The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  The swan hymn transcends the depiction of nature: it is like a spiritual force in animal form. When the horns introduce it, in the midst of a flurry of action in the strings, they seem always to have been playing it and we have only begun to hear it. A moment later, a reduced version of the theme is heard in the bass register of the orchestra at one-third the tempo, creating another hypnotic Sibelian effect of layered time. Then the winds launch into their own melody—a wistfully circling figure that bears an odd resemblance to Satie’s Gymnopédies.

  This is not “masculine” heroism on the order of Beethoven’s Eroica, also in the key of E-flat major. As Hepokoski suggests, Sibelius’s later music implies a maternal rather than a paternal logic—God-given themes gestating in symphonic form. Only by way of wrenching dissonances does the music break loose of its endlessly rocking motion and push toward a final cadence. The swan hymn, now carried by the trumpets, undergoes convulsive transformations and is reborn as a fearsome new being. Its intervals split wide open, shatter apart, re-form. The symphony ends with six far-flung chords, through which the main theme shoots like a pulse of energy. The swan becomes the sun.

  Sibelius was at the height of his powers. Yet he had precious little music left in him: the Sixth and Seventh symphonies, the tone poem Tapiola, incidental music for Shakespeare’s Tempest, a smattering of minor pieces, and the phantom Eighth. His pursuit of a final symphonic synthesis made the process of composition almost impossibly arduous. Suddenly dissatisfied with the fluid form that he had evolved in the Fifth, he began to dream of a continuous blur of sound without formal divisions—symphonies without movements, operas without words. Instead of writing the music of his imagination, he wanted to transcribe the very noise of nature. He thought he could hear chords in the murmurs of the forests and the lapping of the lakes; he once baffled a group of Finnish students by giving a lecture on the overtone series of a meadow. Whatever he succeeded in putting on paper seemed paltry and inadequate. As the revisions of the Fifth show, he looked at his own creations with a merciless eye, slashing away at them as if they were the scribblings of an inept student.

  Harbingers of silence proliferate in Sibelius’s last works. As Hepokoski writes, the teleological narratives end not in a blaze of victory, as in the Fifth Symphony, but in “dissolution,” “decay,” “liquidation.” The Sixth Symphony echoes the sober, neoclassical spirit of the Third, with antique modes underpinning the harmony; it’s as if the composer were trying to flee into a mythic past. Yet brutal choirs of brass keep slicing into the gossamer string textures and through the neat ranks of dancing winds. The final movement is stopped in its tracks by a traumatic episode: in Hepokoski’s account, nature motives representing the pine trees and the wind rip the stately rotational design to pieces. The process continues for another minute or two, but the motives crumble before one’s ears, and the music retreats into the thin, unreal string music with which it began.

  The Seventh Symphony expands on the formal innovation of the Fifth, the telescoping of two movements into one. Contrasting episodes are fused into one continuous structure, so that Adagio hymns become Scherzo dances by imperceptible degrees. In emotional terms, the symphony unites the dark and the light sides of the composer’s personality, the worlds of the Fourth and the Fifth. The piece is anchored on a grand theme for solo trombone, which sounds three times against a mercurially changing background. Like Strauss’s Zarathustra motif, it is made up of “natural” building blocks, thirds and fifths and octaves. On its first appearance, it is couched in summery C major. The second time, the harmony slips into the minor, and a grim, nocturnal mood descends. (One early sketch for the theme is marked “Where the stars dwell.”) Finally, the theme returns to the major, generating such a heat of elation that it teeters on the edge of chaos. Growling runs in the low strings and winds recall the funeral-march movement of Beethoven’s Eroica, and the expected catastrophe looms. It takes the form of a metallic smear of dominant-seventh chords in chromatic sequence followed by a high, exposed line in the violins. When the main key of C returns in the coda, it comes by way of a halting, ambivalent cadence that manages to sound at once radiant and resigned. In the last bars, the note B aches for six slow beats against the final C-major chord, like a hand outstretched from a figure disappearing into light.

  Tapiola, a twenty-minute tone poem picturing the Finnish forest, was Sibelius’s last big orchestral work, at least that the rest of the world got to hear, and his most severe statement in any form. The connection to traditional tonality grows ever more tenuous, although the work is anchored on a half-diminished seventh, a standard Wagnerian chord. The British composer Julian Anderson has highlighted a passage in Tapiola in which a whole-tone interval in multiple registers generates “deep acoustic throbbing”; this is dissonance of a deeper order, the kind that alters your consciousness without assaulting your ears. In a central section depicting a physical or mental storm, whole-tone harmony crumbles into near-total chromaticism, upward-and downward-slithering patterns of notes. Like a wanderer lost in the woods, the listener struggles to find a path through the thicket of sound. When the home chord of B minor is finally reasserted in the brass, it has a hollow ring, its middle note pushed deep into the bass. We are apparently back where we started, no exit in sight.

  Finally came the music for The Tempest, written on commission from the Danish Royal Theatre in 1925. As if liberated from the burden of symphonic thought, Sibelius abandons his familiar Nordic austerity and indulges the more playful side of his personality. Some sections of the score are deliberately archaic in style, partaking of the rarefied manner of the Sixth Symphony. Others are sweetly nostalgic dance and song pieces, tailored to the needs of the stage. The “Storm” Overture takes up where the most adventurous sections of Tapiola left off: the strings play restlessly swirling lines while the brass carve out whole-tone chords. The setting of the lines “Full fathom five” suggests all too realistically the image of a body twisting gently in the deep. An A-minor chord is gradually deformed and transformed by the whole-tone scale with which it partly overlaps, in a kind of musical parallel to the “sea-change” of Ariel’s song:

  Full fathom five thy father lies,

  Of his bones are coral made;

  Those are pearls that were his eyes…

  Perhaps Sibelius felt some conscious or unconscious identification with the figure of Prospero, who, at the end of the play, decides to set aside his magic powers and resume a semblance of normal life:

  I have bedimmed

  The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,

  And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault

  Set roaring war. To the dread rattling thunder

  Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak

  With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory

  Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up

  The pine and cedar; graves at my command

  Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth

  By my so potent art. But this rough magic

  I here abjure. And when I have required

  Some heavenly music—which even now I do—

  To work mine end upon their senses that

  This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,

  Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

  And deeper than did ever plummet sound

  I’ll drown my book.

  Sibelius wrote no music for this tremendous speech, but its rhetoric carries over into the cue for “solemn music” that follows. The harmony at the outset recalls the submersion music of “Full fathom five,” except that the dissonances now sound at earsplitting volume, semitone clashes in full cry. Then the chaos melts away into a clean open fifth, which sounds alien in context. All this evokes Prospero dimming the sun, setting sea and sky at war, waking the dead. A quiet hymn for strings follows, in which the chromaticism of the storm is woven back into classical harmony. It is “heavenly music,” but also sweet, ordinary music,
dispelling the rage and pain that fuel Prospero’s art.

  Did Sibelius, like Prospero, think about abjuring his magic and drowning his book? If so, he gave no sign of it in the late 1920s and early ’30s. The Eighth Symphony was under way, and the composer seemed happy with it. He is known to have worked on the piece in the spring of 1931, while staying alone in Berlin. Writing home to Aino, he said that the symphony was “making great strides,” although he was puzzled by the form it was taking. “It’s strange, this work’s conception,” he told his wife. That is all we know about it.

  Fame can confuse any artist, and it had an especially disorienting effect on Sibelius. Since the turn of the century he had enjoyed international celebrity, but in the twenties and thirties he became something like a pop-culture phenomenon. Why his symphonies struck such a chord with Jazz Age audiences is difficult to explain. Perhaps they achieved mass popularity precisely because they were foreign to the neon light and traffic noise of contemporary urban life. In any case, no composer of the time caused such mass excitement, especially in America. Celebrity conductors vied for signs of favor from Ainola. New York Philharmonic listeners went so far as to vote Sibelius their favorite living symphonist. His name even cropped up as a plot point in Hollywood movies. In Otto Preminger’s chic 1944 thriller Laura, a detective played by Dana Andrews interrogates a shady Southern gentleman portrayed by Vincent Price:

  DANA ANDREWS: You know a lot about music?

  VINCENT PRICE: I don’t know a lot about anything, but I know a little about practically everything.

  DANA ANDREWS: Yeah? Then why did you say they played Brahms’s First and Beethoven’s Ninth at the concert Friday night? They changed the program at the last minute and played nothing but Sibelius!

  “Nothing but Sibelius” comes close to summing up orchestral programming of the period. Serge Koussevitzky, the conductor of the Boston Symphony, presented a complete cycle of the Sibelius symphonies in the 1932–33 season, and he hoped to cap the series with the world premiere of the Eighth.

  Crucial to Sibelius’s American reputation was Olin Downes, who from 1924 to 1955 served as music critic of the New York Times. The son of Louise Corson Downes, a crusading feminist and Prohibitionist, Downes believed that classical music should appeal not just to elites but to common people, and from the bully pulpit of the Times he loudly condemned the obscurantism of modern music—in particular, the artificiality, capriciousness, and snobbery that he perceived in the music of Stravinsky. Sibelius was different; he was “the last of the heroes,” “a new prophet,” who would rescue music from cerebral modernism. At heart, Downes’s motives were good; he wished to celebrate the music of the present and saw in Sibelius a serious figure of mass appeal. But his attacks on Stravinsky were merely tendentious. It would have been more productive to show what the two composers had in common, rather than using one as a stick to beat the other.

  Downes traveled to Finland in 1927 to meet Sibelius on his native ground. The composer had fallen into one of his periodic bouts of depression—it was at this time that he wrote, “Isolation and loneliness are driving me to despair.” Meeting Downes temporarily lifted his spirits, although, in the long term, Downes’s devotion may have had a deleterious effect. Glenda Dawn Goss, in a book-length study of this singular composer-critic relationship, suggests that Sibelius was in some way crushed by the attention that Downes heaped on him.

  In the early thirties, just as Koussevitzky was expecting to conduct the premiere of the Eighth Symphony in Boston, Downes pestered the composer for the completed score. In 1937 the critic wrote a follow-up letter in which he passed along the sentiments of none other than Louise Corson Downes: “My mother and I often speak of you and she asked me again about his Eighth Symphony…‘Tell Mr. Sibelius that I am not concerned or anxious so much about his Eighth Symphony, which I know he will complete in his own good time, as about his Ninth. He must crown his series of works in this form with a ninth symphony which will represent the summit and the synthesis of his whole achievement and leave us a work which will be worthy of one of the elected few who are the true artistic descendants and inheritors of Beethoven.’”

  As if pressure from music critics’ mothers were not enough, Sibelius was also brooding over the reception he encountered in Europe. Paris had no time for him. Berlin, before Hitler came to power, viewed him with condescension bordering on contempt. In neither city did expansive symphonies and evocative tone poems have much intellectual market value. The critic Heinrich Strobel, future impresario of the Donaueschingen Festival, referred to Sibelius’s Violin Concerto as “boring Nordic dreariness.” Sibelius was tormented by these characterizations, and also annoyed by the cult of Stravinsky. He happened to be in Berlin at the time of a performance of Oedipus Rex in 1928, but decided that he “could not afford to throw away three or four hundred marks.” He later said of Stravinsky: “When one compares my symphonies with his stillborn affectations…!”

  In America, Downes’s pugilistic praise of Sibelius aroused resentment among American Stravinsky admirers. In 1940, Virgil Thomson became the music critic of the New York Herald Tribune, and in his debut review he tore lustily into the Sibelius myth, calling the Second Symphony “vulgar, self-indulgent, and provincial beyond all description.” Equally venomous attacks emanated from the Schoenberg camp. Theodor Adorno prepared a dire analysis of the Sibelius phenomenon for a sociological think tank called the Princeton Radio Research Project: “The work of Sibelius is not only incredibly overrated, but it fundamentally lacks any good qualities…If Sibelius’s music is good music, then all the categories by which musical standards can be measured—standards which reach from a master like Bach to most advanced composers like Schoenberg—must be completely abolished.” Adorno sent his essay to Thomson, who, while agreeing with its sentiments, sagely advised that “the tone is more apt to create antagonism toward yourself than toward Sibelius.”

  Sibelius’s confidence was by that time already gone. You can see it slipping away in his correspondence with Koussevitzky, which is preserved at the Library of Congress. The conductor sends letters and telegrams on an almost monthly basis, pleading for the Eighth. Sibelius replies in an elegant, slanting hand on parchment-like paper, tantalizingly mentioning a symphony that is almost finished but not quite.

  In January 1930 Sibelius reports, “My new work is not nearly ready and I cannot say when it will be ready.” In August he is more sure: “It looks as though I can send you a new work this season.” But he is worried about American copyrights, which do not protect his music. Koussevitzky reassures him that the symphony will be safe from pirates. In the end, it does not appear. Then, in August 1931, in the wake of his productive stay in Berlin, Sibelius writes, “If you wish to perform my new Symphonia in the spring, it will, I believe, be ready.” In December the information is leaked to the Boston Evening Transcript, which publishes an item: “Symphony Hall has received an important letter from Sibelius, the composer, about his new Symphony, the Eighth. It is completed, and the score will soon be on the way to Boston.” A telegram from Finland arrives two weeks later, saying that the current season wouldn’t work. Sibelius probably got wind of the Transcript article and panicked.

  The following June, the Eighth is back on its feet: “It would be good if you could conduct my new symphony at the end of October.” Then comes a fresh panic. “Unfortunately I have named October for my new symphony,” the composer writes just one week later. “This is not certain, I am very disturbed about it. Please do not announce the performance.” Eventually, it is promised for December 1932. Koussevitzky sends a “restless” telegram on New Year’s Eve, as if he has been checking the mailbox every day that month. Two weeks later he receives yet another terse telegram, yet another postponement. There are a couple more tentative mentions of the Eighth in subsequent correspondence, then nothing.

  In the late thirties, Sibelius again hoped to set the Eighth free from its forest prison. By that time he knew better than to say anyth
ing to the garrulous Koussevitzky. Then, in 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and Finland became part of a chess game between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Early in the war, Finland was applauded in the West for its hardy stand against the Soviets, and Sibelius was more popular than ever; Toscanini took him up with a passion. In 1941, Finland aligned itself with the Germans, partly to avoid undergoing a hostile occupation and partly to regain territory lost to the Soviet Union in the previous conflict. Sibelius went from being a symbol of freedom to serving as an apparent Nazi stooge. As a Nordic, “Aryan” composer, he had enjoyed glowing notices in Nazi Germany, and won the Goethe Prize in 1935. Now he became almost an official German artist, receiving as many performances as Richard Strauss. The Sibelius Society held a gala concert at the Berlin Philharmonic in April 1942. In a message to Nazi troops in the same year he allegedly said: “I wish with all my heart that you may enjoy a speedy victory.”