Furuhjelm’s book is also significant as one of the earliest attempts to document Sibelius’s life and works in a single span: the terms of Furuhjelm’s discussion were influential for later writers including Simon Parmet, Erik Tawaststjerna, and Robert Layton. The extract translated below is taken from the opening passage of Furuhjelm’s study. Furuhjelm cites the famous bon mot about Sibelius offering pure spring water as opposed to the colorful cocktails of his continental contemporaries—a remark sometimes thought to apply to the Sixth Symphony (1923), though it clearly predates that work. Sibelius is presented by Furuhjelm as the equal of Richard Strauss—the highest-profile European composer of his generation at that point, and a composer whose career, as Leon Botstein explains in his essay for this volume, offers some provocative parallels with Sibelius’s own. Yet Sibelius can equally be perceived as a pure Nordic counterpole to Strauss’s opulent post-Wagnerian decadence, as Furuhjelm is keen to suggest. Sibelius’s work, Furuhjelm argues, is characterized by a sense of “the naturally inspired, the genuine, and the elementary,” terms which in the 1930s would carry much greater ideological weight. Sibelius’s association with ideas of nature and landscape is also a prominent feature of Furuhjelm’s introduction. Sibelius, for Furuhjelm, becomes the “sublimely realistic portrayer of nature,” an accolade that places him in the same category as illustrious Nordic predecessors such as Edvard Grieg or, closer to home, the Finnish “national poet” Johan Ludvig Runeberg. Metaphors of nature and landscape evidently perform a nationalist function here, grounding Sibelius’s music in the soil of his homeland. Yet they also offer a seemingly more neutral site of gathering and community than language (Finnish or Swedish), which, in late 1916, must have seemed an increasingly fragile medium for celebrating notions of national unity and togetherness.
From Erik Furuhjelm’s
Jean Sibelius: hans Tondiktning och drag ur hans Liv (1917) Pages 9–13
“Abroad you mix cocktails of various colors, and now I offer pure spring water”: thus Sibelius is supposed to have spoken when he announced his arrival at the house of a German music publisher. We can assume that he uttered these well-chosen words in his characteristically half ironic, half modest tone of voice. In any case, I don’t start with this appeal to the publisher in order to add to our master’s personal characteristics. For I have a weightier ambition—there is an obvious truth in the cited words; they actually elucidate, in their own way, Sibelius’s position in regard to contemporary music in general and Continental music in particular. Not as if today’s musical arts, especially those of central Europe, were utterly devoid of freshness and clarity, spring water’s most obvious qualities. It is not my intention, nor has it ever been Sibelius’s, to hurl insults at those highly admired representatives of certain modern trends in music in the great civilized nations—not even the ones on the 60th parallel. But it cannot be denied that contemporary music reveals many of the qualities of that alcoholic mixed drink, the cocktail—intoxicating, heterogeneous, artificial—whereas Sibelius’s production carries, to a predominant degree, the stamp of the naturally inspired, the genuine, and the elementary.
To present just a few arguments: Germany—for long the leading nation—is now living through a period of experimentation, of searching for absolutely new ways of expression, for harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic musical innovations. The music now cultivated in this country, with its colossal musical traditions, is part intellectual, part naturalistic, part even highly romantic—and not infrequently quibbling—art. A significant diversity characterizes both individual works and the music in general. The most typical and from a human standpoint the most brilliant representative is Richard Strauss, who in a remarkable way has been able to combine the individual trends, yet who is so un-doctrinaire that he has been able to create both Till Eulenspiegel and Salome. He is, in many of his pieces, certainly an exception. Reflection often makes room in him for brilliant intuition, exultation for the standard ecstasy. To return to my introduction: one cannot really deny this brilliant artist his exuberant freshness and mirror-like clarity. But putting Sibelius and Strauss side by side, we can equally perceive the contrast indicated by our introductory quotation. Even during excursions into the most unreal domains, Strauss is able to retain above all a healthy mind, a clear intellectual sharp-sightedness. With Sibelius’s music our comparison gains a more concrete meaning, for here there is something more—not just health and transparency, but also the spring’s quality of a natural mirror; in its shifting forms it is itself a realistic reflection of the milieu against which the events and situations in his works are outlined. Not only does Sibelius privilege naturalness and the demands of the style as opposed to the pretentious and eclectic, he points just as convincingly to the possibilities of natural surroundings as the object for a composer’s creative activity.
Sibelius is the sublimely realistic portrayer of nature. No matter how “romantic” he often seems in his choice of motive, of invention or plot development, he seldom gives his descriptions of nature or environment any peculiar or unrealistic traits. In this he is the absolute contrast to Wagner and to the entire Wagnerian School. In Scandinavia Sibelius certainly has his equals in this respect—Grieg, the great realist, was a pioneer; and here and there also in other countries—I think, for example, of the American MacDowell and his beautiful and characteristic [karaktärsfulla] nature images. Furthermore we have French realism, which seems almost to overturn our claim that Sibelius is a rather isolated phenomenon in our modern musical life. But this French art has a strongly exotic strain, and this element has a romantic tendency and a reflective [reflekterad] trait that marks an important difference from Sibelius’s music.
Sibelius is currently ahead of others as the great representative for the totally unreflective, spontaneous depiction of nature. This depiction of nature constitutes the obvious background for the majority of his compositions. It is never the goal, never merely an excuse for the introduction of orchestral or harmonic effects. But it is almost always there, generally not as naturalism, but rather as a soulful realism. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that whatever events Sibelius attempts to describe always take place in a fair or magnificent natural environment, seen and enjoyed and understood with a unique sense of reality and beauty. As I said, one can in many senses call Sibelius a romantic, but one cannot help but observe that his representations almost always maintain contact with the seen reality. The foundation of his music is seldom fantastic, and just as seldom fashionable or neutral. This combination of romantic topic and realism is one of the factors that gives Sibelius a special place in today’s music. And this is a factor I wished to stress from the start, not because it is the most important, but because it is the most visible and most characteristic.
To mention those compositions that lack elements of idyllic or somber rusticity would actually require little space; attempting to mention all those where the natural environment as background or decoration plays a greater or lesser role, however, demands acquaintance with most of Sibelius’s works. We find nature description, or at least attempts at such description, in compositions from his school years. We see how it becomes a life-giving component in several of the chamber music compositions from his study years at home—chamber music is, after all, the domain of subjectivity. In works from his study trips abroad it gains a lesser importance—for natural reasons—but in Vårsang (Spring Song) and in Kullervo and En saga and the other mythological and romanticizing poems, it appears in the form of a pastoral or as mostly realistic wilderness description. And after that we meet it almost everywhere—in the great works, the symphonies and the freer so-called symphonic poems, in the lyrical suites—but as exoticism in Belshazzar’s Feast—in songs and piano pieces, etc.
The love of nature seems to be the primary, the basic characteristic [urkaraktaristiska] of Sibelius, and surely we do no injustice to our master’s other inclinations by pointing this out or by taking this phenomenon as the starting point for o
ur contemplation. For out of the child’s and young man’s ecstatic admiration of nature and his vivid sense of reality, the tone-smith’s entire oeuvre seems to have grown, and whatever Sibelius has become, we see at all turns, during all periods, the fascinating nature-teller as a continually active, but never dominating, part of the artist’s personality.
NOTE
1. The preface is dated “Helsinki 1916.” Part of the reason for the delay, Furuhjelm explained, was the opportunity to include pages of the manuscript from the early Kullervo Symphony, which Sibelius had allowed to be performed in 1915 for the first time since its premiere in 1892. Kullervo is discussed on pp. 124–29 of Furuhjelm’s study.
Figure 1. Photograph of Sibelius as it appears on page 225 of Furuhjelm’s biography.• 330 •
Adorno on Sibelius
TRANSLATED BY SUSAN H. GILLESPIE
INTRODUCED BY DANIEL M. GRIMLEY
Theodor W. Adorno’s short, trenchant critique, “Glosse über Sibelius,” has gained significance in Sibelius criticism out of all proportion to its length. First published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1938, and reprinted in Impromptus thirty years later, it was written at a pivotal point in Adorno’s life: the year he emigrated to the United States, after having been resident at Oxford’s Merton College since 1934, when he was forced to flee Germany because of the rise of the Nazi regime. The critique is closely contemporary with other of his key articles on musical aesthetics, including “On the Fetish-Character of Music and the Regression of Listening” and his “Social Critique of Radio Music,” similarly concerned with what Adorno believed was the parlous state of art music composition and the decline of popular musical taste. Adorno’s attack was prompted by the 1937 publication of Bengt de Törne’s eulogistic biography, Sibelius: A Close-Up. But it must also have been motivated by the impact in the UK of other recent writing, such as Constant Lambert’s Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (1934) in which Sibelius’s work was paraded as the paradigm for modern composition.
The focus of Adorno’s criticism, as Max Paddison explains in his essay in this volume, is the ideology of the nature imagery with which many of Sibelius’s supporters associated his work. The claim for the “natural order” of Sibelius’s work, and its associations of profundity, seriousness, and aesthetic autonomy, applauded by writers such as Lambert, Cecil Gray, and Ernest Newman, was deeply problematic for Adorno. Sibelius’s apparent reliance on such naïve pictorial imagery constitutes an attempt to conceal what Adorno perceives as the technical inadequacy of his musical language and its failure to engage critically with the social context in which it was created and consumed. For Adorno, this signals a fundamental failure of artistic responsibility.
Adorno’s essay also raises the issue of Sibelius’s reception in Germany during the Third Reich—not least given the prevalence for essentialist metaphors of blood and soil that fueled the regime’s extreme racist ideology. This in turn prompts the question of the degree to which Sibelius was himself aware of such political appropriation, and may even have been party to such thinking. Sibelius does not appear to have openly expressed sympathy for far right-wing political movements in the way that Knut Hamsun did during the 1940s, and though he accepted the Goethe Medal in 1935 on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, he did not travel to Germany to collect the award in person. Sibelius’s position throughout the Second World War (during which Finland fought both the Red Army, and later the retreating German forces) was at times ambivalent or unclear, but no documentary evidence survives that definitively links him with Fascist tendencies.1 Sibelius’s pithy diary entries of 9 August and 6 September 1943, written during the darkest days of the war—“The question of Origin does not interest me. . . . These primitive modes of thought, anti-Semitism, etc., I can no longer accept at my age”—are deeply inconclusive, as Tomi Mäkelä observes.2 Sibelius’s most culpable offense during the conflict, it seems reasonable to assume from the surviving evidence, is that whenever possible he attempted to maintain an aloof distance from political events. For some scholars, this remains an open question.3
For Adorno, however, the musical materials themselves are already deeply politicized, and the central thrust of his essay becomes the extent to which Sibelius’s music perpetuates a regressively conservative world-view under the guise of a formless elementalism. Adorno’s aim is therefore wider than the simple critique of Sibelius’s music implied by his essay’s title: “Glosse über Sibelius” becomes part of a broader analysis of contemporary musical culture, one as much concerned with patterns of listening and reception as with the supposed technical shortcomings of Sibelius’s work. It is a defense of the New Music—especially of Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, whose work was under particular attack in Germany in the late 1930s—but it is simultaneously a challenge to un-mediated notions of creativity and being-in-place. In its insight and philosophical ambition, Adorno’s “Glosse” and his note on Sibelius and Hamsun, translated below, remain continually provocative.
Gloss on Sibelius
THEODOR W. ADORNO
To anyone who has grown up in the Austro-German musical sphere, the name of Sibelius does not say much. If Sibelius is not conflated geographically with [Christian] Sinding, or phonetically with Delius, then he is familiar as the composer of Valse triste, a harmless bit of salon music, or of filler pieces that can be encountered in concerts, such as The Oceanides or The Swan of Tuonela—shorter pieces of program music with a rather vague physiognomy that is difficult to recall.
But come to England, or even America, and the name begins to become boundlessly inflated. It is dropped as frequently as the brand name of an automobile. Radio and concerts resound with the tones of Finland. Toscanini’s programs are open to Sibelius. Long essays appear, larded with musical examples, in which he is praised as the most significant composer of the present day, a true symphonist, a timeless non-modern and positively a kind of Beethoven. There is a Sibelius Society that is devoted to his fame and busies itself bringing gramophone records of his oeuvre to market.
You become curious and listen to a few of the major works, for example the Fourth and Fifth symphonies. First you study the scores. They look skimpy and Boeotian, and you imagine that the secret can only be revealed through actual hearing. But the sound does nothing to change the picture.
It looks like this: a few “themes” are set out, some utterly unshapely and trivial sequences of tones, usually not even harmonically worked out; instead, they are unisono, with organ pedal points, flat harmonies, and whatever else the five lines of the musical staff have to offer as a means of avoiding logical chord progressions. These sequences of notes are soon befallen by misfortune, rather like a newborn baby who falls off the table and injures its back. They cannot walk properly. They get bogged down. At some unpredictable moment the rhythmic movement ceases: forward movement becomes incomprehensible. Then the simple sequences of notes return; all twisted and bent, but without moving from the spot. The apologists consider these parts to be Beethovenian: out of insignificance—the void—a whole world is created. But they are worthy of the world in which we live; at once crude and mysterious, tawdry and contradictory, all-familiar and impenetrable. Again, the apologists say that precisely this testifies to the incommensurability of a master of creative form who will accept no conventional models. But it is impossible to have faith in the incommensurable forms of someone who obviously hasn’t mastered four-part harmony; it is impossible to think of someone as far above the school who uses material that is appropriate for a schoolboy but simply does not know how to follow the rules. It is the originality of helplessness: in the category of those amateurs who are afraid to take composition lessons for fear of losing their originality, which itself is nothing but the disorganized remains of what preceded them.
On Sibelius as composer one should waste as few words as on such amateurs. He may have made a considerable contribution when it comes to the colonization of his fatherland. We may easily imag
ine that he returned home following his German composition studies with justified feelings of inferiority, quite conscious that he was destined neither to compose a chorale nor to write proper counterpoint; that he buried himself in the land of a thousand lakes in order to hide from the critical eye of his schoolmasters. There was probably no one more astonished than he to discover that his failure was being interpreted as success, his lack of technical ability as necessity. In the end he probably believed it himself and has now been brooding for years over his eighth symphony as if it were the Ninth.
What is interesting is the effect. How is it possible that an author achieves world fame and a kind of classicism—albeit manipulated—who has not merely lagged completely behind the technical standard of the times—for precisely this is what is considered good about him—but who fails to live up to his own standards and makes uncertain, even amateurish use of the traditional means, from the building materials to the large constructions themselves? Sibelius’s success is a symptom of the disturbance of musical consciousness. The earthquake that found its expression in the dissonances of the great New Music has not spared the old-fashioned, lesser kind. It became ravaged and crooked. But as people flee from the dissonances, they have sought shelter in false triads. The false triads: Stravinsky composed them out.4 By adding false notes he demonstrated how false the right ones have become. In Sibelius, the pure ones already sound false. He is a Stravinsky malgré lui. Except that he has less talent.
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 46