Chapter XX
The young musicians lived as a family. . . . They were together every day, and always went to the theater and concerts in each other’s company.
They also had a more-or-less joint economy, so that when they received a consignment from home, much commerce broke out. Old debts were paid and new ones taken on.
Hans was starting to feel excluded from the group. You see, he did not receive anything from home. After six months, his money was already gone and he was indebted to all his friends. And since he couldn’t pay the old debts, instigating new ones was very difficult.
And now the difficult could barely be done at all. To maintain his credit, he had been forced to lie. He had a whole political system of lies, all for borrowing, only borrowing. But it could not continue. The system was exhausted—and they had started to see through it and exercise caution.
Today, for the first time in his life, he was at the pawnbroker’s. He had obtained ten marks for his watch. He would pawn everything he owned. And when he no longer owned anything, he would take his life.
Definitely, he would. To die would be nothing. He had the courage to do it—unless something unforeseeable happened.
He felt almost certain that something unforeseeable would happen. This afternoon he was in a good mood. He went up to Trondberg’s to meet his friends and chat a while. On the stairs he heard lively voices—a particularly noisy discussion. They were probably all there.
He knocked and entered. Instantly a silence fell and his greeting was returned with some embarrassment. He understood: they had been talking about him and his affairs. Immediately he felt hostile toward them all.
“Yes, that was certainly rather strange.” Fredin improvised a continuation to a conversation to try at least to save face. Everyone agreed it was very strange indeed. The Wunderkind went over to the grand piano and started a disjointed fantasia.
It struck Hans, and further confirmed his suspicions, that he had only started to play now, this man who could never leave an open piano alone. Hans struggled to mask his aversion.
The atmosphere remained oppressed. Suddenly Fredin and Munk remembered they ought to go home and practice. They took their hats and left.
“Well,” sighed Trondberg, accompanied by the fantasias the Wunderkind was playing.
“Indeed!” Hans said sharply and abruptly. Silence reigned for a little while. “Odd that they were in such a hurry to leave, as soon as I turned up! It sounded so lively in here, I heard it all the way out on the stairs.”
No response. Trondberg was cautious, and pretended not to have noticed the outburst. The Wunderkind played on. The bile rose to Hans’s head.
Yesterday he had heard Fredin express his astonishment that Hans always wore a frown of displeasure. “You would think it the least I could ask for, no, to be spared the sarcasms,” he had said, “even if I don’t get my money back.” And now they started in with other demands—these, his benefactors!
He was grateful to them for the help they had given him! And they would get the borrowed money back! But their role as moneylenders did not give them the right to make other demands of him. It was too much!
And this coldness—this obvious avoidance.
Trondberg thought he ought to say something. “You’re not taking any lessons now, are you?”
“No, I can’t afford them! All they’re good for is to expose teachers for the frauds they are. All they’ve taught me is their methods! Nothing but indolence on their part! And those methods: there’s a system for each teacher! Show me a teacher whose system is not to have a method and I’ll go to him! Otherwise I improve faster without the teaching!”
Trondberg could not understand. To study without a teacher, yet talk about improving!
“Well, for some people lessons are the most important,” Hans said in an exaggeratedly vehement and biting tone. “Of course, they’re a rod for driving slow oxen down the artistic path.”
That hit home. The Wunderkind halted his improvisation. He had happened to overhear what Hans said. And today, by chance, he was inclined to understand what he heard: the fantasia had given his thought permission. He bit into the conversation.
“You’re an unpleasant character, Hans! Suspicious and bitter, without the slightest reason. You’re more than difficult to be with.”
Finally! This is what Hans had been waiting for! Now at last he could say what he really thought about them all, these hypocrites.
And he did. And much more, too. So much that they sat there in astonishment. He didn’t let them breathe a single syllable, but subjected the Wunderkind to a thorough, detailed, criticism.
“You—the worst egoist in the world! Always pretending to be such a genius and so absent-minded! Always deep in brilliant thought. So deep you’d rather club your closest relative to death than answer one of his mundane questions!
“And for those to whom you’re not close enough to justify being rude you have only empty phrases, a whole supply of readymade responses, all in the prettiest order! Submit the question and out comes the answer, prepared, wrapped, and labeled. No need to interrupt your thoughts! The world should come to an end rather than one of your thoughts perish!—And how touching your friendliness toward me!—I come to you, in anguish, looking for sympathy. You send me away with a memorized phrase, the point of which is to prove that it’s all my own fault. And then you say, with great regret, that you didn’t mean what you said. Only to repeat the tactic again at the first opportunity.—You’re the one it’s hard to be with!”
He became more and more agitated, everything spun around and swirled past his eyes like a bloodied sky. He was utterly unable to restrain himself.
Trondberg dragged the Wunderkind outside to prevent a fight and left Hans standing there talking to himself. Eventually he calmed down and followed them out.
The two had stopped at the nearest street corner. They had already forgotten the entire quarrel and were in the process of debating the important question of whether Miss Rosensten was entirely real or partly stuffed.
But their only conclusion was that Trondberg did not want her. Working up a great deal of enthusiasm, the Wunderkind assured him that, upon the sanctity of his soul, neither did he. With his most devoted expression, he put his hand on his heart and declared ecstatically to Trondberg: “Oh how exquisite, how beautiful you are!” And threw his arms around him and kissed him, oblivious of the scorn of passers-by.
Hans shivered and looked positively embarrassed. He had stopped to join them. But they walked on without noticing him. Singing and yodeling, they disappeared into the crowd, arm in arm.
“No one wants to walk with me! No one wants my company! Always alone and without friends!”
Did he not fit in?—What could be the reason for their inability to agree with one another nowadays?
The Wunderkind said Hans was difficult to be with—and so it was all his fault! And yet the Wunderkind knew Hans’s past so well, with all his financial difficulties!
It was just as much their fault! Their lack of compassion, their refusal to see that he was ill, that his mind suffered from constant disappointments, that he was slowly and surely sliding toward an abyss where the irrational ghost of suicide was waiting for him. They did not see that he, more than most, needed their forbearance. And instead of giving him the longed-for friendship, without which he was pining away, they fueled his bitter thoughts, forcing him to explode in angry words.
Oh! His hatred for them knew no limits!
NOTES
1. Erik Tawaststjerna, Sibelius, vol. 1, 1865–1905, trans. Robert Layton (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 54–68.
2. See George C. Schoolfield, A History of Finnish Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 378–79.
3. Glenda Dawn Goss, Sibelius: A Composer’s Life and the Awakening of Finland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 86–87.
4. Adolf Paul, En bok om en Människa (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers, 1891).
> 5. James Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 7.
Some Viewpoints Concerning Folk Music
and Its Influence on the Musical Arts
JEAN SIBELIUS
TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH BY MARGARETA MARTIN
INTRODUCED BY DANIEL M. GRIMLEY
Sibelius was, by conventional academic standards, little more than a middling student at Martin Wegelius’s Music Institute, having aborted his legal studies at Helsinki University. Evidently he felt ill at ease throughout his life in formal academic institutional surroundings. Sibelius’s strengths rather lay in an idea of music as an essentially private creative practice, an ability to synthesize a rich range of musical styles and compositional models, and above all in the acute sensitivity of his aural imagination. As Tomi Mäkelä explains in his essay for this volume, Sibelius never sought to create a formal school of composition, and his own teaching practice appears to have been a largely improvised or anecdotal affair, far removed from the kind of strong didacticism advocated by figures such as Schoenberg or Max Reger. Nor did Sibelius leave any writings of the kind that attempted to construct a formal compositional method or technique, either prospectively or retrospectively. Indeed, his later comments both in public and s emi-private (through diaries and correspondence) frequently sought to deflect analytical attention from his work, stressing the fluid, more contingent nature of his musical inspiration. In this sense, Sibelius strove to maintain an image of himself as an archetypal decadent artist, as a medium entirely in thrall to the shifting patterns of his creative imagination—an image friends such as Adolf Paul were equally keen to promote (see the extract from Paul’s Book About a Human Being in this section).
One important exception to this pattern of self-obfuscation and deflection can be found in the text of a lecture that Sibelius read at the University of Helsinki on 25 November 1896. The lecture, part of the appointment process for Finland’s first tenured full-time Professor of Music at the University of Helsinki, was an exceptional event. The leading candidates for the post were Sibelius’s senior colleague, the conductor-composer Robert Kajanus, the future ethnomusicologist Ilmari Krohn, and Sibelius himself. As Erik Tawaststjerna has recounted, the post was initially awarded to Sibelius, presumably in recognition of his political importance as one of the leading cultural figures in the nascent Finnish nationalist movement rather than because of his academic pedagogical credentials.1 But the position eventually fell to Kajanus, who lodged an energetic appeal following the first round of the competition. Sibelius was instead awarded a state pension intended to support his independent creative work.
Sibelius’s lecture notes betray their occasional nature.2 The surviving draft contains numerous amendments, corrections, and alternative wordings, and it is not hard to suspect that Sibelius, who perennially suffered from stage fright, may not have been the most compelling speaker on this occasion (as Glenda Dawn Goss notes, Krohn was widely acknowledged to have given the best lecture on that day).3 But Sibelius’s text is carefully calibrated to the expectations of its audience: the framework is essentially an outline of the history of folk music and its influence on contemporary art music. Yet underpinning this familiar narrative account (of the evolutionary shift from pentatonic scales through the church modes to diatonicism and beyond) lies a stronger claim for the true character of Finnish folk music, the importance of runic singing and its associated performance practice, and the likely influence of such folk traditions on the development of future Finnish art music. For a nation still searching for creative and political independence, these ideas assumed a more than academic significance.
Veijo Murtomäki has traced Sibelius’s relationship with Finnish folk traditions and its influence on the development of his musical style.4 In an illuminating account, Murtomäki briefly summarizes the history of folksong collecting in Finland, including the work of one of Sibelius’s school teachers in Hämeenlinna, Arvid Genetz. He also recounts Sibelius’s first encounters with Finnish folk music in the field through meetings with the Karelian runic singers Larin Paraske (1833–1904) and Petri Shemeikka (1825–1915). As Murtomäki and others have noted, it is easy to trace the influence of folk music in Sibelius’s early work, from the melodic profile of songs such as “Drömmen,” op. 13, no. 5 (1891), to the repetitive rhythmic figuration of the second and third movements of the Kullervo Symphony (1892). More intriguing, though, is its lasting legacy on Sibelius’s later musical work. Sibelius himself draws attention to the Russian composer Mikhail Glinka as a suitable model who, “permeated with his homeland’s folk music, . . . instinctively found its correct basic harmonies.” He then proceeds to discuss the harmonic basis of Finnish folk music in terms of an extended Dorian-Aeolian modal collection (a minor scale with variable sixth and seventh scale degrees): a pattern, he suggests, that is supported by the five-note tuning of the kantele.5 As Sibelius notes in his lecture, current performance trends by contemporary folk singers had already begun to raise these scale degrees chromatically, “probably because people are already to some extent influenced by our new tonal system.” But most interesting here is the way in which Sibelius himself embraced such modal variation as a structural principle in many of his larger-scale works: the paradigmatic example being the Sixth Symphony (1923). This work can be heard as an extended exercise in the Dorian mode, but with much of its tonal drama derived from the tension between pitch classes B and B, and the early incursion (in the bass) of a disruptive C, which triggers the opening of the first principal Allegro section. From such chromatic pitch elements, larger-scale modal and diatonic collections emerge (including octatonic and whole-tone patterns, as well as the more familiar major/ minor modes of the diatonic system). The climax of the work is the point of complete chromatic saturation at the apex of the finale: the dramatic composing-out, perhaps, of a complete tonal-harmonic universe in crisis.
In his lecture Sibelius is nevertheless keen, at all times, to maintain a sense of pragmatic distance, and he stresses again his reluctance to draw hard-and-fast musical rules from any of his observations: Glinka, he notes, had similarly failed to standardize his approach to folksong harmonization. So Sibelius’s 1896 lecture cannot provide a prescriptive model for analyzing his own music. Nor should it be read as an objective ethnographic account of Finnish folk traditions at a crucial moment in the country’s modernization—Krohn’s work, and the photography of Sibelius’s great contemporary I. K. Inha, arguably provide more promising material in this respect. But the lecture is nevertheless insightful as the trace of Sibelius’s creative imagination in a formative stage of development. And as a rare glimpse of Sibelius’s public voice in formal institutional surroundings, it has particular value.
Some Viewpoints Concerning Folk Music and Its Influence on the Musical Arts
Translator’s/Editor’s note: Sibelius’s draft contains many additional thoughts or alternative expressions or words in brackets and other deletions and signs of correction or revision. We have retained the bracketed comments except where including them would merely confuse the reader. (Editorial explanations or interpolations are not bracketed, but given as endnotes.) Sibelius also likes to use dashes where commas would serve, and though we have usually retained these, we have substituted commas in some cases, in the interest of clarity.
In the following lecture I intend to present some opinions concerning folk music and its influence on the art of music.
If one follows the development of Christian music one finds, on the one hand, that a huge amount of work has been devoted to mastering its material artistically, and on the other that this material has found its principal nourishment in folk music. The origin of folksong has been the topic of numerous interpretations. It is not unlikely that to a large extent it originated in improvisation, especially prompted by a strong inspiration. Later this improvised succession of tones, having gone through innumerable repetitions and consequent changes, assumed a generally applicable form. Ofte
n enough a whole people has surely been part of this reworking. This must therefore be the reason why these folk melodies often express, in such an oddly touching way, the basic traits of a people’s character and emotional life.
When comparing folk melodies from different countries, as seen in published collections, many noteworthy conclusions can be drawn.
For one, the various folk melodies are based upon different tone systems, especially depending on when they arose; for another, their melody is more developed in countries with an older culture.
Still today in India and China they sing folksongs in what we call a three-part lied form—admittedly a pretty well-developed form of music. These last mentioned melodies are based on a tone system of five tones within an octave6—in other words, a tone system that does not recognize any half-tone steps. Researchers in this field consider the 5-tone system the oldest. Folksongs that use this tone system are sung in Europe nowadays only in Scotland and Norway. A much later period saw the origin of the 7-tone system, i.e., seven tones within an octave, a diatonic system. This was much used—as in the [oldest] older Greek music and in church modes. According to researchers, these seven tones also form the basic scale of later Indian and Chinese music.
The Greeks later divided the octave into 21 parts, with the result that no harmony as we know it could be produced. Already, this tonal system carried the seed of its own destruction. Since most Christian folk melodies at the beginning of our chronology were based on this oddly chromatic Greek tonal system, no polyphony could arise, and they were always singing in unison or in octaves. As for rhythm, originally they followed the Greek laws—i.e., meter determined the length of the tones.
Later, when mensural notation was adopted, all tones were made of equal length. In this form these church melodies had a big influence on all folk tunes of then Christian nations. Having originated in folksong, they easily spread everywhere.
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 44