Jean Sibelius and His World
Page 36
36. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (London: Architectural Press, 1982), 10.
37. Alvar Aalto, “The Humanizing of Architecture” (1940), repr. in Alvar Aalto: Sketches, ed. Göran Schildt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 76.
38. Colin St. John Wilson, The Other Tradition of Modern Architecture (London: Academy, 1995).
39. Alvar Aalto, “The Relationship,” in Alvar Aalto in His Own Words, ed. Göran Schildt (New York: Rizzoli, 1998), 267–68.
40. Alvar Aalto, “The Reconstruction of Europe Is the Key Problem for the Architecture of our Times” (1941), repr. in Salokorpi, Abacus 3, 121–42.
41. Sibelius, 20 May 1918, quoted in Ekman, Jean Sibelius, 154–55.
42. Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 1:7.
43. Sibelius, 21 November 1893, quoted in ibid., 1:149.
44. Storr, The Dynamics of Creation, 282
45. Aalto, “Rationalism and Man,” lecture at the Swedish Crafts Society, 9 May 1935, in Schildt, Sketches, 47–51, quotation at 50.
46. Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. Adam Parry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
47. Aalto, “Architecture in Karelia” (1941), in Schildt, Sketches, 82.
48. Lars Sonck, “The Arrangement of Our Small Towns” (1904), repr. in Salokorpi, Abacus 3, 42. Sonck was a leading Finnish architect at the start of the twentieth century and the designer of Sibelius’s villa, Ainola.
49. Juhani Pallasmaa, “Tradition and Modernity: Feasibility of Regional Architecture in the Post-Modern Society,” Arkkitehti 3 (1993): 17–30.
50. Aalto, “Finland as a Model for World Development” (1949), in Schildt, Alvar Aalto in His Own Words, 171.
51. Aalto, “The Architecture of Karelia” (1941), in Schildt, Sketches, 80–83. Although he claimed not to have a feeling for folklore, Aalto admitted feeling that “the traditions that bind us lie more in the climate, in the material conditions, in the nature of the tragedies and comedies that have touched us.” Conversation between Aalto and Schildt (1967), in Schildt, Alvar Aalto in His Own Words, 171.
52. See Sarah Menin, “Fragments from the Forest: Aalto’s Requisitioning of Forest Place and Matter,” Journal of Architecture 6 (Autumn 2001): 279–305.
53. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1942), 77
54. Theodor W. Adorno, “Glosse über Sibelius,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 6 (1938), repr. in Impromptus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 247–52. A translation appears in the Documents section of this volume.
55. Errki Salmenhaara, Sibelius (Helsinki: Tammi, 1970), 124.
56. Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, vol. 3, 1919–1957, trans. Robert Layton (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 18.
57. Ibid.
58. Santeri Levas, Jean Sibelius (Porvoo: Werner Söderström, 1972), 82.
59. Aalto, “The Trout and the Mountain Stream,” in Schildt, Sketches, 96.
60. Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, vol. 3, chap. 2.
61. Hugo Häring, “Die Wege zur Form,” Die Form 1 (October 1925): 16–17.
62. James Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 21.
63. Sibelius, 22–23 April 1912, quoted in Ferrucio Tammaro, Jean Sibelius (Torino: ERI, 1984), 139.
64. This was the one and only meeting of the creative energies of Finland’s two most famous creative sons. See Sarah Menin, “The Profound Logos: Creative Parallels in the Lives and Work of Aalto and Sibelius,” Journal of Architecture 8 (Spring 2003): 131–48, and Menin, “Aalto, Sibelius and Fragments from Forest Culture.”
65. Finland was a pawn between Germany and the USSR at this time. A secret agreement between Hitler and Stalin, signed on 23 August 1939, gave Finland to the Soviets and Poland to the Nazis. Russia invaded Finland on 30 November 1939. See Eino Jutikkala and Kauko Pirinen, A History of Finland (Helsinki: Weilin and Göös, 1984), 247–49.
66. Göran Schildt, Alvar Aalto: The Mature Years (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 47.
67. Colin St. John Wilson, “Alvar Aalto and the State of Modernism” (1979), in Alvar Aalto vs. the Modern Movement, ed. Kirmo Mikkola (Helsinki: Rakennuskirja, 1981), 121.
68. Douglas Graf, “Strange Siblings—Being and No-Thinness: An Inadvertent Homage to Ray and Charles Eames,” DATUTOP 14 (Tampere: Tampere University of Technology, 1991), 14. See also Gareth Griffiths, “The Polemical Aalto,” DATUTOP 19 (Tampere: Tampere University of Technology, 1997).
69. Aalto, “Art and Technology,” in Schildt, Sketches, 125–29, at 127.
70. In the Lapua Forest Pavilion of 1938 (designed during the construction of the Finnish Pavilion), there is no such argument, since the whole pavilion, carried out by Aalto’s assistant Jarl Jaatinen, has become a pure undulation, unchallenged by any Euclidean frame—and consequently, it may be argued, loses its power.
71. Pallasmaa, “Tradition and Modernity,” 17–30.
72. Aalto, quoted in Schildt, Decisive Years, 173.
73. See Karl Fleig, Alvar Aalto, 3rd ed. (Zurich: Architektur Artemis, 1992), 74; and Fleig, Alvar Aalto: Complete Works, 1922–1962 (Basel: Birkhauser Verlag, 1990), 1130.
74. See Heraclitus, The Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), Frag. 51. See also Edward Hussey, The Presocratics (London: Duckworth, 1972), 44–47.
75. Aalto, “The Reconstruction of Europe,” 154.
76. Richard Weston, Alvar Aalto (London: Phaidon, 1995), 113.
77. Anon., “Finnish Pavilion, New York World’s Fair,” Architectural Review (August 1939), 64.
78. Aalto, “Art and Technology,” lecture on installation into the Finnish Academy, 3 October 1955, repr. in Schildt, Sketches, 125.
79. Aalto and Fleig refer to “synthesis” in reference to the New York pavilion. Indeed, Aalto increasingly used the word in later essays and interviews: for example, in conversation with Schildt in 1967, Aalto suggested that “what is needed is synthesis.” Published as “Conversation,” in Schildt, Sketches, 170.
80. Colin St. John Wilson, “The Natural Imagination,” in Architectural Reflections (Oxford: Butterworth, 1992), 16.
81. Ironically, a radio engineer accidentally broadcast a rehearsal led by a different conductor, and not Sibelius’s own performance as intended. Glenda Dawn Goss, The Sibelius Companion (London: Greenwood Press, 1996), 278.
82. For Robert Layton, the work is “indifferent.” Sibelius (London: Dent, 1978), 90.
83. Sibelius, in de Törne, Sibelius: A Close-Up, 30–31.
84. Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5, 280
85. Wilson, Architectural Reflections, 91.
86. Taken from the quatrain printed at the head of the Tapiola score.
87. Similar activity in Tapiola and the Sixth is underpinned by extreme stasis, “a deep-current slow motion.” Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5, 28.
88. Aalto, letter to Giedion, Autumn 1930, quoted in Schildt, Decisive Years, 66.
89. Aalto, “The Humanizing of Architecture,” 76–79.
90. Aalto, “World’s Fair,” in Schildt, Sketches, 65.
91. It is significant that when he fled to New York in 1940 and began to compose the book Finland Builds (which accompanied the reopening of the pavilion), Aalto was also preoccupied with reconstructing Finland. His subsequent concept of “the growing house,” rooted in his (partly erroneous) understanding of the adaptability of Karelian houses, was explored in his propaganda article “The Architecture of Karelia,” Uusi Suomi (2 November 1941), repr. in Schildt, Alvar Aalto in His Own Words, 115–19.
92. Alvar and Aino Aalto, “Suomen New Yorkin näyttelyn rakenne ja yleissuunnitelma” (Finland New York the exhibition design and master plan), n.d., “New York 1939–40” file, Finnish Fair Corporation Archive (Helsinki).
93. Aalto, “The Humanizing of Architecture,” 76.
Old Masters:
Jean Sibelius and Richard Strauss
in the Twenti
eth Century
LEON BOTSTEIN
Music, Language, and the Visual:
The Divergent Paths of Sibelius and Strauss
Jean Sibelius and Richard Strauss were born a year and a half apart, in December 1865 and June 1864 respectively. They were contemporaries within the same generation of European artists and musicians. Both lived remarkably long lives and survived two world wars. By the outbreak of World War I they were well established as leading figures not only in their respective regional and national communities and throughout Europe, but also in North America—which Strauss visited in 1904, and Sibelius in 1914, to great acclaim.
For Sibelius and Strauss, the years immediately preceding World War I and the war years themselves were a watershed. The radical changes in politics and society the war had sparked deepened a process of self-criticism and dissatisfaction that had already begun before 1914. The year 1911 marked a turning point for both composers. Sibelius completed his more overtly innovative and modernist sounding Fourth Symphony. Der Rosenkavalier had its premiere. The opera came to be regarded as marking Strauss’s turn away from modernism onto a reactionary path of compositional practice in which he flaunted, cynically, a historicist aesthetic.
The period between the outbreak of war and 1926 witnessed many of Sibelius’s finest works. But by 1930 Sibelius had begun what would be a startling thirty-year period of silence. Strauss, in contrast, kept composing through the 1930s and early ’40s against the grain of the self-consciously modern. He continued to write music in the wake of the physical and moral destruction of World War II. For Strauss, the period between 1945 and 1949 (the year of his death) were an “Indian summer.” Using an overt neo classical strategy evocative of the eighteenth century, he produced an array of bittersweet, nostalgic, and intimate works. Sibelius died in 1957 as a revered national icon more than seven years after Strauss. His reputation, however, rested on music composed a half-century earlier, in which he perfected an unmistakable style and sound. The meaning and cause of the silence that came afterward have remained hidden from view.
Sibelius and Strauss enjoyed an embarrassing and, to varying degrees, self-inflicted popularity during the Third Reich. From 1933 to 1945 they were both ideological symbols of nationalist cultural pride and did little to deter official patronage, despite their personal misgivings about politics. Strauss’s contempt for musical modernism and resentment for his status during the 1920s as marginal and outmoded led him to embrace the Nazis’ call for a restoration of “healthy” musical culture. Strauss served as president of the Reichsmusikkammer, the State Music Bureau, despite the vulnerability of his daughter-in-law under Nazi racialist law. Strauss’s shocking opportunism with respect to his own career, which made collaboration reasonable, also led to his falling into disfavor and isolation under the regime. After 1945 he was forced to confront his awkward collaboration with the Nazis. In contrast, Sibelius, enshrined as a Finnish national symbol well before the rise of fascism in Europe, emerged unscathed by his connections to and relative prominence in the cultural politics of Nazi Germany.1
Sibelius deliberately cultivated an image as elegant, severe, and bald.2 Ironically, he came to embody modern Finland even though he identified with the beleaguered Swedish-speaking minority from which he came. He was not overtly political. A supporter of the “White” side during the Finnish Civil War of 1918, he feared mass democracy, nationalist populism, and the political Left. He harbored nostalgia for the social and cultural legacy of the monarchical and aristocratic nineteenth century in which he came of age. Strauss’s attitude to politicians and politics, which dated from the 1890s, was far more derisive. He never wavered from a cynical focus on the advantages or disadvantages a regime offered his own career, standing, and income. As the symbol of a “non-degenerate” aesthetic tradition, he was flattered to be at the center of controversy about the future of German culture before and after the Nazi seizure of power. Statistics on repertoire performed during the Nazi era reveal that Strauss was the most often performed living German composer, and Sibelius the most popular foreign living composer.3 Neither objected or complained.
Even before their accommodation to German fascism became a factor, Strauss and Sibelius shared the distinction of hostility from modernists and their apologists. This strain in criticism flourished pointedly after 1945. Both earned the scorn of T. W. Adorno.4 Strauss was accorded grudging respect for his craft and achievements before 1911. Sibelius, in contrast, was dismissed as at best a local northern novelty, limited in his abilities as a composer. His music was too facile, simplistic, and popular.5 Astonishing longevity earned both Strauss and Sibelius the reputation of having outlived their time. They were relics of a bygone age. Worse, for different reasons their music was viewed as affirmative of, if not complicit with, an aesthetic suggestive (if not supportive) of ethical indifference to injustice, human exploitation, and exclusionary ideologies of community. Such criticism never had much impact on the public. Sibelius and Strauss—particularly Sibelius—remained wildly popular well into the 1950s, especially in England and America, much to the chagrin of competitors, notably Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Copland.6
Having receded into the background as old-fashioned and politically suspect during the heyday of midcentury modernism, Sibelius and Strauss emerged at the end of the twentieth century as dominant figures of influence. No longer marginal, they became representative figures of the twentieth century, harbingers of postmodernism, and suggestive of music’s future. Sibelius in particular offered a model of an alternative modernism. Together they vindicated the potential of a tradition of an accessible and expressive eclectic musical discourse in contemporary life.
The most striking similarities and parallels between Sibelius and Strauss concern biography and reception. What justifies a closer look at these two composers together, however, is their shared musical inheritance, particularly the legacy of Liszt. Like Liszt, Sibelius and Strauss experimented in their orchestral music with the nature of form. They utilized tonality and a musical rhetoric derived from the classicism of the late eighteenth century and the Romanticism of the nineteenth. They continued Liszt’s effort to transcend a purely formalist conception of instrumental music and extend music’s capacity to narrate and communicate “poetically,” albeit uniquely, alongside philosophy, literature, and the visual arts.
As members of a post-1848 generation, they were compelled to ask: how should one write music after Wagner and Brahms? Wagner’s charismatic originality in harmonic usage, instrumentation, and the use of musical motives as signifiers extended the narrative power of music, but his conceit that there was a progressive trajectory in history explicitly devalued classicism and the traditions of instrumental music. Brahms, representing the anti-Wagnerian, revealed the crippling burden of classicism and a daunting self-conscious sensibility of lateness, one that overwhelmed Brahms himself.7 How can a composer respond in a moment in history that seems at the end of a cultural tradition yet is suffused with palpable material and social change and the unmistakable imperatives of the present moment?
Strauss was forced to ponder these issues, given his contact with Brahms and such Wagnerians as Hans von Bülow and Alexander Ritter, let alone his father and his closest contemporaries and rivals, from Mahler and Pfitzner to Schoenberg. The attempt to segregate Sibelius from the currents of European culture because of his unique status as the voice and representative of the youthfully self-aware Finland and unique landscape (often described inaccurately) is not persuasive, as many recent scholars have noted.8 Sibelius’s awareness of European trends, from his encounter with Ferruccio Busoni in Helsinki to his studies in Berlin and Vienna and his frequent travels abroad, contradict any reductive construct of him as provincial or naïvely Finnish. He came of age confronting the same cosmopolitan musical culture Strauss faced and was forced to deal with the same issues Strauss struggled with after the end of the nineteenth century.
The central challenge posed by the realities of the pre�
��and post–World War I period was the sense that one was living, spiritually and philosophically (in terms of epistemology, if not ethics and politics), at a historical moment of decay, decline, and confusion, in a world beset with consternation and fear about culture, civility, and fundamental questions of meaning and value. Progress in everything but the most crassly material seemed to have ground to a halt. Industry and science may have been sufficient to transform everyday life, but their radical success left a spiritual vacuum. Artists in all fields, whether music, literature, or the visual arts, felt required to respond to questions on the nature and purpose of art with more than a dutiful continuation of past practice defended in terms of historical tradition. The sense of discontinuity and philosophical emptiness prevailed after 1918.9
Sibelius and Strauss sensed the disintegration of old assumptions and realities keenly, and their music reflected their struggle to continue their callings and commitments as composers. They were both prone to a thinly veiled pessimism, often masked by nostalgia or self-indulgence, particularly at the end of their careers, as Strauss’s 1943 wind sonatina, “From the Workshop of an Invalid,” and Sibelius’s 1925 miniature melodrama, “The Lonely Ski Trail,” suggest. Both sought refuge in an idiosyncratic reassertion of classicist ideals in their last works. Strauss used extended classical form and thematic figuration, punctuated by romantic expressiveness, as in the 1945 Oboe Concerto. Sibelius employed rich chorale-like textures reminiscent of Mendelssohn’s own appropriation of baroque models in the affirmative 1922 Andante Festivo.
The paths of Strauss and Sibelius crossed, although without much frequency or intensity. Strauss performed the premiere of the revised Sibelius Violin Concerto in 1905. In 1901 he conducted two of the four Lemminkäinen Legends, “The Swan of Tuonela” and “Lemminkäinen’s Return,” remarking that the music showed genuine melodic inspiration and vitality. Later on, in his characteristic manner, Strauss came to regard his Finnish contemporary with condescending respect as the lesser of evils among living non-German composers. Strauss was a staunch cultural chauvinist regarding German music—a commonplace disease among his contemporaries and shared by Schoenberg and Heinrich Schenker. But Strauss recognized, with sympathy, the authenticity, depth, and greatness in the music of Sibelius, even though he considered his own skills as a composer decidedly superior. Strauss was not the only German who conceived of Sibelius as the voice of a yet unspoiled Northern Europe, a region still capable of naïve enthusiasms about nature, language, and myth. Strauss’s view was an expression of envy as well as contempt. He sensed that Sibelius’s gifts extended beyond being a voice of the exotic.10