79. See Leon Botstein, “Out of Hungary: Bartók, Modernism, and the Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Music,” in Bartók and His World, ed. Peter Laki (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 3–63.
80. See Pekka Korvenmaa and Lars Eliel Sonck, Innovation Versus Tradition: The Architect Lars Sonck, Works and Projects, 1900–1910 (Helsinki: Suomen Muinaismuistoyhdistys, 1991).
81. See Jean Sibelius, Dagbok, 1909–1944, ed. Fabian Dahlström (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2005), 47, 149, 158, 296, 319. Tawaststjerna reports that the first thing Sibelius saw when he woke in the morning was an architectural drawing by Saarinen titled Castle in Air (Sibelius, 1:36).
82. In this volume, Sara Menin discusses connections in the work of Sibelius and a younger contemporary, Alvar Aalto, the great Finnish architect and an admirer of Saarinen. The discussion in this essay centers on Saarinen and Wright as more direct contemporaries of Sibelius and should be understood as complementary to Menin’s essay.
83. On Wright’s fondness for Beethoven, see Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright: An Autobiography (1943; repr. Warwick, UK: Pomegranate, 2005), 422–23.
84. See Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling, vol. 5 (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1856–61; 1859), 355–736, English translation: The Philosophy of Art, ed., trans., and introduced by Douglas W. Stott, foreword by David Simpson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
85. See Carl Dahlhaus, Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik (Laaber: Laaber, 1988), 248–56.
86. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, 163–69.
87. Schelling’s term attracted Goethe’s ridicule. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 28, ed. Karl Goedeke (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1895), 416–17.
88. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, 118.
89. Ibid., 177.
90. Ibid., 166.
91. See Berbeli Wanning, “Schelling,” in Music in German Philosophy: An Introduction, ed. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and Oliver Fürbeth, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 95–119; and Bruce Matthews, Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy: Life as the Schema of Freedom (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011).
92. On Wagner’s influence on Saarinen and his generation, see Marika Hausen, Kirmo Mikkola, Anna-Lisa Amberg, and Tytti Valto, Eliel Saarinen: Projects 1896–1923, with translations by Desmond O’Rourke, Michael Wynne-Ellis, and the English Centre (Helsinki: Otava, 1990), 21. On Wagner and Sibelius, see Eero Tarasti, “Sibelius and Wagner,” in The Sibelius Companion, 61–75; Daniel M. Grimley, “The Tone Poems: Genre, Landscape and Structural Perspective,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius, 100; and Veijo Murtomäki, “Sibelius’s Symphonic Ballad Skogsrået: Biographical and Programmatic Aspects of His Early Orchestral Music,” in Jackson and Murtomäki, Sibelius Studies, 95–138.
93. The analogy between architecture and music was further elaborated by Hugo Riemann in Wie hören wir Musik? Grundlinien der Musikästhetik (1887), 6th ed. (Berlin: Hesse, 1923), 43–47.
94. For example, the Tallberg Building (1897) and the Suur-Merijoki Villa (1903). See Hausen, Eliel Saarinen, 18–19, 25, 106–16.
95. He beat out, among others, Sonck. Ibid., 32–33, 84–87.
96. See Albert Christ-Janer, Eliel Saarinen: Finnish-American Architect and Educator, rev. ed., with a foreword by Alvar Aalto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and Hausen, Eliel Saarinen, 48–55, 116–26.
97. See Walter Niemann, Jean Sibelius (1917; repr. n.p.: BiblioLife, 2009).
98. On the Pohjola Insurance Company building, see Hausen, etc., Eliel Saarinen Projects 1896–1923, 88–97.
99. On Lahti Town Hall, see Saarinen et al, Saarinen Projects, 182–84.
100. A curious mix between Lahti Town Hall and the Kalevala House project is the 1913 St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Dorpat, Estonia. See the photograph in Christ-Janer, Saarinen: Finnish-American Architect, 145.
101. The initial design of Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony, with its 1938 shed and the 1944 opera facility, was first conceived by Saarinen, but not fully designed, built, or completed by him.
102. For photographs of the Tabernacle Church of Christ, see Christ-Janer, Saarinen: Finnish-American Architect, 89–92.
103. See Tim Howell, “Sibelius’s Tapiola: Issues of Tonality and Timescale,” in Sibelius Forum: Proceedings from the Second International Jean Sibelius Conference, 237–46.
104. Sibelius’s Seventh was described in explicitly architectural terms by Simon Parmet in 1959 as a “dome mounted on the granite structure of the earlier symphonies.” Quoted in Edward Laufer, “Continuity and Design in the Seventh Symphony,” in Jackson and Murtomäki, Sibelius Studies, 352.
105. Abraham, “The Symphonies,” 35.
106. Eliel Saarinen, The Search for Form in Art and Architecture (New York: Dover Publications, 1985), 47, 158–59. See also Eliel Saarinen, The City: Its Growth, Its Decay, Its Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1943), 15–19.
107. Saarinen, The City, 15.
108. Saarinen, The Search for Form, 305.
109. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 29, 668–69.
110. Frank Lloyd Wright, Truth Against the World: Frank Lloyd Wright Speaks for an Organic Architecture, ed. Patrick J. Meehan (New York: Wiley & Sons, 1987), 28.
111. Wright, An Autobiography, 162.
112. See ibid., 332–39, 344: and Wright, “This Is American Architecture,” in Truth Against the World, 28–31.
113. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Natural House (New York: Horizon Press, 1954), 15.
114. Wright, An Autobiography, 146–47.
115. Ibid., 338.
116. On the Wright House playroom, see Neil Levine, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 24–26.
117. For Wright’s design for the Dana House, see his Drawings and Plans of Frank Lloyd Wright: The Early Period (1893–1909) (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1983), plate 31a.
118. For photographs of the Dana House entrance, see Levine, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, 34–36.
119. Ibid., 40–46.
120. Ibid., 37–40.
121. Wright, Autobiography, 153–56.
122. On Fallingwater, see Levine, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, 224–40.
123. Ibid., 233–34, 247.
124. On the Kingswood School, see Christ-Janer, Saarinen: Finnish-American Architect, 70–78.
125. On the Johnson Wax Administration Building, see Levine, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, 303–5.
126. See photographs of the Guggenheim Museum and Marin County Civic Center in ibid., 363 and 411–13, respectively.
127. Wright, Autobiography, 344.
128. Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), 137.
129. See Daniel Albright, ed., Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 4–13; and Daniel Albright, Music Speaks: On the Language of Opera, Dance, and Song (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009), 3–14.
130. This and the following quote can be found in “Jean Sibelius: Observations on Music and Musicians,” compiled by Glenda Dawn Goss, in The Sibelius Companion, 231.
PART II
DOCUMENTS
Selections from Adolf Paul’s
A Book About a Human Being
TRANSLATED BY ANNIKA LINDSKOG
INTRODUCED BY DANIEL M. GRIMLEY
After Sibelius graduated from the Helsinki Music Institute in the summer of 1889, where he had taken instruction with Martin Wegelius and the young Ferruccio Busoni, he decided to continue his studies not in Finland, where educational opportunities were ultimately limited, but in Germany, at the very center of the European musical marketplace. Having received a government stipend of 2,000 Finnish marks in May, Sibelius left Helsinki in Septem
ber to begin lessons in harmony and counterpoint in Berlin with Albert Becker (1834–1899), director of the Königlicher Domchor and composer of numerous vocal, orchestral, and liturgical works including a Reformation Cantata (1878) and the ceremonial oratorio Selig aus Gnade (1890), dedicated in honor of Kaiser Wilhelm II.1 By traveling south, Sibelius was following a well-worn path: other Nordic musicians, including Edvard Grieg and Johan Svendsen, had also studied in Germany, although Leipzig had been their preferred destination. Berlin, however, offered a more diverse and cosmopolitan milieu now, as well as the opportunity to hear many of the current trends in contemporary European music. Sibelius’s studies with Becker appear to have focused almost exclusively on strict compositional technique—especially fugue—and the immediate benefits from Becker’s lessons in his developing musical language are not easy to identify. The most important work from Sibelius’s Berlin year—namely the remarkable Piano Quintet in G Minor, premiered in October 1890 in Turku—is more striking for its expressive handling of modal harmony, rugged texture, and rhythm than for its contrapuntal complexity. Berlin seems rather to have been a vital sensory and artistic stimulus for Sibelius—in other words, it served as a crash course in late nineteenth-century decadent aesthetics. Arguably, it was Sibelius’s association with a close-knit group of Nordic writers, artists, and musicians at Zum schwarzen Ferkel (The Black Piglet), a tavern at the corner of Unter den Linden and Neue Wilhelmstraße in downtown Berlin, that left a lasting legacy on his later creative output. Here Sibelius came into formative contact with other leading lights of the Northern European avant-garde, including Edvard Munch, Richard Dehmel, and August Strindberg.
The most vivid, and problematic, account of Sibelius’s time in Berlin can be found in the pages of Adolf Paul’s lightly fictionalized novella En bok om en Människa (A book about a human being).2 Paul (1863–1943), a former student at the Helsinki Music Institute, has generally received a poor press in the Sibelius literature, not least on account of his extreme right-wing aesthetics—he was later sympathetic to the Nazi regime and an admirer of Hitler. As an ambitious young man in the 1890s, however, he was keen to align himself with what he perceived to be the most promising cultural figures of his generation, including Sibelius, Busoni, and Strindberg. A series of books in the 1890s, loosely modeled on other decadent texts such as Strindberg’s satirical 1879 novel Röda Rummet (The Red Room), chronicled the half-imagined exploits of the Schwarzen Ferkel circle, and elaborated their wide-ranging discussions on contemporary art, literature, and the monotony of everyday life. In En Bok om en Människa the narrator Hans is Paul, wishfully placing himself at the heart of the group’s debates. Other characters include the aristocractic, aloof Trondberg (Strindberg), and the artist Munk (Norwegian painter Edvard Munch). Yet the center of the book is the composer Sillén (Sibelius), a figure who, as Glenda Dawn Goss observes, is partially based on the impoverished artist Sellén in The Red Room, and who may also have been inspired by the hero in Knut Hamsun’s nearly contemporaneous novel Sult (Hunger, 1890), one of the key texts in the emergence of literary modernism in the North.3
When En bok om en Människa was first published, its scandalous account of the group’s alcoholism, extravagant dining habits, and womanizing created an immediate uproar.4 Though Paul’s later work included a historical play about King Christian II of Denmark, for which Sibelius wrote his atmospheric incidental music in 1898, he never attained mainstream status—an accurate reflection, as many commentators have noted, of his restricted literary talents and achievement. For all its sensationalist tone and self-indulgence, Paul’s book is valuable for the glimpse it offers into Sibelius’s creative process, a portrait whose accuracy is partially corroborated by other accounts as well as the evidence of Sibelius’s own sketches and later compositional materials.
Paul depicts Sibelius as the archetypal decadent artist—a naïve genius whose work is possessed by an irrational creative spirit or restless and irresistible inspiration. Yet the focal point of his narrative is the description of Sibelius suddenly leaping up from his chair and beginning a “disjointed fantasia” on the piano. Much of Sibelius’s compositional work appears to have been essentially improvisatory in nature, and the free-form structure of the music that unfolds in the background of Paul’s novella anticipates Sibelius’s later preoccupation with what James Hepokoski has subsequently termed “content-based forms”: an idiosyncratic sense of musical architecture determined by the inner demands of basic compositional materials such as themes, chord progressions, and specific textural or registral effects.5 As Paul vividly describes, such ideas often possessed a synesthesic quality for Sibelius, being associated with particular colors, moods, or times of day. And Sibelius never lost the addictive impulses to alcohol or tobacco that evidently fueled such intensive creative work. The interaction in Paul’s account between the fantasia and the characters’ dialogue also points toward Sibelius’s early preoccupation with melodrama: the combination of spoken text and music became an especially vibrant medium in early twentieth-century Germany and the Nordic countries, but has subsequently faded sharply out of fashion. Works by Sibelius such as Svartsjukans Nätter (Nights of Jealousy; 1893) to a text by Runeberg, or the chamber version of the tone poem Skogsrået (The Wood Nymph;1895) to a text by Viktor Rydberg, traverse similar erotically charged territory to that which preoccupies many of the protagonists in En Bok om en Människa. Paul’s novella cannot be relied upon in any sense as a historically accurate source. Nevertheless, it provides a fleeting glimpse of the intense decadent environment from which Sibelius’s creative character first emerged.
From Adolf Paul’s En bok om en människa (1891)
Chapter XIV
A curious man, this Sillén. Soon it would be two years since they had been friends, and Hans still couldn’t quite work him out. The only definitive conclusion he had drawn was that the man was not mad, regardless of a thousand whims and as many contradictions.
Nor were his manners affected. Had they been, he would probably soon have lost his appetite, what with all the sarcasm and merciless taunts his friends offered in carrying out their self-appointed duty to make a man of him.
It followed that he must be a genius. And without further ado Hans discarded Sillén’s honest, civil name and christened him the Wunderkind [Genibarnet]. It was both easy to use and captured his character.
Because, being the most childish of children, he had innumerable fancies that were far from brilliant, and befitted a spoiled brat more than a grown man.
He was a great gourmet, and loved good cigars more than he loved himself—which is to say, to a considerable extent. For he seldom had a thought for anyone but himself. To him, all human beings were more a necessary evil than fellow travelers through this vale of tears. He was a refined egoist.
Whenever he had a sudden craving—for a two-dollar cigar, perhaps—he suffered terribly from his longing and was the unhappiest man on earth until he held the object of desire in his hand.
But then it became terribly unimportant, and he could throw away the precious cigar without a further thought. Pleasure was to be found not in possession, but only in the satisfaction of such craving.
And his naïveté! He always gave the impression of having suddenly fallen from a distant planet, or having arrived on earth in some other impossible manner.
For his imagination was furnished by everything with the most bizarre characteristics, and nothing could be allowed to happen naturally. His powers of imagination were forever wandering off and finding the most distantly unfathomable causes for every occurrence. And to find connections between the most incompatible objects was for him the simplest and most natural thing in the world.
His “thought factory” was fueled by that most curious of machines, his brain, which did least well in coming up with an idea in the normal, commonsensical way of the decent citizen.
Ideas came to him glittering on a ray of sunshine reflected in the water—falling with a dry leaf—leaping
with a bird—or radiating from the perfume of a beautiful woman. Yes, even a simple shower of rain, one of those that falls anywhere in the countryside and drains away into the first available muddy ditch, could make ideas shoot up like mushrooms from the moist earth.
And what ideas they were! As tenuous a relationship as that between mushrooms and the rainfall that forces them out from their dark nothingness existed between his ideas and the external factors that brought them to the light of day.
These external factors were simply the trigger that set off the wondrous machinery in his brain—the instigator, and therefore necessary, but with no further significance for the finished product.
He was a truly natural genius, utterly individual, without the merest relationship to anyone else. Once he told Hans how he composed. The moods that struck him with an impression were identified in his brain with a certain shade or color, and only then, when mood and shade were clear to him, did the actual composition start. Then and only then did the motives, appropriate rhythms, and correct harmonies report for duty.
To run around in search of decent, original motives, then return to one’s Chinese-decorated atelier and concoct something that no one else had yet done according to the available rules, without offending any philosophical system—this was a way of composing he could barely grasp, let alone despise.
For him there was a wonderfully mysterious connection between tone and color, between the most secret perceptions of the eye and the ear. Everything he saw brought on a corresponding impression in the auditory organs—every tone impression was transferred and fixed as color on the retina, and from this into memory.
He found all this natural with as good a reason as those who did not possess this quality called him mad or willfully original. And so he told this to Hans in the strictest confidence and under an oath of secrecy. “For otherwise they will make me a laughingstock!” They became good friends.
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 43