sina tematiske ingivelser och i kalejdoskopiskt växlande musikaliska visioner karakterisera dramats personer, luftandars och najaders spel, naturkatastrofer och mytologiska skördefester.” Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 5:202.
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 31