“Fresh Springs” or “Absurd Birch Bark Culture”?
Following the Paris Pavilion’s success, art nouveau gained strength in Finland. But this approach to design frustrated more forward-looking Finns, such as the critic Gustaff Strengell (1878–1937) and architect Sigurd Frosterus (1876–1956), who had been frequent visitors to Hvitträsk in the 1890s. They had traveled abroad and become increasingly dissatisfied with the parochial nature of Finnish architecture at a time when other international architects and designers were building in a more austerely modernist idiom. In 1904, they issued an open challenge to the supposed decadence of the animal and plant carvings that adorned the massive stone edifices that were such a characteristic feature of the buildings designed by the Hvitträsk trio in and around Helsinki. Their particular target was the competition for the city’s new railway station. Such stylized or naturalistic details were irrelevant in their eyes, and they ridiculed “the quasi-nationalistic, archaic archaeological romanticism” of such buildings, lamenting that “Finnish architecture, divorced from reality, is like soap bubbles floating in the air.”16 They even likened the massive stone edifices in Helsinki to “program music . . . a sonnet in stone.”17 Despite the fact that this stylistic richness had been used to herald Finland’s existence to the world in Paris, Strengell and Frosterus felt it had become a local self-indulgence, out of kilter with fast developing aesthetic tastes elsewhere. They demanded “fresh springs” from architects and others—something more authentic and less redolent of what they described as “mindless romanticism.”18
Sibelius, of course, had exploited the programmatic potential of the Kalevala in works such as his early Kullervo Symphony and the Lemminkäinen Legends, as well as in his music for the series of tableaux vivants in the 1890s from which Finlandia emerged.19 Yet as early as 1904, Sibelius’s creative journey toward his most individual and arguably profound music naturally took him increasingly away from the national romantic agenda. As he himself is supposed to have put it much later: “Whereas other composers are engaged in manufacturing cocktails of various hues, I offer pure spring water.”20 Strengell and Frosterus’s challenge had been made just as Sibelius first began to confront the distillation and abstraction of large-scale form in his First and Second symphonies, but many of his architectural colleagues were still flavoring their designs with the heady mix of motives drawn from local flora and fauna. Strengell recognized this trend, writing:
The history of music is one long series of extending the rules. All its pioneers overstepped the contemporary rules of harmony, and here in Finland we have Sibelius, and he too, in many respects, points to the future by stretching the limits currently accepted for harmony.21
The image of pure spring water that Sibelius later channeled into his music was especially emotive: a landscape of lakes and the snow of the long, harsh winters, where, as Aleksis Kivi expressed it in his influential poem “Bear Hunt,” “a harsh wind blows.”22 The correlation between Finland’s meteorological climate and the increasingly frigid tone of political suppression in the early 1900s undoubtedly led to periods of deprivation among the wider Finnish population. During Finland’s long winters, extending from October to March, temperatures could regularly dip below–30 degrees F and effectively rendered preindustrial Finland into a state of hibernation. Indeed, Finnish ethnologists have cited how cold winters and failed crops brought tragedy to the lives of many thousands of peasants, enshrining hardship or “lack” as the hallmark of their lives. In 1865, the nationalist poet Zachris Topelius wrote: “Although a humble people, our guard against the powers of barbarianism and darkness is humanity’s own endless struggle for light and life.” There is little doubt that the manner of survival in the forests had become an important theme for the cultural elite—who tiptoed in their galoshes through the mud, uttering awkwardly in newly learned Finnish, as they began to define what being Finnish meant. Pushkin had understood this when he described Finland as “harsh nature’s poor abandoned child.” Up until the later part of the nineteenth century, the majority of Finnish-speaking Finns had been slaves to the rigors of their natural environment—but the independence movement brought the more wealthy Swedish-speaking elite alongside them to discuss aspects of common hardship at the heart of their country. Even Sibelius bought a sheepskin coat in order to look more like a true peasant.23
Although a sense of opulence had characterized Carl Friedrich Engel’s 1830s imperial architecture in Helsinki, creating a model town for French visitors to visit en route from Paris to St. Petersburg, a simpler backwoods classicism of pole and pediment had appealed to Finns in the “hard unrelenting nature of the country that the architecture clearly reflects.”24 Worked tree trunks replaced ornate classical columns. It was not a lack of beauty that characterized such native classicism, but rather a lack of superfluity dictated by a lack of choice or resources. The congruence between the poverty and simplicity embraced a Lutheran asceticism, and somehow sanctified the reality of a harsh existence: “A lack of materials and of economic possibilities made simplicity in its classical meaning a natural solution.”25 In contrast, the extraordinary fecundity of springtime as the winter snow recedes could bring a huge sense of release. Thus the clarion cry of “Let us be Finns!” heard in the vaults of the Paris Pavilion, pointed not toward art nouveau symbolism but toward a new modernist spring—an aesthetic of renewed energy and vitality. Strengell and Frosterus had opened a window to a new, modern Europe. Their call for “fresh springs” was both a reaction to the heady stylistic cocktail party of Saarinen, Lindgren, and Gesellius and a desire to become more “honest” and less superficial.
Alvar Aalto, who was taught by Lindgren but belonged to a younger artistic generation than the Hvitträsk trio, grew up in architectural reaction to their art nouveau, preferring a more sober neoclassicism. Yet even here was a superficiality of style and idea he would later come to challenge. When Aalto began designing in the early 1920s, Sibelius had traveled a long way from the stirring patriotism of Finlandia. Finland had grasped its chance at independence and leapt forward, albeit with jerky and at times faltering steps, into the modern industrialized community of nations. It was now time, Aalto felt, for a new mode of architectural expression. Sibelius, too, seems to have undergone a similar moment of aesthetic transformation or realignment. The trauma surrounding his throat tumor in 1909 amplified Sibelius’s preexisting fear of death, and coincided with a deep musical crisis. In the Fourth Symphony, this involved moving toward the borders of atonality and exploring the realms of the unconscious. He turned away from the world, and the overt national romanticism of friends such as Gallen-Kallela. What followed creatively was a pared-down, elliptical orchestral form through which Sibelius allowed himself to concentrate and condense musical ideas. As for Aalto, neoclassicism was “a point of departure” for Sibelius, not a formal goal.26 Indeed, Sibelius’s shift away from romanticism toward a new, streamlined creative expression was a deeply personal journey, what he called his “ethical line.”27 More recently, the English psychiatrist and writer Antony Storr has suggested that a work of art is “a positive adaptation, whereas neurosis is a failure to adapt.” Indeed, Storr suggests that “creativity is one mode adopted by gifted people of coming to terms with, or finding symbolic solutions for, the internal tensions and dissociations from which all human beings suffer in varying degrees,”28 that is, the sense of “otherness” in art.29 Crucially, Sibelius’s work never lacks discipline—even though Tawaststjerna suggests it may be a “psychological symphony,” the Fourth Symphony is not “neurotic” art in the sense defined by Storr.30 Rather, the Fourth demonstrates clearly Sibelius’s musical journey toward greater symphonic unity. Sibelius’s motivation became increasingly personal, addressing deep inner conflicts through the creative exploration of ways of relating symbolic musical forms. Hearing Schoenberg’s music brought Sibelius to an exploration of the boundaries of tonality, and face to face with his own creative crisis. Yet, though Sibelius did not follow Scho
enberg into atonality, he greatly admired the work.31 As Tim Howell has explained, to move forward Sibelius had to look back—toward the backwoods of Karelia, and indeed to his own past in provincial Hämeenlinna.32 “The impressions of childhood form our most precious inheritance in life. The more I live the more I come back to them, and they remain an inexhaustible source of inspiration.”33
Alvar Aalto’s career began not with the imperative sense of national romanticism that had motivated Sibelius and his immediate architectural contemporaries, but rather within this neoclassical discourse. Like many determined young people, Aalto did not lack self-conviction, and he held a deep animosity toward his tutor’s generation, writing of “the absurd birch bark culture of 1905, which believed that everything clumsy and bleak was especially Finnish.”34 But as soon as the modernists sounded their clarion call, heard decisively in Scandinavia at the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition, Aalto was keen to relinquish his earlier classical garb and follow the herald. Critically, however, he was to do this with a Finnish accent. This stylistic change in the late 1920s saw him denude his neoclassical design for the Viipuri Library (1927–35) shortly before it was built (see Figure 3). The frieze that had previously adorned his designs for a sunken Pompeian reading room was jettisoned in the name of modernist clarity. Aalto was ridiculed for challenging the neoclassical vogue by leading figures in Helsinki, such as the vociferous Bertel Jung, for whom Nordic classicism had become the style of nationhood. Stark white modernity, which would later become synonymous with Finnish design, was perceived as a threat, and Aalto even came to blows over the issue before it gained wider acceptance as the way forward for a new Finnish idiom.35
Rather like Sibelius’s ambiguous feelings toward the New Music of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and others in the 1920s, Aalto from the very start both sought to align himself with the high priests of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) yet also felt a deep ambivalence about inherent aspects of their way of being modern. Most famously epitomized by Le Corbusier’s statement “The house is a machine for living in,” modernist architects believed that engineering and the machine held the epoch’s salvation.36 Aalto could never worship the machine in the way that his erstwhile colleagues Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius did. On the contrary, he still tended to look to nature’s growth processes for his work’s genesis. Aalto’s aim was to discover how to make standardization work flexibly for human life, not vice versa—real functionalism, Aalto maintained, starts from the human point of view, not the other way around.37
Figure 3. Alvar Aalto, Viipuri Library, interior.
The reasons for this position go to the heart of the correlation between Aalto and Sibelius. Unlike those who followed Le Corbusier’s modernism blithely into the International style, believing they had a universal solution that could be transplanted to all design contexts, Aalto believed strongly that it was important to relate to the local milieu and root a building in its immediate context. Although he had stripped his Viipuri Library of unnecessary ornamentation and used pallets of whitewashed rectilinear form in good modernist fashion, Aalto simultaneously mocked the epoch-shifting, machine-orientated worldview, challenging the principal tenets of mainstream modernist architecture. Aalto had designed an acoustic ceiling in the form of an amorphous wave for the library’s long lecture room. This was a critical moment: he had apparently gone modern. Yet on closer inspection he had somehow undermined the very basis of the style. Indeed, this clever architectural move signaled an alternative modernist tradition,38 one that asked questions not about the nature of the machine, but about how to make architecture a warm invitation for the “little man,” as he affectionately described his building’s intended users. The undulating ceiling “waves,” so to speak, at the “little man” in a gesture of faith. However modern and ascetic Aalto’s buildings appeared to be to his Finnish colleagues, they constituted a pointed response to his machine-worshipping colleagues elsewhere. The response took the form of a wave, constructed out of that most Finnish of materials—wood.
Children of the Forest God
The question nevertheless arises: Why was Aalto’s “wave” wooden? The answer lies both in the congruence between geographical and physical narratives of deprivation in Finnish history and the profound connection between Aalto’s own early life and his work’s consequent asceticism. Similar arguments can be advanced toward Sibelius’s life and work. The fact that the wave was made of wood is of primary significance. The etymology of wood in Latin is materia, closely related to the word mater, meaning mother and maternal love. Aalto sought to use forest material in order to offer a “primary embrace”—one associated with this sense of “mater” or the maternal. He wrote:
Of course I primarily mean substance, and yet the word material means more to me, for it translates purely material activity into related mental process. . . . Matter is a link. . . . It has the effect of making a unity. . . . The links in material leave open every opportunity for harmonious synthesis . . . wood is the natural material closest to man, both biologically and as the setting of primitive civilizations.
Interestingly, Aalto continued, “I do use wood, but not for sentimental reasons.” Rather, he suggested that it was a tool for mediation, “as a timeless material with an ancient tradition wood is readily available, and not merely for constructive purposes but also for psychological and biological ones.”39 Although written in 1970, toward the end of his life, this explanation epitomized both Aalto’s manner of relating the material and psychological, and importantly, how he utilized nature (more specifically wood) in his work. The desire to mediate, to create a bridge or bond between material and human worlds, was an agenda that had placed him at odds with many of his modernist colleagues. And the reason for this concern with the material/maternal may be related to Aalto’s close relationship with his mother, who died when he was only eight years old. The question his architecture subsequently posed was about how to accommodate the “little man” through his work—both the eventual “users” of his buildings and himself. Aalto repeatedly linked architecture to metaphysics when he suggested that the root of “disharmony” in architecture arises at “the break with the individual’s genuine psychological needs.”40 Again, this is close to what Sibelius called “the ethical line.”41
Such breaks or points of disruption are a matter of historical fact in the early lives of both Sibelius and Aalto. Sibelius’s impulsive father, Christian Gustaf, lived at the mercy of “self-destructive forces.”42 A doctor and an alcoholic, he married Maria Charlotta Borg, a priest’s daughter who was nearly twenty years his junior. Weakened by drink, he died in an epidemic when Sibelius was just two. Sibelius’s mother was left pregnant, in debt and destitution. She was a fervent Lutheran, cold, unaffectionate, and completely incapable of showing either the vital emotional warmth or physical closeness that her three children demanded, the youngest of whom, Sibelius’s brother Christian, became a psychiatrist, while the oldest, his sister Linda, ended her life in a mental institution.
Aalto’s family was also familiar with early death and illness. His mother, Selma Mathilda Hackstedt, came from an educated Swedish-speaking family and was keenly interested in issues of women’s emancipation. Aalto’s father, a caring but emotionally cold man, was from a farming background, and educated himself to become a land surveyor. Aalto’s mother bore five children, of which Alvar was the second, before dying in their early childhood in 1906. Her first child died in infancy; the last, Selma, remained weak throughout childhood. Aalto’s younger brother Einar killed himself at the start of the Winter War, in 1939.
Both Sibelius and Aalto’s biographies suggest they experienced considerable psychological distress. As if speaking for them both, Sibelius confessed to his brother Christian on 21 November 1893: “I am often afraid of dying.”43 Nonetheless, both Sibelius and Aalto crucially had a childhood refuge—the realm of the Finnish forest—something that remained a creative stimulant throughout their lives. And arguably both addres
sed their biographical conflicts by creating (or one might argue by borrowing) a natural growth process through which to articulate complex unities or difficult wholes. Indeed if, as Freud suggested, creativity is a tool with which to adapt or relate to the external world, creative struggle may also be able to defend against anxiety and depression, pushing it from the foreground of conscious life. Thus the psyche may choose a creative defense as a mechanism for self-regulation, seeking to ameliorate or even resolve such conflicts in the long term, or simply fill (or at least plaster over) the divide. This is a less painful solution than the deep restlessness that characterizes the mass of repressed feelings in the “maternally deprived.” As Anthony Storr has suggested, “Creative people may be more divided than most of us, but . . . have an especial power of organisation and integrating opposites within themselves.”44 Given the trauma of their childhoods, to which they both referred in later life, Sibelius and Aalto’s common desire to piece together small fragments into more complex wholes is a vivid example of self-maintenance or homeostasis: the positive adaptation in their art may also be a mechanism for the symbolic resolution of deep personal trauma rooted in insecurities surrounding childhood bereavements. Sibelius and Aalto used their inherent creativity to address, and even reorder these gaping deprivations of inner reality in symbolic form, informed by their tendency to syncretize disparate elements and to relate to the deprivation of the past. It can be argued that for both men the Finnish forest and nature’s growth process was the bridge. Indeed, Aalto was later to discuss the fecundity of “continual renewal and growth” in his architectural creativity—in his case he also recognized this as something psychology demanded.45
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 33