6. On Sibelius in America, see Glenda Dawn Goss, Jean Sibelius and Olin Downes: Music, Friendship, Criticism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), 39–74, as well as her essay in the current volume. Sibelius’s influence during this period can be felt in the early work of Samuel Barber. See Barbara B. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 140–41; and Gian Carlo Menotti’s comments in Peter Dickinson, Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2010), 62. With respect to Sibelius’s reception in Great Britain, see Laura Gray, “Sibelius and England,” in The Sibelius Companion, ed. Glenda Dawn Goss (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 281–95; Peter Franklin, “Sibelius in Britain,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius, 182–95; and the essay in this volume by Byron Adams.
7. See Reinhold Brinkmann, Late Idyll: The Second Symphony of Johannes Brahms, trans. Peter Palmer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 199–228.
8. See Tomi Mäkelä’s “Poesie in der Luft”: Jean Sibelius. Studien zu Leben und Werk (Wies-baden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2007), 11–73. Mäkelä’s indispensable monograph is perhaps the finest comprehensive analysis of Sibelius in the literature.
9. It is interesting to compare the sense of crisis in the realm of music and musical aesthetics with that in philosophy in the decade after World War I, particularly concerning issues of the human condition—being in the world—notably subjectivity and the perception of space and time in modernity. See, for example, Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 204–34.
10. Gleissner, Der unpolitische Komponist, 135–38. Perhaps the leading voice in this strain of criticism was Walter Niemann, whose 1917 monograph on Sibelius exercised considerable influence on his German reception.
11. A classic example can be found in Strauss’s 1890 letter to Cosima Wagner, written after playing Don Juan for her on the piano—it had already been a sensational success—and being counseled by her to let his “heart” speak without his sharp intellect getting in the way. Strauss replied that it had been easier for Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert to write “naïvely,” but for him and his generation the task was no longer so simple, even though in the end the “heart” must pierce through or “burn” beyond the intellect. He and his peers had to digest the gigantic advancement of all the arts in order to understand classicism, much less produce something to follow it, and that required that we “have to really strain our minds in a disciplined way.” See Cosima Wagner–Richard Strauss: Ein Briefwechsel, ed. Franz Trenner (Tutzing, Germany: Richard Strauss, 1978), 28–30.
12. See, for instance, Walter Rathenau’s Zur Mechanik des Geistes (Berlin: Fischer, 1917) and Zur Kritik der Zeit (Berlin: Fischer, 1919), esp. 45–101. See also Stefan Zweig, “Die Monotonisierung der Welt” (1925), in Zeit und Welt (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1981), 64–71; Georg Simmel, “Die Grosstädte und das Geistesleben” (1903), in Brücke und Tür, ed. Michael Landmann (Stuttgart: Köhler, 1957), 141–52; and Martin Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik” (1953), in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7, Vorträge und Aufsätze, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 7–36. On Heidegger and modernity, see Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 193–224.
13. See, for example, Charles Ives’s view of Strauss’s musical realism in Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority, and Other Writings, ed. Howard Boatwright (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 83–85.
14. Two examples stand out: Don Quixote and Also sprach Zarathustra. See Charles Youmans, “The Private Intellectual Context of Richard Strauss’s ‘Also sprach Zarathustra,’” 19th-Century Music 22/2 (1998): 101–26.
15. On the subject of language and music, see Daniel K. L. Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3–7, 167–70, 177–82, 221–90; John Neubauer, The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); and Garry Hagberg, Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 91–98. The most useful synthetic consideration of this subject can be found in Ruth Katz’s A Language of Its Own: Sense and Meaning in the Making of Western Art Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), particularly 134–92 and 315–29.
16. Strauss was so enamored of Watteau’s 1719 Embarquement pour Cythère that he contemplated writing a ballet based on it; see Hugo von Hofmannsthal to Richard Strauss, 23 July 1912, in Hofmannsthal and Strauss, Briefwechsel, ed. Willi Schuh (Zurich: Atlantis, 1978), 187. Years later he reminded Joseph Gregor of this never-realized plan: see Strauss to Gregor, 14 January 1945, in Strauss and Gregor, Briefwechsel, ed. Roland Tenschert (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1995), 262–63.
17. See Ulrich Tadday, ed., Richard Strauss: Der griechische Germane (Munich: Edition text + kritik, 2005).
18. Strauss did admire in Wagner the way he had fashioned an exemplary and appropriate integration of text and music.
19. See Leon Botstein, “Nineteenth-Century Mozart: The Fin-de-Siècle Mozart Revival,” in On Mozart, ed. James M. Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 204–25.
20. See Harry Kessler, In the Twenties: The Diaries of Harry Kessler, trans. Charles Kessler (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971), 366.
21. One thinks of Ariadne auf Naxos, for example. On this point see two letters, Hofmannsthal to Strauss, 15 June 1911, and Strauss to Hofmannsthal, 24 July 1911, in Briefwechsel, 129–30 and 140–42.
22. See Romain Rolland’s recollection of taking Strauss in 1900 to see the eighteenth-century galleries in the Louvre in Richard Strauss and Romain Rolland: Correspondence, Diary, and Essays, ed. Rollo Myers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 129–130.
23. See the illustrations in Kurt Wilhelm and Paul Sessner, Richard Strauss persönlich: Eine Bildbiographie (Munich: Kindler, 1984), 134–139 and 424–25, as well as the set designs for the first performances of Strauss’s operas in Richard Strauss: Autographen, Porträts, Bühnenbilder, ed. Hartmut Schaefer (Munich: Richard-Strauss-Archiv, Garmisch; Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung, University of Cologne; and Deutsches Theatermuseum, Munich; in association with Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, 1999).
24. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s problems with language are eloquently expressed in his 1901 “Letter to Lord Chandos.” See Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1951), 2:7–22.
25. The most trenchant analysis of Hofmannsthal and the problem of language at the turn of the century is Hermann Broch’s Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit: Eine Studie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974).
26. Strauss explicitly pointed to another late eighteenth-century model, Schiller, as exemplary with regard to communicating with the audience from the stage. See Richard Strauss, Capriccio, libretto by Clemens Krauss, arr. by Ernst Gernot Klussmann (Mainz: Schott/London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1942), 1–4.
27. For more on Strauss, the following works are recommended: Norman Del Mar, Richard Strauss: A Critical Commentary on His Life and Works, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1962–1972); Bryan Gilliam, The Life of Richard Strauss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Charles Youmans, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2005); and Bryan Gilliam, “‘Frieden im Innern’: Außenwelt und Innenwelt von Richard Strauss um 1935,” in Richard Strauss und die Moderne, ed. Bernd Edelmann, Birgit Lodes, and Reinhold Schlötterer (Munich: Henschel, 2001), 93–111.
28. Leon Botstein, “The Enigmas of Richard Strauss: A Revisionist View,” in Richard Strauss and His World, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 16–21; and Botstein, “Strauss and Twentieth-Century Modernity: A Reassessment of the Man and His Work,” in Richard Strauss und die Moderne, 113–37.
29. James Hepokoski and Tomi
Mäkelä have illuminated Sibelius’s entire development as a composer through the lens of wider European historical developments and their attendant cultural politics. See Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 2–3, 10–18; and Mäkelä’s “Poesie in der Luft,” 269–74.
30. Veijo Murtomäki, Symphonic Unity: The Development of Formal Thinking in the Symphonies of Sibelius, trans. Henry Bacon (Helsinki: Hakapaino Oy, 1993), 59.
31. Ibid., 59–84, esp. 79.
32. On the history of the appeal to organicism as a metaphor for musical form, see Mark Evan Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 141–49.
33. Quoted in Eero Tarasti, “Sibelius and Wagner,” in The Sibelius Companion, 71.
34. Ilmari Krohn, in his massive exploration of the symphonies, placed emphasis on the visual perception of form and sound, even though each had some “extra-musical” sensibility—in the Third the presence of the divine, in the Fourth the vain efforts of humanity. See Krohn, Der Stimmungsgehalt der Symphonien von Jean Sibelius (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1946), 2:404–05.
35. Daniel M. Grimley, “The Tone Poems: Genre, Landscape and Structural Perspective,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius, ed. Daniel M. Grimley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 107–10.
36. See Erik Tawaststjerna’s seminal biography, Sibelius, trans. Robert Layton, 3 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976/London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 2:267. Those interested in the composer’s life and music should also consult Glenda Dawn Goss’s Sibelius: A Composer’s Life and the Awakening of Finland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), which is particularly strong on the Finnish context of Sibelius’s career, and Andrew Barnett’s Sibelius (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
37. This generalization, of course, has to be understood as such, given Sibelius’s many songs, melodramas, text settings (in Kullervo and Luonnotar), and the extensive music for the theater. But in the latter case, the music is largely incidental, not combined with text.
38. Quoted in Timo Virtanen, “Pohjola’s Daughter—‘L’aventure d’un héros,’” in Sibelius Studies, ed. Timothy L. Jackson and Veijo Murtomäki (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 174.
39. Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 1:36.
40. On iurlionis and Scriabin, see Dorothea Eberlein, “iurlionis, Skrjabin und der osteuropäische Symbolismus,” in Vom Klang der Bilder: Die Musik in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Karin v. Mauer (Munich: Prestel, 1985), 340–46; and Viacheslav Ivanov, “iurlonis and the Synthesis of the Arts,” in iurlionis: Painter and Composer, ed. Stasys Gostautas (Vilnius: Vaga, 1994), 74–95, as well as other essays in this collection.
41. It is interesting to speculate about Sibelius’s search for a new template for musical form as a response to a path whose character has been provocatively and brilliantly charted by Karol Berger in Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
42. See Alexander Gerschenkron, “Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective,” in Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962).
43. Lars Sonck’s design of Sibelius’s home Ainola reflects the composer’s preference for simplicity and proportion. See Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 2:18–22.
44. This fear is implicit in Adorno’s critique; see Max Paddison’s essay, “Art and the Ideology of Nature: Sibelius, Hamsun, Adorno,” in this volume.
45. See Edward Laufer, “On the Fourth Symphony (Third Movement),” in Sibelius in the Old and New World, 185; and Goss, Jean Sibelius and Olin Downes, 39–74.
46. This summary derives from the original and provocative analyses of James Hepokoski, particularly in his Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 and “Rotations, Sketches, and the Sixth Symphony,” in Jackson and Murtomäki, Sibelius Studies, 322–51.
47. See Hepokoski, “The Essence of Sibelius: Creation Myths and Rotational Cycles in Luonnotar,” 121–46.
48. Jean Sibelius, Luonnotar (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2005), 34, measure 189.
49. On An Alpine Symphony, see Mathias Hansen, Richard Strauss: Die sinfonischen Dichtungen (Kassel, Germany: Bärenreiter), 212–24; and Youmans, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music, 217–30.
50. See Robert Layton’s excellent Sibelius (New York: Schirmer Books, 1992), 77, 82.
51. Murtomäki, Symphonic Unity, 96.
52. Ibid., 118.
53. Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, 2:172.
54. Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5, 60
55. Krohn, Der Stimmungsgehalt der Symphonien, 144–45 and 206–09.
56. Leonard B. Meyer, “Music and Ideology in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Sterling M. McMurrin (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 6:23–52, esp. 38–45.
57. See Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5, 23–30.
58. Quoted in ibid., 17.
59. See Antonin Servière, “Twenty Measures of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony: A First Attempt at Stylistic Characterization,” in Sibelius in the Old and New World, 236; and Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5, 26, 30.
60. On the Sixth Symphony, see Michael Steinberg, The Symphony: A Listener’s Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 601–10.
61. See Murtomäki, Symphonic Unity, 194–95; Hepokoski, “Rotations, Sketches, and the Sixth Symphony,” 325; and Krohn, Der Stimmungsgehalt der Symphonien, 317–18.
62. The Seventh Symphony’s original title was Fantasia sinfonica.
63. Putnam Aldrich quoted in Murtomäki, Symphonic Unity, 241.
64. See Donald Francis Tovey’s analysis of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony in Essays in Musical Analysis: Symphonies and Other Orchestral Works, a collection of essays first published between 1935 and 1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981; repr. 1989), 501–3. I thank Daniel Grimley for pointing out that Tovey’s essay was inspired by a 1933 BBC radio account of an airplane flight over Mount Everest sonically illustrated by a recording of Sibelius’s symphony, a work of “austere beauty and rare atmosphere.” On the “organic” character of the work, see Gerald Abraham, “The Symphonies,” in The Music of Sibelius, ed. Gerald Abraham (New York: W. W. Norton, 1947), 35; Marc Vignal, “The Sibelius Seventh as a One-Movement Work,” in Sibelius Forum: Proceedings from The Second International Jean Sibelius Conference, Helsinki, 25–29 November 1995, ed. Veijo Murtomäki, Kari Kilpeläinen, and Risto Väisänen (Helsinki: Sibelius Academy, 1998), 311–14; and Murtomäki, Symphonic Unity, 241, 278.
65. See Veijo Murtomäki, “‘Symphonic Fantasy’: A Synthesis of Symphonic Thinking in Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony and Tapiola,” in The Sibelius Companion, 153–58.
66. For example, Akseli Gallen-Kalella, Eero Järnefelt, Pekka Halonen, Eliel Saarinen, and Lars Sonck, who designed Ainola, for no fee.
67. Quoted in Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5, 22.
68. Jean Sibelius, The Hämeenlinna Letters: Scenes from a Musical Life, 1874–1895, ed. Glenda Dawn Goss, trans. Margareta Örtenblad Thompson (Esbo, Finland: Schildts, 1997), 98–99.
69. Gerald Abraham, “The Symphonies,” 35.
70. See Harmut Krones, ed., Jean Sibelius und Wien (Böhlau: Vienna, 2003), particularly Peter Revers, “Wien 1890: Jean Sibelius, Anton Bruckner, Carol Goldmark, Robert Fuchs,” 15–21; also Glenda Dawn Goss, “Vienna and the Genesis of Kullervo: ‘Durchführung zum Teufel,’” in The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius, 25.
71. One can compare the Sibelius symphonies, from the Fourth on, to Bruckner in a manner reminiscent of Reinhold Brinkmann’s discussion of Schoenberg’s op. 9 Kammer symphonie in relationship to prior models of nineteenth-century symphonic practice, e.g., Brahms. See Brinkmann, “Die gepresste Sinfonie: Zum geschichtlichen Gehalt von Schönbergs Opus 9,” in Gustav Mahler: Si
nfonie und Wirklichkeit, ed. Otto Kolleritsch (Graz: Universal Edition, 1977), 133–56; an English translation by Irene Zedlacher, “The Compressed Symphony: On the Historical Content of Schoenberg’s Op. 9,” appears in Schoenberg and His World, ed. Walter Frisch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 141–61.
72. See Mäkelä, “Poesie in der Luft,” 69–73, 161–74.
73. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discours sur l’origine, et les fondements de l’inégalitié parmi les hommes” (1755), in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, Du Contrat social; Écrits politiques, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 148–51.
74. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1983), 10.
75. Ibid., 23.
76. Ibid., 22.
77. Mäkelä, “Poesie in der Luft,” 245. See Hepokoski on the Sixth Symphony in Jackson and Murtomäki, Sibelius Studies, 324–25.
78. This hypothesis does require a concession to a distinction between the European “center” and a “periphery.”
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