Saarinen skirts the distinction between style and idea dear to many apologists for modernism. He defines style as “a form-language” expressive of a civilization in time. Therefore style is derivative of and dependent on form making. Since forms must be in accord with nature, every element must have a function, as in a cell or organism. Every note or chord in music must have a function within a formal design, just as every detail must in a building design. The task of the artist is not therefore the free play of the imagination. Rather, the freedom is defined and limited by fundamental natural principles that include the necessity of a purposeful logic for every element in a structure. When the “principle of organic order” is violated in a period of history, particularly in the design of cities, as it appeared to be the case for Saarinen with modernity’s uncritical embrace of the International style of the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, Breuer, and Gropius, the result is a dangerous disintegration, a disease analogous to “cancer.”107
Art cannot tolerate the arbitrary. Yet the variety of valid original formal solutions to very particular challenges and problems in any age is great, as it is in nature. Saarinen describes artistic creativity and originality in architecture as a problem-solving process called “modulation.” Saarinen observed, in a manner directly suggestive of Sibelius, that “since the problems are many and different, so must the solutions of these problems be many and different: sometimes simple and modest, sometimes vivid and playful, sometimes serene and elevated. Andante. Vivace. Festivo. It is up to the imagination to master the modulation.”108 Saarinen offered an apt characterization of the compositional procedure of the late Sibelius in which the formal architecture, derivative of a perception of the local and the natural, evokes a dynamic, organic logic focused on the functionality of sound, the sequential impact of motivic elaboration, pace, gesture, and material sonority. Sibelius defined an organic architectural music of modernity that reconciled tradition with the imperatives of contemporary existence, and a music that could communicate in an arresting manner as the impotence of language seemed ever more apparent.
Saarinen’s ideology—the appeal to nature and the organic, reconciled with the requirement to reinvent tradition in accord with the specific demands of the historical moment, rejecting the slavish imitation of past styles and procedures—bears an uncanny resemblance to the ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright, his American contemporary. Like Saarinen, Wright invoked the primacy of nature and the idea of an “organic architecture.” Key to Wright’s usage of the concept of nature was its debt to Emerson. For Emerson, a “moral law” was at the center of nature, making every natural process “a version of a moral sentence.” Like Swedenborg, nature represented the synthesis of the scientific and the aesthetic, since “nature is always self-similar” and infinitely self-generating, making creativity go on, unwearied, “adapted to infinity.”109
Wright, like Saarinen, took this notion of nature as an overarching framework that could be reconciled as a normative principle with the variability and specificity that came with the passage of time. For Wright, nature meant the true “essential significant life of the thing, whatever the thing is.”110 For architecture that meant becoming true, as a moral precept, to the immanent truths in the materials and methods of modern life. Modernism, by expressing the specific character of modern life, would create structures that were simultaneously coherent with a transcendent definition of the organic and nature. The laws of nature were dynamic and continuous. Organic architecture in modernity meant “coming out from within ourselves to an outside that we’ve learned to understand as harmonious and true and beautiful, true to the nature of materials, true to the methods of our day, true to the life of our time, true to the best of ourselves.”111 Self-realization demanded the search for inherent harmony and unity within an honest confrontation with historical discontinuity.
Wright reversed the conventional appeal to nature as something that limited change and adaptation to historical developments. Nature was not a conceptual barrier against historical relativism and modernist innovation. But as with Saarinen and Sibelius, the appeal to nature offered Wright the artist a discipline of an almost religious character against imitation, fashion, and thoughtlessness. Modernism in Wright’s usage may seem radical on the surface, but it was, as with Saarinen and Sibelius, a vindication of classicism. By linking the modern with nature, Saarinen, Sibelius, and Wright’s break with past practice assumed the status of a vindication of eternal truths that simultaneously required a candid acceptance of progress in history. “Organic” modernism was a powerful answer to the accusation against modernism that it was either “degenerate” or nihilistic.112
An emphasis on “organic simplicity” links Wright with Sibelius.113 For Wright, simplicity was inherent in nature and held the key to harmony, making the task of the artist a balancing act between elaboration and elimination. A piece of music, like a piece of architecture, reconciled form and function with simplicity. Simplicity was inherently modern, a consequence of rationalization and efficiency. It was the essence of the machine and modern technology. Wright objected to the derision of ornament in certain modernist circles and the notion that form should rigidly follow function. For him, they were “one” like a tree.114 For Wright, the form of a building and plasticity in the use of space (like Sibelius’s use of sonority to help define orchestral form), as well as the development of an aesthetic—a genuine style, in Saarinen’s terms—all required a fundamental emancipation from inherited models. It required recognizing the particular implication of nature in modernity that privileged simplicity in plasticity and form consistent with the realities of modern life. Lending any church structure nobility, monumentality, and light demanded that the modern means equivalent to the materials and design of a Gothic cathedral be distilled with a traditional allegiance to “old ritual.” Architecture—and all modern art—must create works that were “an adequate ideal for our general culture,” creating no false distinctions hindering the natural, organic integration between form and function.115
The uncanny symmetry between Wright’s work and Saarinen’s suggests parallels in landscape and culture between fin-de-siècle Finland and the American Midwest, notwithstanding the scale of the differences. This is visible in Wright’s years in Oak Park, Illinois. Wright’s own house, particularly the playroom, and the Dana House, bear key similarities to Saarinen’s villas from the early 1900s.116 The design of the Dana House reveals a shared emphasis on a single successive line of motion.117 As in Saarinen’s designs, ornamental elements and contrasts are integrated between the linear and the curved; the arched entrance to the Dana House and its vertical fenestration, for example, are both reminiscent of Saarinen’s Lahti Town Hall.118 Wright’s Unity Temple119 (Figure 8) and the Larkin Building for Buffalo120 reveal a handling of exterior surfaces and the creation of large-scale interior spaces comparable to Saarinen’s Helsinki Railway Station and his plans for the Parliament and the Kalevala House, even though the massing and the materials are different.121 The similarities between Wright’s project in Wisconsin, Taliesin, and Saarinen’s studio-home complex, Hvitträsk, are particularly striking.
Figure 8. Frank Lloyd Wright, ceiling detail in Unity Temple, Oak Park, Illinois, 1905–08.
But Wright’s later works—Fallingwater (1937), the Johnson Wax Building (1939; Figure 9), the Marin County Civic Center Administration Building (1957; Figure 10), and the Guggenheim Museum (1959)—are the most powerful examples of his use of the metaphor of nature and organic simplicity to fashion a modernism whose principles referenced the claims of tradition and classicism but whose vocabulary and resolution of form and function were distinctly and resolutely contemporary. Wright’s late work went in a direction not dissimilar from Saarinen’s last projects, particularly Kleinhans Hall. The resultant designs dispose of the notion of style as surface phenomenon. The legacy from these buildings invites a comparison with Sibelius. Sibelius’s economical use of tonality, time, linear continuity, and orchestral sonority in
his last works represent an original “organic” modernism, itself anticipatory of later composers such as Morton Feldman, George Crumb, and Magnus Lindberg.
Fallingwater represents the most eloquent modernist reconciliation of the manmade and nature characteristic of Saarinen and Sibelius.122 The nature in which Wright’s house is placed is clearly distinct from a man-made environment. But the fluid unifying integration of the two is not illustrative or governed by any priority of the natural, just as Sibelius’s sound world in Tapiola fuses time created by music with the natural pace of time. Wright’s integration of the resolutely modern manmade with a more innocent, pristine concept of nature is formal and seamless. This reconciliation of man and nature in modernity is best appreciated from the interior of Fallingwater.123 It has its more modest parallel in Saarinen’s Kingswood School (1929).124 Like Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax Headquarters uses continuity achieved by repetition and regularity reminiscent of Sibelius in a manner that subsumes all detail within one formal gesture.125 The same unifying effect is achieved in the Guggenheim Museum and in the Marin County Civic Center.126 One sweeping successive line, a single organic natural gesture, creates a sense of space in which classical monumental grandeur and intimacy are reconciled with one dominating set of materials and structural shapes.
Figure 9. Frank Lloyd Wright, interior of Johnson Wax Headquarters (1936–39), Racine, Wisconsin, 1939.
Figure 10. Frank Lloyd Wright, traffic entrance to the Marin County Civic Center Administration Building (1957–62), San Rafael, California, 1963.
The lean, condensed forms used by Sibelius in his last symphonies could well be described in Wright’s self-justifying language; they turned “their backs on antique rubbish heaps with which classic eclecticism has encumbered new ground” by “going back to learn from the natural source of all natural things.”127 That turn to nature, understood in the terms of architectural polemic in his own time, opened up for Sibelius a path for innovation and simplicity that was relatively free of nostalgia. Strauss, in contrast, turned to irony, sentiment, and memory. Beginning in 1911 and even more so in the 1930s and ’40s, Strauss utilized a dark-hued candor about human nature and history far removed from Wright’s and Saarinen’s persistent optimism, which was located in their appeal to nature. With a deep pessimism, Strauss turned away from shaping new forms and matching them with novel sonorities as he had done before 1908—an approach that had earned him a wide-spread reputation as a radical, eloquently endorsed by Schoenberg, who once quipped that Strauss, not he, had been a true revolutionary.128
Between 1911 and 1926, it was Sibelius who took a different path, and designed new shapes with distinct sonorities. Wright’s designs, like Saarinen’s, suggest the architectural analogue to Sibelius. The fact that Wright’s designs invite a similar complementary juxtaposition vindicates the claim that Sibelius’s originality and his debt to nature cannot be tied reductively to Finland, the North, and its landscape. Sibelius’s approach to the challenge of modernity ran along lines comparable to a transnational “organic” strain in architectural modernism that included Saarinen and Wright, who worked without reciprocal influence at the exact same time. Both insisted on unifying form and function without lending function priority, thereby retaining an independent role for the aesthetic defined as integral to function. Experimenting with organic shapes and welcoming ornament, they defied the International style’s clarion call for “objectivity” and the rejection of ornament as arbitrary and dishonest.
Saarinen’s and Wright’s adherence to ideas about the organic and the natural lent their work a relevance to contemporary postmodernism lacking in high modernism from the mid-twentieth century. That relevance holds for Sibelius as well, but quite differently from Strauss’s ironic, self-conscious use of tradition. Sibelius sought and developed a resolution of the demands of modernity by conceiving of nature as suggestive of new ways of shaping sound and musical form and time. Sibelius created a musical analogue of architecture because, unlike Strauss, he distrusted language as a metaphor for composition or as a medium for himself. Yet he did not retreat, like Stravinsky, into the belief that music is an art in the non-objective sense, bereft of symbolic meaning.129 While Stravinsky maintained a steadfast allegiance to an absolutist aesthetic of self-referential musical formalism, Sibelius linked his musical inspiration and ambition with nature and visual forms defined not by painting but by architecture. Doing so, he retained a belief in the capacity of music to express something of significance.
Sibelius’s resolution of the challenge to the artist in modernity retained for music the same conceit of significance inherent in architecture. Designed space has function and is responsive to human experience. Sibelius sought to extend a classical tradition of art-making in which the aesthetic experience mirrored, in Wright’s terms, life and nature at a particular historical moment. Sibelius reconciled a conservative impulse—his allegiance to a classical heritage that prized harmony with nature—with the imperatives of modernism. The startling simplicity and originality with which he employed the materiality of sound and the experience of time in music brought him a persuasive, popular influence in his lifetime and after, his critics notwithstanding.
Conclusion
In the end, Strauss, not Sibelius, expressed the most terrifying and troubling view of modernity and its relationship to art. Despite the seeming conservatism of his music after 1911, Strauss was radical in questioning the viability of any sustainable direct communication through the aesthetic in modern times. Faced with the bankruptcy of notions of progress and meaning, the collapse of language, and the atrophy of culture, Strauss embraced indirection, the manipulation of fragments, the construction of memory, and the primacy of irony and resignation, strategies located both in the artificiality of music’s material and its susceptibility to connections and analogies with the linguistic. If Sibelius in his maturity appropriated a constructive modernist architectural model for writing music, Strauss shied away from any affirmative effort to embrace modernity.
Yet both artists reached a similar verdict about the future. Strauss, overcome with pessimism at the end of his career, used music as an instrument of recollection and nostalgia. Sibelius, after his breakthrough to a persuasive modern response to the exhaustion of past practice, came to realize the futility Strauss had discovered regarding the construction of meaning and truth-telling in modernity. As Ludwig Wittgenstein observed, a candid observer of modernity had to confront the limits of language and be consoled that what was truly significant demanded silence. Like architecture, music’s shape and character could elude the linguistic. The conceit of music’s capacity to communicate remained ingrained in Sibelius for a time. Retaining a visualized sense of nature to guide him, he turned to the possibilities of symbolic meaning in music and architecture. “It is impossible to define a religion—least of all in words,” Sibelius noted during World War I, “but perhaps music is a mirror.”130
Ultimately, Sibelius’s recognition of the impotence of communicating in words would extend to music. Later in life he confessed, “Life is full of enigmas and the older I grow the more I perceive how precious little we actually know. The mysteries are always increasing.” In response to the daunting reality of modern life, he fell silent, leaving his final works to inspire those less overcome with the profound anxiety and pessimism with which Strauss struggled to the end.
NOTES
I would like to thank those who helped with this essay: Daniel M. Grimley, Christopher Gibbs, Susan Gillespie, Bruce Matthews, Franz Kempf, Lynne Meloccaro, Irene Zedlacher, and Nina Stritzler-Levine.
1. On Sibelius and the Third Reich, see Ruth-Maria Gleissner, Der unpolitische Komponist als Politikum: Die Rezeption von Jean Sibelius im NS-Staat (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2002); and Timothy Jackson, “Sibelius the Political,” in Sibelius in the Old and New World, ed. Timothy L. Jackson, Veijo Murtomäki, Colin Davis, and Timo Virtanen (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2010), 69–123. On Strauss’s involvement, see Gerhard Spli
tt, Richard Strauss, 1933–1935: Ästhetik und Musikpolitik zu Beginn der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft (Pfaffenweiler, Germany: Centaurus, 1987); Fred K. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat (Frankfurt: Dittrich, 2000); and Michael Walter, “Strauss in the Third Reich,” in The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss, ed. Charles Youmans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 226–41.
2. Sibelius’s strikingly clean-shaven head dates from the time of his Fourth Symphony and parallels the austere stylistic shift it undertakes. Only later, perhaps, would it come to be associated with more extreme right-wing aesthetics. I want to thank Daniel Grimley for sharing this information with me.
3. See Gleissner, Der unpolitische Komponist als Politikum, 202.
4. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Richard Strauss: Zum 60. Geburtstage: 11. Juni 1924,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), 18:254–62; and “Richard Strauss: Zum hundertsten Geburtstag: 11. Juni 1964,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 16:565–606.
5. Tomi Mäkelä has discussed and refuted the modern reception history of Sibelius that portrays his work as essentially kitsch. However, in the case of Strauss the suspicion remains. Hermann Broch’s famous distinction between kitsch and art pursued a common thread in fin-de-siècle Vienna thought about the need for the aesthetic to achieve an ethical status and transcend mere beauty and sensuous pleasure. By those measures Strauss’s achievement, notably after 1911, does not qualify as kitsch. It represents an open, original, and eccentric approach to musical composition that breaks boundaries and rules and eschews any form of imitation. See Broch, “Einige Bemerkungen zum Problem des Kitsches,” in Gesammelte Werke: Dichten und Erkennen, vol. 1 (Zurich: Rhein, 1955), 295–309; translated as “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch,” in Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, ed. Gillo Dorfles (New York: Universe Books, 1969), 49–76. In this sense, the effort to see Strauss’s works of art between 1911 and 1945 as inherently connected with evil is misplaced, even in Broch’s framing of the problem (itself an extension of Schiller’s aesthetic philosophy).
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 41