Early in his career, nature became an explanatory device to define Sibelius’s uniqueness. But it was construed as contingent on something substantive in the Nordic and Finnish character. Sibelius, eager to make his mark as more than a Finnish celebrity and keenly attuned to the modern crisis regarding the proper path for music, turned for inspiration to a strategy and sensibility closest to himself: his predisposition for silent contemplation in nature. This inclination to the visual and material environment, to nature and a sense of the organic, went well beyond illustration. For all of his engagement with the Kalevala early in his career, Sibelius, unlike Strauss, never aspired to become a literary composer.37 His only opera was a failure. And he himself recognized the centrality of the visual in his music. In 1915 he mused in his diary, “It is as if Father God had thrown down pieces of mosaic from heaven’s floor and asked me to determine what kind of picture it was. Maybe a good definition of composing. Maybe not. How would I know?”38
Sibelius’s self-doubt notwithstanding, the “pieces of mosaic” in his music consistently possessed attributes of spatiality, the organic, and the visual. Tawaststjerna notes that Sibelius, in his twenties, reported having dreamt as a boy of a new art form that combined sculpture and music, an art form “where matter, line and shape would be given life by sound and thus enabled to move. To the three dimensions of sculpture he wanted to add the fourth: time.”39 Painting was not crucial. There are those who hear color-sound symbolism, Klangfarbensymbolik, in the earlier Lemminkäinen Legends, op. 22. Such symbolism linked Sibelius with his contemporaries M. K. iurlionis and Alexander Scriabin, for whom the color-sound connection was structural and whose implications for form extended beyond the painterly correspondence between musical gesture and pictorial image.40 The visualization of time in nature guided Sibelius’s assembling of mosaic fragments—“pieces” of musical form—and after the Third Symphony led to a self-conscious search for self-evidently “simpler” elements. Instrumental music based on thematic transformation seemed more artificial, less “natural,” less congruent with the experience of the organic. Large-scale form demanded reinvention. To give life to form through time called for events of sonic assemblage occurring in succession. In the sequential passage of time, sound and the sensuous particularity of the materials of sound emerged as units of structure.41
Sibelius’s notion of the nature that gave life to form through sound was certainly influenced by the relatively “backward” (in Alexander Gerschenkron’s brilliant non-pejorative usage) economic and industrial character of his native Finnish surroundings.42 Early twentieth-century Finland fit with an image of nature as rural, uncorrupted by man, and therefore original in some theological sense. This sensibility coincided with Sibelius’s increasing penchant for simple, transparent elements and harmonic motion that privileged static and slow-moving textures as structural components. These elemental, almost primitive, evocations of space and time in turn appeared congruent with the cult of myth and antiquity surrounding the Kalevala and helped define the uniquely “Finnish” as derivative of a premodern and more authentic natural landscape.43
When juxtaposed to the cosmopolitan and individual, however, the substantive construct of the natural and organic that can be associated historically with Sibelius generated darker political overtones. The natural and organic became aligned in early twentieth-century politics with a reactionary definition of authentic community, placing the modern, individual, and cosmopolitan vision of society as a differentiated, diverse, collective reality on the defensive as alienated and bereft of spiritual cohesion. The ideal of restoring a natural, organic community within modernity dissolved easily into apologies on behalf of homogeneous race-based nations and (ironically) futuristic visions of universal classless solidarity, further isolating notions of democratic individualism as abstract and materialistic.44
The duality between nature and man explicit in myth, and its attendant contrast between modern industrialization and the rural landscape that first inspired Sibelius to use the natural and organic as a visual metaphor for writing music, represented just one factor in shaping the late nineteenth-century concept of nature. Equally significant were nineteenth-century scientific obsessions with dynamic processes in nature, both cyclical (mitosis) and progressive (evolution). These explained how nature caused differentiation and regulated the cycle of birth, growth, and decay. The idea of nature implied temporal vectors of momentum without finite boundaries. Organic forms found in nature were known to be economical, symmetrical, and implicitly revelatory of their purpose. For that reason, late nineteenth-century theories of history frequently appealed to the scientific, dynamic character of the organic and of nature.
The natural, including disease and evolution, was understood as contingent on time and therefore temporal in experience in a way that the mechanical and inorganic were not. The philosophical fascination with the organic as a dynamic force was enhanced by the perception that nature generated differentiation in a manner compatible with uniformity. Natural phenomena such as multiplicity and individuation were consistent with unity, recurrence, cycles, repetition, and sameness. The natural world as understood in the late nineteenth century reconciled a dynamic surface of difference with a deep, shared structure of stasis. All this suggested an implicit unifying purpose in nature, perhaps a divine plan, compatible with a metaphysical belief in the invisibility of infinity and the boundlessness of the cyclical.
Sibelius gradually translated into music this reconciliation of diversity and unity in nature. For the listener, the persuasive musical expression in the later Sibelius symphonies derives from a visual conceptualization of spatiality, not a narrative one. The frequency with which pictorial explanations were made about Sibelius’s music, particularly by English and American critics, suports this claim. The third movement of his Fourth Symphony suggests that “Sibelius’s design is primarily a dynamic or cumulative one, like tiny ripples on a lake which expand into rolling waves.”45 Predictably, images from urban landscapes, industry, and the machine are rarely used in evoking the sound of Sibelius’s mature orchestral music.
Sibelius’s reliance on visual constructs of nature and the organic is most audible in the breadth, duration, and the specific materiality of sound. The harmonic structure is organized to emulate the emergence of single causes with dominant features. Characteristic elements in the discussion of Sibelius’s music include the compression of form, the emphasis on sameness and not motivic contrast as a structural device, the use of cyc lical “rotational” devices, and the focus on entropy and disintegration toward the end of works. Such features are routinely contrasted with the classical-Romantic model of symphonic procedure with its manipulation of heterogeneous motivic elements, or the narrative logic of the symphonic poem. Thematic development, variation, and dramatic culmination based on the synthesis and recapitulation of multiple contrasting variables are placed in opposition to music suggestive of the temporal experience of nature and the organic.46
In Luonnotar (1913), a “tone poem for soprano and orchestra,” the striking aspect is not the text from the Kalevala or the setting of the creation myth from its first canto, but rather the economical transparency, the intensification of sound itself in which the materiality of each group of instruments, strings, winds, and brass, assists separately in evoking the strange distant landscape of divine creation. There is the unmistakable sense of a single line of experience or argument—a single formal arc. Repetition with slight nuanced variation evokes the illusion of extended duration in a short piece. Whether the “image” of nature suggested by Luonnotar’s sound world is dark, Dionysian, or seemingly “unconcerned with, and standing apart from any human perception of it” (as Hepokoski suggests), Sibelius’s approach to temporality and musical form in the work is influenced by an effort at translation of a visual sensibility or image, even given the absence of a human observer.47
The pacing of the work, its steady motion, its grandeur, and its intricate but integrat
ed sound world balance detail with the long line. This suggests a visual architectural logic—the use of sonority per se (open fifths) as a structural element, punctuated sparsely by detailing: ornament in the form of brief contrasts in instrumental coloration against a monochromatic background. In a vision of primeval chaos, sudden eruptions and waves of melodic exclamation fit within a commanding, stable, and atmospheric sensibility. The piece’s visual sense of landscape is explicitly implied by the composer’s admonition to the singer to sing, at letter L, “visionarico.”48
Readings of Luonnatar that foreground ideological programmatic meanings in the work as opposed to its strikingly original use of sound and time invite a direct comparison to Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony, completed early in 1915—his last major symphonic and large-scale independent orchestral work. Strauss, too, evokes the spatial expanse and grandeur of the landscape. But he does so by a thematic narrative, suggesting an observer and human subject. Strauss’s techniques are illustrative. The work is explicitly reminiscent of Mahler, whose death in 1911 spurred Strauss to resume work on the piece, which he had begun years earlier. An Alpine Symphony can be heard, in fact, as a tribute to Mahler. Strauss unleashes a Mahlerian instrumental array, including cowbells and wind and thunder machines, along with his own signature use of horns and tenor tubas. Strauss employs this overwhelming arsenal descriptively, albeit sparingly. The listener follows at a distance, experiencing as an observer or the reader of a novel the awe, loss, return, and memory of the leading character. The perspective remains painterly: a species of narrative and an expression of philosophical realism.49
The visual element in An Alpine Symphony is explicit, but it is pictorial, not architectural. The music depicts the landscape, and the program suggests a story through Strauss’s explicit evocation of past symphonic tradition. He satisfies the anticipation of a listener whose appreciation has been honed by familiarity with conventions of thematic exposition, development, and recapitulation (as in Rubinstein’s Ocean Symphony, Goldmark’s Rustic Wedding Symphony, Mahler’s Third, Smetana’s Má vlast, Liszt’s Dante Symphony, and Beethoven’s Pastoral). The music inspires in listeners an inner dialogue of a novelistic character, and the recollection of their own encounter with nature. The sensibility inspired in listeners is operatic, foregrounding the human character against a scenic backdrop—a brilliantly realized visual tableau.
The contrast between Strauss and Sibelius becomes acute when one compares An Alpine Symphony to Sibelius’s two major orchestral works from 1911 and 1915, the Fourth and Fifth symphonies. Sibelius’s Fourth has been said to “enshrine the essential Sibelius”; it reveals “a searching intensity” and a “purity of utterance.”50 Although praised by critics as Sibelius’s most modernist work, it never captured a public the way the Second had or the Fifth would. Sibelius, perhaps offering a direct alternative to Mahler, suggested that the Fourth had a confessional aspect. Despite its surface of astringent modernism, the bleak sonorities, the elusive harmonic motion, the use of the tritone, the dominant innovative aspect of the symphony—its “free self-determining structure”—is formal.51 Form is implied by elements linked to sonic materiality and is experienced as an evolutionary process. This is audible even in the tightly argued and more neoclassical first movement. The architectural shape of an arch in the last movement can be inferred.52
The polemical intent of the symphony, according to Sibelius’s friend Axel Carpelan, was to expose the mechanistic “musical civil-engineering” of German composers and the “inner emptiness behind an enormous mechanical apparatus.”53 Sibelius’s challenge was spiritual in the sense of the organic. Line and form—musical design as visual architecture—predominate, not the conventional functionality of motivic and harmonic relationships. Sibelius’s architecture is organic in the use of cyclical procedures and recurrent patterns. Sibelius reconciles, in the Fourth, the technique of organic form-building already present in Luonnotar with a Beethovenian symphonic scale. The concentration on coordinating sonority with structure in the Fourth forces the listener to think musically and respond not to an implied narrative or philosophical argument as might be appropriate with Strauss and Mahler. The musical logic is not painterly, but suggestive of shape and design in a more abstract manner—visual three-dimensionality conceived and realized temporally in music.
In the Fifth, the work with which Sibelius most struggled, he mastered the musical equivalent of organic unity. After the popular Second, it was his most successful venture into symphonic form. The architecture of the work has been described by Hepokoski as based on “slow, rotational transformations toward a stronger and deeper principle.” The form emerges from “an implicit essence” audible at the start.54 Sibelius moves beyond evocations of sonata form and classical procedure by managing sound in time visually through space as if sound were light changing over time. But the symphony moves in one direction, leading to an “apotheosis” that is systematically prepared and implied from the beginning. Although Olin Downes thought the work rather “pastoral,” that feeling is not achieved by an implied narrative, despite Krohn’s elaborate argument on behalf of a “North Spring” that ends in a “Journey to Church” and the entrance into paradise in the presence of God. But even Krohn, faced with the “uniqueness” in the closing measures, retreats, suggesting a “symbolic effect.”55
Sibelius’s musical solution appears directly and pointedly responsive to Strauss. If musical meaning can be constructed along the lines suggested by language, then its form must somehow approximate the functions of words and utterances. Thematic significance is contingent on grammar and syntax that regulate usage and anticipate meaning, even in poetry, where convention can frame meaning.56 For Sibelius, expositions, developments, and recapitulations defined by themes, cadences, variations, harmonic motion, and counterpoint, understood in traditional terms, no longer seemed persuasively meaningful. Just as the logic and power of language had been eroded in modern times, so too had the musical traditions rooted in conventions based on an analogy with language. In Sibelius’s Fifth, to use Hepokoski’s terms, teleological genesis, rotational form, content-based fantasy, and a focus on sonic materiality as an expressive element all contributed to an original construct of a unified organic-sounding form. The symphony was a response to decaying cultural practice represented, ironically, by An Alpine Symphony, itself a nostalgic and implicitly pessimistic reprise of tradition.57
By 1919, when the third and final version of the Fifth was premiered, Sibelius had arrived at a new approach to musical architecture, justifying his quip that in comparison to what was happening in Europe beyond Finland’s borders “my music has infinitely more nature and life.”58 The Fifth has been said to have a “revelatory effect,” the result of an “organic” expansion achieved through simplification and distillation.59 The temporal experience in Sibelius assumes a spatiality that appears balanced and economical, in which content and function emerge sequentially, accumulate, and define in retrospect a single dominant formal logic.
Sibelius’s experiments with form as sounding visual shapes and structures were elaborated and surpassed in three late works: the Sixth Symphony (1923), the Seventh Symphony (1924), and Tapiola (1926). The Sixth is perhaps the most personal and nostalgic, given its modal references to a premodern past. But it is also the most daring and unusual.60 It proceeds directly in the path charted by Luonnotar. In the sequence of events, Sibelius intersperses silence and space within repetition, fragmentation, augmentation, and diminution, using highly simplified motivic and thematic units. The architectural line is elegant and restrained, generated by a single formal gesture that builds and then recedes. But the sonorities yield a succession of sharp contrasts, fleeting episodes, echoes of history, and fragments, often without evident symmetry. This detail is subsumed into an ethereal, mystical, and overarching harmonic sensibility, suggesting distance and contemplative interiority. The suggestion of a narrative argument has become weaker. Admirers of Sibelius have heard in the co
ntroversial Sixth Symphony an organic expression of Finnish identity, the most Finnish of the symphonies, “pure and cold water,” a spiritualized expression of an ancient Finnish landscape, a wintry February; others have heard a “Nordic summer” that ends in a “midsummer night’s dream.”61
The Seventh, widely regarded as the greatest of the Sibelius symphonies, is more a symphonic fantasy than heir to the formal tradition dating back to Beethoven.62 In the Seventh, Sibelius addresses the problem of unity in symphonic form with which nineteenth-century composers struggled. Consisting of a single movement, the Seventh represents a compressed structure. Donald Tovey invoked the metaphor of a mountain peak—flying over it, being on it—to characterize this densely argued work. The symphony, for Tovey, mirrors the logic of the visual experience of time: “The beginning is in darkness. . . . Dawn grows into daylight” before the composition ends, somberly, “in tones of noble pathos.” The work’s intensely condensed musical structure grows like an organism, from seeds that suggest immanently its form and design. In this way it is similar to the Sixth, heard as an “organism that grows with the same irresistible force and logic as the leaf stalks.”63 Both works reveal “the intuitive necessity of nature.”64
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 38