24. “KONGELIGE THEATER FORESPŒRGER VIL DE KOMPONERE/MUSIK TIL SHAKESPEARES STORMEN DERES/BETINGELSER UDBEDES MA HAVE MUSIKKEN FŒRSTE/AUGUST JOHANNES POULSEN REJSER OP FOR NÆRMERE AFTALE OMGAAENDE SVAR UDBEDES=NORRIE.” Box 52, Folder “Myrsky/Stormen,” NA.
25. “Direktor Norrie/Kongelige Teater/Köbenhavn/Villig komponera Stormen mina betin–/gelser tretusen kronor genast samt fem prosent av bilettoinkomsten kompositionen/min egendom.” Undated draft of telegram, Sibelius to the Royal Theatre, Copenhagen, torn leaf brown paper (Box 52, NA). The theatre cabled and accepted Sibelius’s terms on 29 May.
26. Tawaststjerna, Sibelius vol. 5, caption accompanying Figure 8. Unfortunately, the image published in the Atlantis edition is in fact a page from the second movement of the Sixth Symphony, not from The Tempest.
27. “Jeg forventer som aftalt Deres Partitur til 1 Septem–/ber, da Prøverne paa ‘Stormen” allerede er i fuld Gang og/Premieren gerne skulde finde Sted sidst 1 September./Med venlig Hilsen/Deres ærbodigste/Wm Norrie.” Box 52, Sibelilus Family Archive, NA.
28. “Kapelmester Høeberg beder mig hilse Dem og udtale hans/Glæde over deres herlige Musik, ligesom jeg ogsaa kan med–/dele, at Sceneinstruktør Johannes Poulsen og de Kunstnere,/der skal fortolke Deres Toner, er i allerhøjeste Grad be–/gejstrede.” Box 52, Sibelius Family Archive, NA.
29. Hauch wrote on 28 May: “I disse dage har Johannes Poulsen talt meget med mig om den eventuelle Mulighed för at formaa Professoren til at skrive Musik til Shakespeare’s ‘Stormen,” som indstuderes paa Det Kgl Teater. Han tænkt paa at rejse op til Finland og bede dem derom—men om den bliver noget af det ved jeg endnu ikke. Men var det ellers en Sag som kunde interesse?” (Johannes Poulsen has recently told me much about the eventual possibility of asking the Professor [Sibelius] to write music for Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which is being staged at the Royal Theatre. He is thinking of traveling up to Finland and asking you about it—but whether anything will actually happen I don’t know. But is this something that would be of interest?) Box 20, Sibelius Family Archive, NA.
30. “Jag kommer till Eder med en mycket diskret Sak. Det gälder musiken till Stormen. Redan föra circa två måneder sände jag de första scéneren. Nu åfinstå af 34 endnast 3, hvilken jag med det snareste skal sände. Detta dock beroende på om mitt gripp på ämnet slagit om på vederbörande. Jag har ej med ett ord, ej med ett teckan fått besked om något./Ville Ni nu godhetsfullt ‘sondera terraine’ D.v.s. taga moda på om min musik äfvenhufvudtaget kommer till utförande, eller ej.” National Library of Finland (HUL), Collection 206.61.
31. “Tak fordi De hensendte Brev til mig angaaende Situationen vedraaende “Stormen” og deres Musik til det Kgl Teater. . . . Allerede for nogen Tid siden har jeg hört af Hr. Johannes Paulsen hvor aldeles begejstret han var over de Musik Professoren har sendt, og under en Samtale jeg på Tirsdags havde med Direktor Norrie bekræftede han ganske dette Ledsagen. Jeg have trygt sige, at man er usædvanlig glad, taknemmelig over det Værk, Professoren nu har skabt, og Teatret ventes sig en enestaadende Begivenhed af Premieren, der efter den seneste Bestemmelse skal findes sted i Tiden ved Jul og Nytaar. Naar den ikke kommer tidligere skydes det at teatret nu i Maaneder maa fremföre Debussy”s Pelleas et Melisande, og Stravinskys Petrouchka. Jeg finder det aldeles beunderingsværdigt, at Professoren i saa kort Tid har medfört et saa stort Værk—og mere end nogen glæde mig til at lære dette nye storværk af Dem at kende. Er det indiskret af spörge lidt om Værkets ydre Karakter? Om der er Ouverture, og Instrumentation, etc.?” Box 20, Sibelius Family Archive, NA.
32. “Om Ni kunde få beda forå när Stormen oppföres, skall jag försöke komma til Köbenhavn. Men incognito om ej till Premiären.” HUL Coll. 206.61.
33. “Nu måsta jag bekänna mig—trots alle mina försök—ej ha fått ihåg något om Shakespeare. Följande dag har det jag skrivit foregående dag, förefallit fattigt och dumt. Gudskelof att jeg ej är journalist./Ni måsta tillgifne mig. Timon från Athén är mig kärest på grund af dess mänsklighet; Stormen i dess musikaliskhet. Beträffande Stormen, när uppföres den? Ville Ni vänligen ta medd derpå och skriver till mig några om den.” HUL Coll. 206.61.
34. “En ulykkelig Skaben har hidtil hvilet over Indstuderingen af dette Værk.” Box 20, Sibelius Family Archive, NA.
35. “Opförelsen par den kgl. Teater bliver uden al Tvivl en meget stor Success. Der havde adskille ydre pragtfulde Momenter i Anvendelsen af den sceniske Teknik, og Udförelsen var mærkbart baaret oppe af en stor Indsats. Mens det kan ikke nægter at Skuespillernes Kræfter paa afgörende Punkter ikke just var paa Shakepeareske Höijder. Som Helhed gælder det at de lyriske Scener virkede for svagt paa grund af Fremstillernes Spinkelhed. Mens de komiske Situationer bredte sig mere end rimeligt. Naar Poesiens og Fantasiens sande Tone dog ofte klang, skyndtes det saa afgjort Musiken.
“Hvor forunderligt Gang paa Gang at mærke disse Toners Aabenbaring af Ordens sande Sjæl. Musiken blev dirigent af de unge Kapelmeter Johan Nye-Knudsen, der er et adskilligt större Kapelmester–Talent end Höeberg.” Box 20, Sibelius Family Archive, NA.
36. “Hela Historien med Stormen har jag glömt. En dumhet var det att jag sog mig i slang med Poulsen. Han kan nu nog vara bra, men säkert är iscensättningen—som du skref—dårlig.” Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 5:219.
37. “Inte i något av de teaterstycken han dittills skrivit musik till hade han dock kunnat leva sig in i huvudpersonerna like intensivt som han nu identifierade sig med Prospero i Shakespeares Stormen.” Ibid., 204.
38. David Lindley, Introduction, The New Cambridge Shakespeare: The Tempest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–83, at 3.
39. Georg Brandes, William Shakespeare (Copenhagen, 1895–96). The prominence of Brandes’s writing in European literary circles is evidenced by its remarkably early translation into English (in two volumes) by William Archer, Mary Morrison, and Diana White (London: William Heinemann, 1898), French and German. Some of the Shakespearean allusions in Brandes’s text are lost in Archer, Morrison, and White’s translation (see below).
40. Niels B. Hansen, “Observations on Georg Brandes’s Contribution to the Study of Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare in Scandinavia, ed. Gunnar Sorelius (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 148–67.
41. Ibid., 151.
42. Brandes, William Shakespeare, 160, translation altered. The allusions are to Ophelia’s description of Hamlet’s apparent madness: “Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh” (3.1.161), and as Hamlet is directing the players in his dumb show on how to perform (3.2.6–7).
43. Ibid., 378.
44. Ibid., 380.
45. Ibid., 380.
46. Ibid., 386.
47. HUL Sibelius Archive, Manuscript 0935.
48. Lindley, The New Cambridge Tempest, 121.
49. See Lindley’s illuminating discussion of the confusing typography in the first folio, ibid., 247–50, and the contrasting solution offered by the most recent edition of The Arden Tempest, ed. Virgina Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: Methuen, 2000 [1998]), 177. Lembcke’s Danish translation is, characteristically, less richly ambivalent than Shakespeare’s original: “Aander synger koret med” literally means “The spirits sing along with the chorus.”
50. For a discussion of the folio text and the surviving seventeenth-century settings of the song, see Lindley, New Cambridge Tempest, 248 and 252.
51. Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 5:209. Octatonic collections are symmetrically ordered scales, organized in alternating half-tone/whole-tone steps, and can be transposed only three times before the initial collection repeats itself. They are especially common in early twentieth-century music because of their ability to suggest familiar diatonic functions (such as dominant-seventh chords) without conclusively indicating a stable diatonic root.
52. James Hepokoski, “Rotations, Sketches, and the Sixth Symphony,” in Sibelius Studies, ed. Timothy Jackson and Veijo Murtomäki (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 322–51, at 322.
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br /> 53. Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 205. Tawaststjerna describes the music’s whole-tone quality as a representation of Ariel’s “demonic” side, but it might be more illustrative to compare it with similar whole-tone and octatonic collections in Russian dramatic music, which are frequently concerned with ideas of enchantment and the supernatural. See Richard Taruskin, “Chernomor to Kashchey: Harmonic Sorcery; or, Stravinsky’s Angle,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 38/1 (Spring 1985): 72–142.
54. Hepokoski, “Rotations, Sketches, and the Sixth Symphony,” 329.
55. Ibid., 346.
56. Ibid., 351.
57. Brinkmann, Late Idyll: The Second Symphony of Johannes Brahms, trans. Peter Palmer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)
58. Ibid., 40.
59. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope), vol. I, chapter 20: the translation is Brinkmann’s own and is quoted in Late Idyll, 132, but the passage can be found in the English edition, trans. Nevill Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 299.
60. Brinkmann, Late Idyll, 46.
61. McMullen, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing, 26.
62. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, 125.
63. Ibid., 126.
64. Tim Ingold, “Against Soundscape,” in Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice, ed. Angus Carlyle (Paris: Double Entendre, 2009), 10–13.
65. “Huru oändligt svart är det ej att åldras som konstnar och—framför alt som komponist. Det är nog klokast att ej ha vänner. Man dör ensam och då är det ju lättare. Måhända måste jag ‘stiga ned från berget’–lifvet blir ju annars ett väntande på döden.” Sibelius, Dagbok, 323.
Waving from the Periphery:
Sibelius, Aalto, and the Finnish Pavilions
SARAH MENIN
In 1900, Jean Sibelius accompanied a delegation of Finnish cultural figures to the Paris World Fair, where he performed a series of pieces including his recent work Finlandia—under the politically expedient title, La patrie.1 This event marked a breakthrough in Sibelius’s international career. But it was simultaneously an important milestone in Finland’s attempts to gain cultural independence from Russia—a prelude to the political independence that it would seize at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Four decades later, at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Finland’s cultural heroes met again to draw the world’s attention to their nation’s plight while the Soviets were making aggressive overtures toward Finnish territory. At the opening of the Finnish Pavilion on 4 May, the tones of Sibelius once again joined the cultural vanguard, urgently announcing the perilous state of the small nation, its young democracy teetering on a knife edge. The New York Pavilion, designed by Finland’s leading architect, Alvar Aalto (1898–1976), did not celebrate the nation with pomp and circumstance, but rather offered what some found to be a more disturbing view of a wild hinterland—not only one of Europe’s farthest outposts, but also a wilderness of the human mind. This essay will address the development of Sibelius’s music in the years between these two pavilions and its congruence with Aalto’s architectural output, exploring the reasons why Tapiola (which was not performed) might have been the most appropriate parallel in New York in 1939. The discussion will shed light on the cultural roles of the two men, but also on the genesis of their creativity and their experience of Finland’s natural environment and its significance as a cultural stimulant.
A Stylistic Cocktail Party: The Symposium and National Romanticism
Sibelius’s close friendship with the Järnefelt brothers, painter Eero, composer Armas, and writer Arvid, brought him to the heart of Nuori Suomi, or Young Finland—the progressive, liberal pro-Finnish group that led the movement that first turned cultural attention toward the Karelia region in the east of the country.2 Today, two locations remain that are particularly associated with members of this group—the famous Kämp Restaurant on the Esplanade in Helsinki, where they regularly met, and the studio-villa complex at Hvitträsk, less than twenty miles west of the city, built by the architectural trio of Herman Gesellius (1874–1916), Armas Lindgren (1874–1929), and Eliel Saarinen (1873–1950). A dinner-party seating plan from Hvitträsk included the Järnefelt brothers, their sister Aino and her young husband (Sibelius), the conductor-composer Robert Kajanus, as well as the architectural hosts and their wives.3 Members of the group were united in seeking to create a sense of what being Finnish meant in the arts, echoing the famous words of the nineteenth-century Finnish statesman Johan Vilhelm Snellman: “Swedes we are not, Russians we cannot become. Let us be Finns!”4 The architects, in particular, sought to break away from the grand symmetry of the Russian-funded empire style that had gripped Helsinki in the nineteenth century, and promoted instead a localized art nouveau, or Jugendstil.5 Many were caught up fully in the art nouveau movement, and whole new areas of Helsinki were redesigned in a style that moved beyond neoclassicism toward something altogether more primitive and radical. Stone dressing was added to brick structures to give the illusion of medieval massiveness, symbolic of the individual breaking out from the strictures of tradition. Indeed, many of the Symposium circle explored spiritualism and challenged social, cultural, and religious taboos. As Salme Sarajas-Korte has written, “The symbolists in fact believed in the coming of a new age of spiritual depth . . . [each] engrossed in the mystical being of his own self.”6
Sibelius’s music must have seemed particularly closely attuned to the work of Saarinen, Lindgren, and Gesellius at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair. The pavilion has been described as “the unprejudiced mingling of international influences with original splashes of local color,” and, from the outside, resembled a simple chapel, with stone massing and a steep roof, like much medieval architecture in Finland.7 (See Figure 1.) Although the pavilion’s entrance was carved in granite and soapstone, the other walls were made of lighter, cheaper materials. The simple rectangular building had one rounded end that was top-lit, allowing light to flow into the heart of the building. It also had a tower at its center, which offered the chance to have a vaulted interior. The pavilion’s whole conception had a certain clarity, despite its rather eclectic detailing, with features borrowed from many parts of the world. The building was thus highly charged: “The entire pavilion and its interior design created such a coherent and compact atmosphere[, a] unified expression of the ‘creative soul’ of this strange country.”8 It was something of a stylistic cocktail party, mingling art nouveau gestures with aesthetic references borrowed from the Finnish forests.9 Fellow symposium member Akseli Gallen-Kallela provided a pictorial narrative for the pavilion with frescos based on scenes from the Kalevala (Canto XIX) that decorated walls and vaults with the imagery of what, at the time, was thought to represent Finnishness, its history and current reality (see Figure 2). In depicting the magical smith Ilmarinen ploughing a field of vipers dressed as a soldier, for example, Gallen-Kallela invoked folk mythology while presenting a political allegory of the Finnish struggle against the Russians.10
Figure 1. Exterior of Paris Pavilion, designers Gesellius, Lindgren, and Saarinen, National Board of Antiquities, Helsinki.
Everything was designed to boost Finland’s artistic and political self-confidence. The public relations triumph was secured when Anatole France wrote approvingly in Le Figaro of the serene chapel-like building; it was, he concluded, “étrange et charmant,” and more modern than many other things at the fair.11 Ironically, the building’s rich cocktail of styles and ornamental details, like Sibelius’s music, owed as much to Russian traditions as to the Finnish backwoods—the medieval castles to which the pavilion referred were originally built by the city state of Novgorod, ancestors of the Russians who had seized Finland from Sweden in 1809. Yet the Paris Pavilion demonstrated to a young nation the importance of creating a national image that it could embrace as its own. Many sympathetic observers sensed the building’s “Finnishness.” Sibelius’s friend, the photographer I. K.
Inha, wrote:
Figure 2. Vaulted interior of the Paris Pavilion, Gallen-Kallela frescos
The shingle roof reminds us of the shingle roofs of our ancient stone churches. Its walls and windows resemble original country dwellings—stone cowsheds, as they have been called. The tower on the roof is like a belfry, and the outside ornamentation is a vivid reminder of Finnish nature. The huge hulking bears stalking the foot of the tower, the bears’ heads and squirrels on the arches of the main corridor, the giant pine cones that support the side turrets of the corridor and the water lily leaves on the outside walls all tell of the flora and fauna of our land. The material of the walls depicts Finland’s endless supply of granite. The points of the cupola on the tower depict the sun’s shimmering rays—a metaphor for the endless daylight of the northern summer and for the brightness of the nation’s hopes, which will never be dimmed even in the face of the most severe hardships.12
Inha’s response demonstrated what Finns had invested in the building—the form and content of which became inseparable in their desire for nationhood. The renaissance that Gallen-Kallela and others had called for in the 1890s had come to full fruition, and the architects had not only assimilated the new artistic currents from Europe, they had added their own Finnish color. In Paris at the turn of the new century their design was understood as distinctively Finnish, whatever that slightly peripheral and exotic sense of otherness might have meant to cosmopolitan tourists in the French capital as they visited the fair.
The organizers of the musical tour to accompany the Paris Pavilion were keen not to antagonize the Russian authorities, and therefore avoided using Finlandia’s more politically provocative title openly. Yet Sibelius’s name had already become associated in Finnish circles with resistance, and his role in Paris was primarily as a musical ambassador—with two programs, including La patrie, some of the King Christian II Suite, the “Swan of Tuonela” and “Lemminkäinen’s Homeward Journey” from The Lemminkäinen Legends, op. 22, alongside the First Symphony, conducted by Robert Kajanus. As Erik Tawaststjerna suggests, Kajanus recognized that Finland’s success depended upon Sibelius’s music.13 Prince Vyacheslav Tenishev, the Russian commissioner at the exhibition, kept a close eye on proceedings, and ensured that the Finnish Pavilion was labeled “Section russe”: no separatist sentiments would be tolerated. In the event, however, both he and the French minister of culture applauded the concert warmly. Sibelius himself was concerned about the entente cordiale between Russia and France, and how pro-Russian papers “are bound to heap abuse upon us all, above all me, as I am so nationalistic.”14 However, many of the key protagonists in French musical life, including critics and artistic contacts, were away from the city at the time of the concerts. Although the overall impression of the Finnish dele gation in Paris drew attention to Finland’s plight, it did not immediately appear to the Russians as a threat.15 But such sounds of romantic patriotism were designed, in part, to stir Finland to awake and arise. Sibelius’s music, like Gesellius’s pavilion, established the idea of Finland in the mind of many who had been unfamiliar even with its existence, and, as Inha put it, struck “the brightness of the nation’s hope” upon an international stage.
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 32