This heritage of philosophical speculation, which already had a powerful history prior to Schelling, left a distinct legacy in the discourse about music that occupied young artists, writers, and musicians of Sibelius’s generation in the 1880s and 1890s. The link between nature and art had occupied Kant earlier in his Critique of Judgment, particularly as related to the issue of causality and the idea of purpose in art. Goethe, too, was obsessed with nature, urging artists to study the process of development in plants as a prelude to cultivating a sense of form and style. Schelling’s placement of music at the center of the arts, not at its periphery, and not subordinate to language, inspired Hanslick’s argument on behalf of “absolute” music. By the same token, the new prestige Schelling lent music as the art form with the greatest power to transcend dualities—particular and universal, subjective and objective, real and ideal—also inspired Wagner and his notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the “total work of art,” in which music provided the core with its capacity to integrate the experience of time and space.92 By linking music with architecture, Schelling heightened the prestige of architecture as well. For Schelling they were both public art forms actualized in space and time, and thereby symbolic of collective ideals contingent on but beyond the organic. They were truthful as more than passing expressions of human individuality.
Schelling’s association of music with architecture, in terms of criticism and public reception, was vindicated during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when music and architecture as public arts became tied to politics and issues of national identity.93 In the public sphere at the turn of the century, music and architecture defined the modern. The tension between historicism and modernism in the controversy in Vienna over the music of Schoenberg between 1906 and 1913 repeated itself in the furor over Adolf Loos’s 1910 Goldman & Salatsch building on the Michaelerplatz. The controversy around Klimt in Vienna was architectural: it centered on his Beethoven Frieze for the 1901 Secession Klinger exhibition. And the cultural politics surrounding architecture in Vienna—debates about the work of Loos, Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich—ran parallel to those about the music of Mahler and Schoenberg’s pupils Berg and Webern, and to a lesser extent Alexander Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker.
Nature and Form: Saarinen, Wright, and Sibelius
The parallel between Saarinen’s architectural ideas and realizations and Sibelius’s use of orchestral sonority and time in the construction of musical form in the symphony rests in a common quest grounded in Schelling’s alignment of architecture and music: How can art be truthful to nature, be universal and transcend specificity, and yet respond to the subjective needs of a moment in history?
Saarinen was born in 1873. His family, unlike Sibelius’s, was part Finnish-speaking (his father, a Lutheran pastor), part Swedish-speaking (his mother). To make matters worse in terms of the conflicting linguistic currents in the formation of Finnish identity, Saarinen grew up in the Finnish part of Russia, beyond the Finnish border on the southeast of the Gulf of Finland. He spoke Russian and spent time in St. Petersburg, where he developed his initial ambition to be a painter. Influenced by his father, Saarinen, like Sibelius, became caught up in the rise of Finnish cultural nationalism that centered on an enthusiasm for the Kalevala. By the late 1890s he had begun working as an architect in Helsinki, employing visual elements from Finnish myth and history in interiors and exteriors. These decorative elements and figures in untreated stone walls corresponded to stories from the Kalevala about the hero Lemminkäinen and the tragic Kullervo.94 Saarinen’s breakthrough to prominence came with the Finnish Pavilion at the Paris Exposition of 1900.95 In 1902 he built his legendary home Hvitträsk, a studio-home at which Sibelius spent many evenings.96
Both these structures are laden with markers of Heimatkunst, “ homeland art,” a term made notorious by Walter Niemann in his writing on Sibelius—explicit markers of a romanticized Finnish sensibility.97 Comparable terms, e.g. Provinzkunst, were used in Vienna and Budapest to describe a similar architectural style in Central Europe around 1900. This style reflected an explicit break from architectural tradition in that it used highly stylized, rural folk traditions. Saarinen, in the 1900 Paris pavilion and his beloved Hvitträsk, emphasized local materials and evocations of the landscape. But in these projects, a sense of organic dynamism and formal unity was visible. Saarinen broke the distinction between façade and interior, giving the viewer and user a sense of a nearly monothematic arrangement of space that betrayed a single defining logic. Detail emerged from an all-encompassing flow in the design.
This strategy was indebted to Saarinen’s devotion to the appropriation in design theory of the Wagnerian ideology of Gesamtkunstwerk, a quality characteristic of his generation of artists and architects. All the elements—fixtures, surface detailing, furniture, fireplaces, windows, and fabrics—were of a piece, creating an organic, unified, temporal experience for those using the building or living in it. Parallels between music and architecture were greatest in the immediate post-Wagnerian period, when architects and composers attempted to integrate every detail, overwhelm the user and spectator, and obliterate the quotidian and ordinary in an enveloping aesthetic that transformed the experience of time and space simultaneously. (Consider, for example, the apocryphal response Mahler gave Sibelius about the symphony needing to encompass the whole world.)
The closest architectural equivalent to Sibelius’s Finlandia (1900) or Lemminkäinen Legends was Saarinen’s 1899 building for the Pohjola Insurance Company in Helsinki. Indeed, although Saarinen built a series of great villas and houses before 1910, it is his public buildings that offer the precise analogy to Sibelius’s sense of form in works for large orchestra. The Pohjola building, named for the land of the north in the Kalevala, was consistent in its footprint and layout with historicist models of urban multi-story buildings. But distinctly Finnish elements are visible from the start in the exterior: the use of large stone, the tower, and the softer roofline are all suggestive of Finnish rural architecture. Much of the stone façade is patterned in a naturalistic manner, evocative of craggy surfaces and characteristic wood construction. The modernity of construction (the iron columns bearing the weight) remains concealed, but the design draws a history in fantasy and does not pay homage to classical, Renaissance, or baroque models.98
The most visible sign of Saarinen’s instinct for form based on an explicitly organic notion of movement over time can be found in the interior of the Pohjola building, in which he created sweeping but gentle curves and guiding vectors. The most startling element is the staircase, with its premodern-looking arches, intense carvings, asymmetrical patterning, and elaborate but modernist grillwork and fixtures (Figures 2 and 3). The reconciliation of form, function, and detailed, intensely symbolic decoration can be seen in the front door, down to its hinges. The elements of explicit Finnish symbolism and narration are unmistakable. After 1900, however, Saarinen began experimenting, moving away from late nineteenth-century Romantic and neoclassical impulses, just as Sibelius distanced himself from the lavish illustrative realism of Liszt and Wagner or its synthesis with sonata form and thematic transformation found in Strauss’s tone poems of the 1890s.
Figure 2. Eliel Saarinen, staircase spiral in the Pohjola Insurance Company Building, Helsinki, 1899–1901.
Figure 3. Eliel Saarinen, staircase detail in the Pohjola Insurance Company Building, Helsinki, 1899–1901.
Saarinen’s two most important, path-breaking buildings were the Finnish National Museum (1900–12) and the Helsinki Railway Station (1904–19). The museum reveals a greater distance from the mythic symbolism and nationalist impulses of the Pohjola building. Saarinen allowed himself more liberty in the detailing of the façade, filling it with geometric as well as illustrative decoration. Abstract forms were juxtaposed with narrative symbols. Saarinen exploited the flexible setting of the museum, which was not surrounded by other buildings, allowing him to unify function and design in the flow and foot
print of the building. The entrance is placed parallel to the street and indented, softening the building’s inherent monumentality. Saarinen achieved a balance between the vertical and horizontal, a more intimate and compact space than implied by the building’s function.
Saarinen’s other major accomplishment, the contemporaneous equivalent to Sibelius’s 1902 Second Symphony, was the Helsinki Railway Station (Figure 4). Saarinen now integrated the structure of the façade with function, revealing a single formal entity. The building was given a defining sweep. Ornament and symbolic allusion were muted, replaced by decoration that is geometric and functional. The graceful balance between right angles and round arch-like forms in such a large building, Saarinen’s tapered layering of the massive structure, his theatrical and grand use of light and fenestration, combined with the sparse but powerful use of monumental sculpture, permitted him to retain a distinctive Finnish symbolism. But the character and content of that symbolism were resolutely modern. Saarinen projected a disciplined integration of form and function that utilized, with the suggestion of natural shapes, the character of the materials of construction. Saarinen’s simplified vocabulary of modernism was not mechanical or ascetic. Rather, it communicated a monothematic line of organic form that, in a new way, used an abstract aesthetic to define a modern national identity.
Figure 4. Eliel Saarinen, main entrance to Helsinki Railway Station (1904–19), 1939.
The Helsinki Railway Station revealed a shift in Saarinen’s architecture toward an integrated and simplified monumentality based on massive structural forms that seemed to emerge dynamically in space, diminishing the unavoidable static artificiality of architecture. Three Saarinen designs produced after the railway station can be understood as running parallel to Sibelius’s development during the same period: the 1908 Parliament House project, the 1912 Lahti Town Hall, and the 1921 Kalevala House, which was never realized.
The Parliament House design (Figure 5) suggests the architect’s intent to link the natural and the human. The building appears to emerge out of the incline in the site. The massive simple form—one gesture integrated by material and geometry—is differentiated subtly but consistently on the surface of the structure. The design can be read as stressing the ideal of unity in democratic politics, avoiding any clear architectural references to political models as had become traditional in European parliament designs during the second half of the nineteenth century. (In Budapest, for example, the English example of Westminster was adapted, and in Vienna, the Greco-Roman heritage was employed in an unabashed homage to classical antiquity).
Lahti Town Hall is more suggestive of Sibelius’s use of transparent textures and sonorities.99 It reveals a flirtation with a modernist aesthetic of simplicity. Saarinen uses a leaner vocabulary, fewer massive elements, and generates a more elegant vertical and delicate geometry. But the impressive integration of the curved and the straight, bringing the ornamental and the functional together into one gesture, is striking. Saarinen provides the user with a single vector of time. The entrance with its protruding fenestration and arched entryway implies the elegant staircase with its mix of curved fluidity, delicate vertical elements, and beautifully lit spatial stateliness.100
Figure 5. Eliel Saarinen, winning design for Parliament House competition, 1908.
The Kalevala House design (Figure 6), stark and lean, is a modernist evocation of a rural past. It is the most reminiscent of the sonorities of Sibelius’s later works—the use of open intervals, the massing of the brass sound, and the nearly static stability of time generated by the use of tonal pedals and measured, slow, harmonic motion. Saarinen’s design suggests an ancient fortress, but all symbolic signifiers are subordinated to the dominant shape of the structure that frames a tower at the center. The tower repeats, as if by variation and diminution, the ascending roof angle. Like Schelling’s image of architecture as solidified music, the Kalevala project is Sibelius’s sound world rendered concrete. It captures the experience of time created by musical form and structures that temporal experience spatially.
After distinguishing himself in the 1922 competition for the Tribune Tower in Chicago, Saarinen moved to the United States where he remained until his death in 1950. In America, Saarinen built buildings, taught, and wrote. Two of his American buildings are of particular interest with respect to a comparison with Sibelius: the Tabernacle Church of Christ from 1940 and Kleinhans Hall, built for the Buffalo Philharmonic in 1938, the only building for music Saarinen completed.101 The Indiana church reveals the strong influence of the more ascetic attitude to ornament characteristic of the International style and the Bauhaus. Furthermore, the massing is leaner and the reference to organic rounded shapes, perhaps reminiscent of Finland, is gone in favor a more puritan American angularity.
Saarinen was influenced in his earlier work by European trends, including the Arts and Crafts movement and Otto Wagner and the Vienna Secession. In America he encountered modernist trends, particularly the work of Louis Sullivan. But his distinctive aesthetic survived these various influences. In the Indiana church one sees a striking austerity of line and simplification of form. But Saarinen’s instinct for light and the gradual unfolding of a spatial framework make the interior of the church strikingly grand and uplifting. Despite its sparse, disciplined, and straightforward skin, the building integrates symbolic decorative motifs into the exterior, often functionally as fenestration.102 The materials and transparent use of a single idea create a minimalist and static composition, an architectural equivalent of Tapiola.103
Kleinhans Hall in Buffalo, New York, built just a few years before the Tabernacle Church, offers the most suggestive analogue between music and architecture in the late work of Sibelius and Saarinen. Here Saarinen once again linked the organic with the geometric. The hall is both curved and impressively linear. The brick exterior highlights the simplicity of form, yet offers subtle decoration. Saarinen’s brickwork suggests beauty and detail in a quite musical way. Throughout the building, larger simple structural elements work dialectically with design details, subthemes, and rhythmic counterpoint. The lobby staircases and public spaces have organic curved shapes created with a refined sense of wood detailing, all suggestive of the flow of time. Once again Saarinen builds ornament into a single line.
In the main hall Saarinen achieves his closest architectural equivalent to late Sibelius. White stucco and wood alternate in the undulating curved ceiling, creating the sense of a hall that emerges dynamically like a wave of water from the stage: architecturally realized sound projected in space (Figure 7). The organic unity and simplicity of the design are breathtaking, as is the use of wood. The closest musical analogue is Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony, where the composer’s single-movement structure offers an arc of continuity with a nearly neoclassical “noble severity” and “grandeur,” as one critic has observed.104 Saarinen’s achievement in Kleinhans Hall is a vindication of his special adaptation of modernism. Much like the Sibelius Seventh, its warmth and inviting simplicity can be experienced as a “single indivisible organism.”105
Figure 6. Eliel Saarinen’s rendering of Kalevala House, 1921.
The link to the organic and to nature suggested by Saarinen’s brand of modern design represented a distinct philosophical ideology about architecture. Saarinen devoted much of his career in the United States to teaching at the Cranbrook School, which he also designed. He wrote two major books, The City: Its Growth, Its Decay, Its Future (1943) and The Search for Form: A Fundamental Approach to Art (1948), in which he gave voice to a philosophy of design that articulates the connection between nature and modernism in a manner comparable to the connection expressed in Sibelius’s music, particularly in the symphonic form.
For Saarinen, nature provided the logic for all aesthetic structures. The human imagination must shape art along lines that reflect the inexhaustible potential inherent in nature. Furthermore, “organic order” is “the all-governing principle in the universe” requiring architecture to
respect it. The organic defines the “whole world of forms.” Like a piece of musical composition, a building must follow “the fundamental principle of organic order.” Saarinen reconciles this notion with the imperatives of modernism by offering a corollary that “no man . . . is . . . timeless” and therefore no civilization can be “timeless.” He generates a “categorical imperative”—namely, that every historical age must develop a style and personality in accord with its “place in time” and therefore evolution, with its inherent “potentialities” and “outside influences.”106
Figure 7. Eliel Saarinen, ceiling of the concert hall in Kleinhans Music Hall, Buffalo, New York, 1938–40.
Nature is understood as a constant variable, though its manifestations change with time and place. History determines the specific character and attributes that aesthetic forms must assume at any moment in time. Nature, for Saarinen, is an idea and reality that reconciles the particularity of history with normative principles of form. As formal arts and distinct from language and images, architecture and music are ideally suited to this synthesis of the objective and subjective.
Saarinen offers a brilliant account of how he, as a Finn, utilized the particularity of his historical circumstance to exploit the specific, while developing a valid international mode of expression. It required the distillation of design principles: “The more slowly form develops toward international expression, the safer the development.” His unique brand of modernism, capable of international emulation, reconciled ornament and function, natural materials with modern industrial components; he redefined function as a dynamic temporal principle and deviated from the canons of the modernist International style by focusing on a monothematic, continuous, visibly organic sense of form that transcended the implications of function. He continued to believe in the symbolic meaning of architectural gesture. Sibelius’s refusal to emulate the currents of Internationalist modernism can be understood in an analogous manner. Like Saarinen, his forms were unique, but naturally emergent from tradition. The emphasis on rotation, repetition, stasis, sonority, and symbolically powerful simplicity resulted in a distinctive originality. The once “local” natural setting bred a distinct pattern of formal design, while the expressive use of time no longer betrayed its origins, rendering it international.
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 40