His followers want to hear nothing of all this. Their song echoes the refrain: “It’s all nature; it’s all nature.” The great Pan, and as needed Blood and Soil too, appears promptly on the scene. The trivial is validated as the origin of things, the unarticulated as the sound of unconscious creation.
Categories of this kind evade critique. The dominant conviction is that nature’s mood is bound up with awestruck silence. But if the concept of “nature’s mood”5 should not remain unquestioned even in the real world, then surely not in works of art. Symphonies are not a thousand lakes, even when riddled with a thousand holes.
Music has constructed a technical canon for the representation of nature: Impressionism. In the wake of nineteenth-century French painting, Debussy developed methods for expressing the expressionless, for capturing light and shadow, the color and the half-light of the visual world in sounds that go deeper than the poetic word. These methods are foreign to Sibelius. Car nous voulons la nuance encore6—this sounds like a mockery of his muted, stiff, and accidental orchestral color. This is no music en plein air. It plays in a messy schoolroom, where during recess the adolescents give evidence of their genius by overturning the inkwells. No palette: nothing but ink.
Even this is reckoned as an achievement. On the one hand Nordic profundity is supposed to become intimate with unconscious nature—without, on the other, taking frivolous pleasure in her charms. It is a cramped promiscuity in the dark. The asceticism of impotence is celebrated as self-discipline of the creator. If he has a relationship with nature, then it is only inwardly. His realm is not of this world. It is the realm of the emotions. Once arrived there, you are released from all reckoning. If the emotional content is as indeterminate as its foundation in the musical events themselves, this is seen as the index of their profundity.
It is not. The emotions are determinable. Not, it is true, as they might prefer, in terms of their metaphysical and existential content. They have as little of this as Sibelius’s scores. But in terms of what is unleashed in the scores. It is the configuration of the banal and the absurd. Each individual thing sounds quotidian and familiar. The motives are fragments from the current material of tonality. We have already heard them so often we think we understand them. But they are placed in a meaningless context: as if one were to combine indiscriminately the words gas station, lunch,7 death, Greta, and plowshare with verbs and particles. An incomprehensible whole made up of the most trivial details produces the false image of profundity. We feel good that we can follow from one thing to the next, and are pleased, in good conscience, while realizing that in actuality we don’t understand a thing. Or: complete non-understanding, which constitutes the signature of contemporary musical consciousness, has its ideology in the appearance of comprehensibility produced by Sibelius’s vocabulary.
In the resistance to advanced New Music, in the mean-spirited hatred with which it is defamed, we hear not just the traditional and general aversion to the new, but the specific intuition that the old means no longer suffice. Not that they are “exhausted,” for mathematically the tonal chords certainly still permit an unlimited number of new combinations. But they have become mere semblance, un-genuine: they serve the transfiguration of a world that has nothing left to transfigure, and no music can lay claim to being written, any more, that does not present a critical attack on what exists, down to the innermost cells of its technical methodology. This intuition is what people hope to escape by means of Sibelius. This is the secret of his success. The absurdity that the truly depraved means of traditional post-Romantic music take on in his works, as a result of their inadequate treatment, seems to lift them up out of their demise. That it is possible to compose in a way that is fundamentally old-fashioned, yet completely new: this is the triumph that conformism, looking to Sibelius, begins to celebrate. His success is equivalent to longing for the world to be healed of its sufferings and contradictions, for a “renewal” that lets us keep what we possess. What is at stake in this kind of wishing for renewal, what is equally at stake in this “Sibelian” originality is revealed by its meaninglessness. This lack of meaning is not merely “technical,” any more than a sentence without sense is merely “technically” devoid of meaning. It sounds absurd because the attempt to express something new using the old, decayed means is itself absurd. What is expressed is nothing at all.
It is as if for the autochthonous Finn all the objections ginned up in reaction to cultural Bolshevism were coming into their own. If reactionaries imagine that the New Music owes its existence to a lack of control over the material of the old music, this applies to none other than Sibelius, who holds fast to the old. His music is in a certain sense the only “corrosive” one to emerge from our times. Not in the sense of the destruction of the bad existing, but of a Caliban-like destruction of all the musical results of mastery over nature that were sufficiently hard-won by humanity in its handling of the tempered scale. If Sibelius is good, then the criteria of musical quality that have endured from Bach to Schoenberg—a wealth of relations, articulation, unity in diversity—are done in once and for all. All that Sibelius betrays in favor of a nature that is nothing but a tattered photograph of the familiar apartment. For his part he contributes, in art music, to the great degradation at which industrialized music easily outdoes him. But such destruction masks itself in his symphonies as creation. Its effect is dangerous.
Footnote on Sibelius and Hamsun
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Translator’s note: Adorno wrote this brief text in connection with Leo Lowenthal’s 1937 essay “Knut Hamsun: On the Prehistory of Authoritarian Ideology” ( Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 6). It was printed as a note to the following sentence by Lowenthal: “If the poverty of the cultural inventory and the shadowy quality of the people in his works are interpreted by readers and critics as a sign of particular modesty, mature austerity, reverential reserve toward nature, and ‘epic grandeur,’ then what is expressed in this kind of encomium of the writer is a tired resignation, a social defeatism” (338).
The same tendency can be observed in a strictly technical sense in the symphonies of Jan Sibelius, which are of Hamsun’s ilk in their material construction as well as their effect. Here one should think not only of the vague and at the same time coloristically undeveloped “Pan-like” nature mood, but of the compositional methods themselves. This type of symphonic style knows no musical development. It is a layering of arbitrary and chance repetitions of motives whose material, in itself, is trivial. The resulting appearance of originality is ascribable only to the senselessness with which the motives are put together, without anything to guarantee their meaningful context other than the abstract passage of time. The obscurity, a product of technical awkwardness, feigns a profundity that does not exist. The constructed opaque repetitions lay claim to an eternal rhythm of nature, which is also expressed by a lack of symphonic consciousness of time; the nullity of the melodic monads, which is carried over into an unarticulated sounding, corresponds to the contempt for humanity to which an all-embracing nature subjects the Hamsunian individual. Sibelius, like Hamsun, is to be distinguished from Impressionist tendencies by the fact that the all-embracing nature is prepared from the dessicated remains of traditional bourgeois art, rather than being the primal vision of a protesting subjectivity.
NOTES
1. For a summary, see D. G. Kirby, Finland in the Twentieth Century: A History and an Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 106–47.
2. Tomi Mäkelä, “Poesie in der Luft”: Jean Sibelius, Studien zu Leben und Werk (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2007), 43.
3. The issue is examined exhaustively in Ruth-Maria Gleissner, Der unpolitische Komponist als Politikum: Die Rezeption von Jean Sibelius im NS-Staat (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2002); as well as in Mäkelä, “Poesie in der Luft.” More recently Timothy L. Jackson has reopened the question of Sibelius’s sympathies during the war in his chapter in Sibelius in the Old and New World: Aspects of
His Music, Its Interpretation and Reception, ed. Timothy L. Jackson, Veijo Murtomäki, Colin Davis, and Timo Virtanen (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2009).
4. In German: auskomponiert.
5. In German: Naturstimmung.
6. French in the original. The quotation, which concludes “Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance” (‘Because all we want is greater nuance/Not color, but rather nuance’), is from the fourth verse of Paul Verlaine’s symbolist poem “Art Poètique” (from Jadis et naguère, 1884), beginning “De la musique avant tout chose!”
7. English in the original.
Monumentalizing Sibelius:
Eila Hiltunen and the Sibelius
Memorial Controversy
INTRODUCED AND TRANSLATED
BY DANIEL M. GRIMLEY
On the western outskirts of central Helsinki, on the edge of a leafy suburb en route to Seurasaari, the open-air island museum that is the summer haunt of tourists, tour buses, and picnicking locals, stands Eila Hiltunen’s Sibelius monument, Passio Musicæ. Though it has now become one of the city’s principal sights, reproduced on countless “Greetings from Helsinki” postcards, the monument was highly controversial when it was first unveiled by Finnish president Urho Kekkonen on 7 September 1967, following a two-stage competition in 1961–62.1 Strenuous objections were made in the local press to the abstract non-representational design, which consists of a series of bright silver metallic tubes with sculpted textural effects, arranged in a gently curving arc across a rough pink granite outcrop, typical of the series of rocky strata that erupt through the soil everywhere in the Finnish capital and seem to shape the city’s built environment. Hiltunen’s design, originally called Credo, might suggest a set of organ pipes (though, unfortunately, Sibelius wrote very little organ music) or the movement of the aurora borealis across the northern winter sky. Or it might also evoke the edge of a vast glacier or ice sheet of the kind that moved across and scoured the Finnish landscape in ancient geological time: a powerful representation of the morphological forces that shaped the characteristic Finnish landscape of lakes, boulders, and dense boreal forest. In an attempt to assuage criticism, Hiltunen later added a bust of the composer, depicted in his brooding middle age ca. 1911, at the time of the composition of the Fourth Symphony. The bust stands rather awkwardly to one side of the monument. Even without it, however, the monument is remarkable for the way in which it captures the dual sense of stillness and momentum that characterizes much of Sibelius’s music, the feeling of two or more things happening at once in different temporal domains, as well as his preoccupation with the elemental, animating forces of the Finnish landscape. And the memorial literally sets in stone Sibelius’s perceived associations with Finnish nature, reinforcing the impression, promoted by numerous representations in the media (CD covers, books, radio and television programs, pre-concert talks) that his work is somehow an expression of the Finnish natural world.
The documents translated below offer a snapshot of the controversy that took place over Hiltunen’s design at the time of the competition—before the monument was actually constructed. The protagonists are two key figures in the debate: Simon Parmet (1897–1969), composer and conductor of the Finnish Radio Orchestra between 1948 and 1953 and a vital interpreter of Sibelius’s music, and Erik Kruskopf (b. 1930), art critic, author, and editor at the Swedish-language newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet (1956–65). Besides his activities as a conductor, Parmet’s contribution to Sibelius’s critical reception included a highly influential monograph on the symphonies, in which he expounded the principle of thematic development in Sibelius’s work, deriving large-scale structures from a single thematic germ or kärnmotiv (see Byron Adams’s essay in this volume for the Anglo-American context).2 Kruskopf was an early supporter of Hiltunen’s work, and later published, with the sculptor, an important monograph on her oeuvre.3 The debate, which took place in Swedish in the pages of Hufvudstadsbladet, revolves partly around the question of realism versus abstraction as the most appropriate mode of expression for a memorial sculpture. But at a more fundamental level it involves a generational shift in Finnish culture, in particular the movement from an essentially conservative but nevertheless modern civic nationalism (in Parmet’s case) to a more internationally oriented avant-garde modernism (in Kruskopf ‘s). It therefore parallels a crucial stage in the evolution of Finland’s own political identity, the transformation from a newly independent but ostensibly peripheralized member of the Nordic region in the first half of the century to a crucial buffer zone between Eastern and Western blocs, on the fragile frontline of a new political order after the end of the Second World War.
The debate also involves competing claims over Sibelius’s creative legacy. For Parmet, who had been closely acquainted with the composer himself, Sibelius’s music combines a deep personal resonance with a strong sense of patriotism and national duty: the true value of art, for Parmet, lies in its capacity to serve a wider community. In contrast, for Kruskopf, whose relationship with Sibelius was necessarily more distant, art is more properly concerned with an authenticity of expression, a sense of intellectual and artistic rigor that transcends more localized questions of abstraction or representation. Though the details of the exchange largely center around the details of Hiltunen’s design and other monumental sculpture in Helsinki and beyond, it might also be understood in the context of the shifting patterns in Sibelius’s own critical reception, in particular the tension between the idea of the national romantic cultural figurehead and an international modernist artist. Yet, as Tomi Mäkelä, Glenda Dawn Goss, and others have observed, in the last thirty years of his life Sibelius had already become in some sense a monument: a figure who had already outlasted his time and whose longevity and apparent creative silence had become symbolic of a lost age and distant past. Even before his death in 1957, in other words, Sibelius had begun to seem petrified, or set in stone.4 Hiltunen’s sculpture might therefore be understood as the tribute to a man who had already, in this sense, become his own memorial. The desire for a figurative portrait, as Kruskopf perhaps sensed, was therefore potentially reductive and redundant. The essence of Hiltunen’s design lay not in its ability to capture Sibelius’s human character or physiognomy, already deeply ingrained in the Finnish popular consciousness, but rather in its response to the idea of Sibelius’s music as an imaginative force. This fine-grained feeling for line, shape, and shifting color, framed by the trees, rocks, and water of its park setting (originally designed by landscape artist Juhani Kivikoski), is the key element of Hiltunen’s vision.
Figure 1. Sibelius Monument
A Decent Monument—Or Nothing Else
Erik Kruskopf
Hufvudstadbladet, 18 September 1962
When the first round of the Sibelius monument competition took place a year ago, it was clear that only a single entry had the potential to form the basis for the development of a suitably dignified, sculptural, and artistically satisfying monument to the composer.5 Eila Hiltunen’s proposal was so poorly judged by both competition organizers and jury, however, that after a lengthy delay following official publication of the result it was ranked only sixth among the prizewinning entries. First place was awarded to a highly unpleasant and amateurish proposal.
Now that the second round has taken place, the distance between the other participants and Eila Hiltunen has widened even further. Eila Hiltunen has substantially, though not yet sufficiently, improved the earlier version of her design, while three of the other contestants, Ben Renvall, Toivo Jaatinen, and Kauko Räsänen, have entirely abandoned their preliminary versions and produced new designs. Jaatinen’s is, if possible, even more immature than his first. Räsänen is a proficient sculptor, yet he has not succeeded in the task of creating on a monumental scale a sufficiently interesting sculpture upon an abstract theme. Ben Renvall has in this sense sunk himself: he is an intimate artist, which is fine in the smaller format, but his work is ultimately not adaptable to larger proportions.
Martti Peitso,
who is now in second place, has done a splendid piece of work. To my eyes, however, it looks almost like a caricatured and distorted stereotype, mannered and hence rather tasteless. Harry Kivijärvi, whose idea offered the richest possibilities for development after Eila Hiltunen’s a year ago, has unfortunately not succeeded in progressing very far forward. All of the errors that marred the proposal, then, namely its monotony, the compact heaviness, and lack of rhythm, persist. The young artist has not found a solution that can yet do his idea justice.
Eila Hiltunen’s proposal, whose character owes much to the positive impression made by her husband Otso Pietinen’s splendid photographs and architectural collaborator Juhani Kivikoski’s drawings, has now gained a richer variety than was previously the case. The construction of the pipes is arranged in a waveform, and their surface is torn asunder so that the material does not have such an obviously cylindrical quality as before. And yet I believe the idea can be developed even further. Above all, it would benefit from gaining a sense of formal shape that distinguishes it from the surrounding environment, yet at the same time possesses such strong rhythmic vitality when seen from any angle that the monument does not lose any of its current power. Finally, the environmental landscaping should take on a more defined form: paths, avenues, and other similar features should be arranged according to the monument.
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 47