OUT
OF FINLAND…
I was
brought up on classical music because my parents were into it and I had no
rebellious siblings to persuade me otherwise. I listened to my parents’
recordings long before I bought my own; I took piano lessons and later gained a
modest competence on the clarinet (long since abandoned, alas). I never aspired
to a musical career.
Should one have a favourite style or
composer, or does this indicate musical partiality and thus deafness to
classical music taken as a whole? Shouldn’t real classics lovers show a
willingness to listen to all or most musical idioms, ancient (or medieval) to
modern and postmodern? Certainly a professional musician should be open to
playing (nearly) all, though players of the older music tend to be specialists.
But then the emotions come into it. In
my experience composers either induce or fit moods. There are Bach, Mozart,
Beethoven moods. Chopin moods. Gershwin moods. Vivaldi moods. For instance when
I was going through a lovelorn period I could listen to no one but Faure – such
a tenderly melodious grasp of the human heart! (Sob! Sob!...)
The composer who got to me through
many more phases than most was: Jean (Johan) Sibelius (1865-1957). For long a
concert classic Sibelius needs no help from me! Yet appreciation is not set in
stone; Mozart and Beethoven are secure of course; but as we draw nearer to the
present we have to sustain the nearer reputations more deliberately. Sibelius
is not a controversial composer now but there may be a danger that he will be
relegated to a particular niche – partly through the overplaying of certain
works at concerts to the complete neglect of others – that belies the sheer
dimensions of his achievement. And this at a time when, at least outside
Finland and Scandinavia, a large number of his works are being heard by many
for the first time that have as much a claim on our attention as those already
known. His is such a unique idiom that it deserves a renewed wider interest.
(Elgar was long neglected as the Edwardian composer of, say, Pomp and
Circumstance No. 2 before a major public rediscovery of his music opened up from about the 1960s in which
Jacqueline du Pre and Ken Russell for BBC Television Arts had a particular
hand.) For reasons I’ll come to I believe Sibelius is on the way to finding a
whole new audience for a much wider spectrum of his work, already celebrated in
his part of the world. (Meanwhile, the commentary for the Naxos CD of
Sibelius’s piano music states that Sibelius ‘was not a great piano composer’,
and indeed states this twice. What we hear on the CD in question might not
disabuse us of this view. But Sibelius at the hands of Glenn Gould for Columbia
is another matter altogether. Gould’s interpretation – suitable for a foremost
interpreter of Bach on the piano – is precise, steely and at times explosive,
rendering the Three Sonatines and ‘Kyllikki’ extraordinarily. It is as if the
music opens to Gould like a flower opening to rain. It is fully up to taking on
his commanding approach as he is up to its interpretation.)
When as a young man I was exposed to
his 3rd and 5th Symphonies and not having heard his music
before, I had this strange sensation that I was composing the music myself, as
it moved along. No other composer has ever had that effect on me. Perhaps it
was a melodic artlessness with the sorts of progressions and transitions,
subtle or sudden, that seemed so natural, as if they were the patterns of my
own thought processes. Nor is this music light or trite or predictable. On the
contrary, these – and other symphonies and tone poems, for example – are
seemingly, idiosyncratically odd,
peculiar stuff. But their very peculiarity made them so very personal to me. It
seemed that Sibelius was writing music to please solely himself, not only to
follow musical conventions as such, and its appeal to him made Sibelius take it
anywhere it wanted him to go. Not that it is whimsical or merely crowd
pleasing. Nothing very whimsical about Jean Sibelius, though he knew how to
please crowds – quite a lot of Sibelius’s pieces were written (apart from
anything else to bolster his shaky finances) for the dramatic stage and for the
salon - but first to please himself. Sometimes he wasn’t pleased. In which case
he suppressed or destroyed or ruthlessly worked over the composition again.
Composers do this, of course. But two major symphonies? Apart from his most
popular symphony, the 5th, which he revised twice after its two ‘premieres’
because he knew it was a going concern that needed to be got right, his first
symphony (as he decided it was) was not his official 1st but a
massive work for orchestra, choir and soloists – Kullervo Op. 7 – which was his
first big success in Finland. After that (note: not a failure with the public!) Sibelius ordered that it should
never be performed again. To my knowledge it was never published in his lifetime
though performed since; in retrospect it sounds ‘Sibelian’ in parts though I
find it turgid. Evidently, (do I give myself airs?) so did he. At the other end
of his creative life the same thing happened again. His ‘final’ 7th
Symphony – something just over 20 minutes’ long and regarded by many as no less
than the greatest symphony of the 20th century - was not, in fact,
his last though it was the last one anybody ever heard. For some years
thereafter he laboured mightily on an 8th but eventually gave up the
struggle and later burned the manuscript in his garden. He lived on till death
at 91 in 1957, but he ceased publishing after 1926 when still only 60. Perhaps
only then did he feel financially secure, but it seems he stopped working on
anything major or original when he ceased being pleased altogether. His muse
always sounded a bit erratic and wilful, which is part of his unique attraction
as a composer. When he was young it took him down a path he didn’t want to
follow, and became an intolerable companion when he was old.
An unexpected thing to learn about
Sibelius is that he wasn’t incredibly Finnish. Of course he was Finnish, born in Finland, but he had
difficulties with spoken Finnish because his own tongue was Swedish. And
Finnish is about as much like Swedish as Welsh is like English – from entirely
different linguistic roots. Sibelius was the progeny of a long-time exodus of
Swedes into Finland, for between 1157 and 1809 Finland was ruled by Sweden. He
grew up in a Swedish-Finnish family and milieu. Swedes in the main dominated
Finnish business and government. Finland was ceded to Russia in 1809 whereupon
it became an ‘autonomous’ Grand Duchy of
the Russian Empire, with the Tsar as Grand Duke. This state of affairs lasted
till the Bolshevik Revolution in Petrograd in 1917, after which Finland finally
gained its independence. This means that Sibelius was a Russian subject until
he was 52. He is often lined up with ‘national’ composers putting their
national idioms at the forefront of classical music: Grieg, Dvorak, Smetana, da
Falla, Rodrigo, Enescu, Vaughan-Williams, Dohnanyi and Bartok – a composer much
admired by Sibelius who painstakingly researched Hungarian folk idioms which
found their way into his greatest music. But, as Sibelius himself said, there
is not a single note of Finnish folk music in his own work: he composed
everything himself. In this sense it may be difficult to label him a ‘Finnish’
composer, and almost irrelevant in his case.
But not quite. Though there were class
tensions between Swedes and Finns in Finland, Russian rule, hardening in the
1880s and 90s, brought Finns together
whatever their origins. The young Sibelius was passionate for Finnish
independence. His Karelia music was sensed by his countrymen as a gesture of
defiance. Later, his Finlandia was an anthem for a nation not yet in existence.
It ranks with La Marseillaise and The Internationale as one of the most popular
anthems in the world. Born into Lutheranism with its long musical heritage
(think Bach, for example, and Martin Luther himself) Sibelius was a dab hand at
the secular anthem and hymn-like tune: it can be found throughout his music. In
his old age he arranged actual Lutheran hymns.
Even more importantly, Sibelius
communed with nature for his inspiration as have others such as, for example,
Messiaen and Villa-Lobos. When still relatively young and requiring absolute
silence as a prerequisite for composition, he built a house for self and family
in proximity to forests and lakes, and within a small community of artists, fairly
isolated. When not composing he took long walks in the forest, observing,
listening and being inspired by what was the Finnish landscape and wildlife.
His ‘Finland’ is the physical Finland itself. This includes its gods and
legends – beliefs long before conjured up from the vast, mysterious wilderness.
Though Sibelius was no pagan and no mere scene-painter. He draws from nature’s
special form of ‘silence’ in the sense meant by Ralph Waldo Emerson in
Emerson’s The American Scholar (1838): that the Book of Nature is the fount of
knowledge, wisdom and inspiration, far more than all the libraries in the
world. And Sibelius was no more a mere naturalist than was Wordsworth, who drew
his inspiration also from nature but in the service of Romantic poetry and
philosophy.
However granite-like the Sibelian
image may be, no human being is a Rock of Gibraltar. Sibelius was
intermittently an alcoholic with long periods of sobriety. On the eve of the
premiere of his Violin Concerto in 1903, the work was still unfinished. A
search-party was sent out and tracked him down to somewhere in Helsinki in
order to sober him up sufficiently to put the finishing touches on what may be
the greatest of modern concertos for the violin (his own instrument). In 1923
he was too drunk to conduct the premiere of his 6th Symphony and had
to be led off the podium in the middle of the first movement. He may have
communed with nature but his wife had to put up with his occasional departures
to the city for heroic binges, with male companions, perhaps for days at a
time. Benjamin Britten said cattily that Sibelius must have written the 6th
Symphony when he was drunk. I wouldn’t have thought Sibelius was Britten’s cup
of tea anyhow, and this may have been no more than a snide remark about the
symphony, but he was right about the premiere.
The 6th is Sibelius’s least-known
major work but there are those who consider it his finest. I didn’t understand
it much when I first played it, the puzzling thing being that it gave me a craving to keep playing it
until I did. It is a subtle distillation of his maturest expression: like the 4th
denying the listener the satisfaction of mighty climaxes and resolutions. And
deliberately so. He announced himself that while other composers offered up
‘exotic cocktails’ his 6th was a glass of ‘cold, clear spring
water’. One would like to think this was what he drank while composing it.
Sibelius keeps a tension or balance
between the classical and the romantic in his music: romantic in range of
expression, classical in regard to form and concision. In contrast to Mahler,
for example, Sibelius’s symphonies grew shorter as he progressed, after the 2nd.
Sibelius came to have a high
reputation on the European continent. In 1907 he and Gustav Mahler conversed on
the nature of the symphony on equal terms when Mahler was visiting Helsinki. Later,
World War I intervened with Germany and Austro-Hungary on the opposing side, as
it were. Sibelius’s reputation plummeted in Mitteleuropa. German critics
referred to his tone poems as ‘film music’. What cheek! As if any movie could
survive under Lemminkainen or Tapiola! By contrast his music found favour in
the Anglo-American world. I hazard Americans would have liked his ‘wide open spaces’ approach while the
more withdrawn Brits might respond to his lack of embarrassing sentimentality
(ironically, while Elgar’s music is nothing if not nostalgic, there is no
nostalgia in Sibelius at all that I can find) – he is emotional, naturally, but
not drippy. A favourite contemporary of his was the ‘cool’ Debussy. I have
already said that his piano music responds wonderfully to the ‘Bachian’ Glenn
Gould. Consider swans. Tchaikovsky’s swans are dancing human beings. Saint-Saens’s ‘The Swan’ from his charming
Carnival of the Animals is romantically conceived, enough for it to be danced
as ‘The Dying Swan’ by Pavlova. By contrast Sibelius’s Swan of Tuonela, one of
his most popular works, is no more and no less than a swan. Swans may have
emotions but not human emotions.
Swan-language is not human language and none but other swans understand it (if
‘understand’ is the right word). It is the sheer beauty and majesty of the swan
itself, gliding along on an impenetrably gloomy lake, that is so moving, for
the swan is itself, non-human, the
Other in nature. I turn to Sibelius with
relief when I find myself having had a surfeit of (self-pitying?) late Romantic
classical music. One responds to the expansiveness of the outer and inner
worlds that he expresses with tears if one is so inclined; but they are not
tears brought on by the frettings and sufferings of the ego. In the 1950s the
charismatic Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic were influential in
restoring Sibelius’s reputation on the continent. A later successor to von
Karajan was Sir Simon Rattle, astonished to find that some of his German
musicians still considered Sibelius ‘an amateur’. They were put right when
exposed to his profoundly moving effect on their audiences! By contrast a
musician friend of mine in London had a framed portrait on his piano that I
assumed was his father or grandfather. It was Sibelius.
Sibelius was no amateur moonstruck
naif wandering the woods. Musically he was thoroughly cosmopolitan, trained by
outstanding teachers in Berlin and Vienna and whose musical antecedents
included amongst others Beethoven (of course); Wagner and his Leitmotif; Liszt in turning the young
man’s attention to tone poems more than opera; the uncompromising, towering
Bruckner; and Tchaikovsky – the last one especially significant in the
germination of Sibelius’s 1st Symphony of 1899. It’s sort of amazing
to realize that Sibelius died in 1957 yet had been a contemporary of
Tchaikovsky’s for nearly thirty years till the latter’s death in 1893. Since
copyright runs out seventy years after the death of the progenitor it means
Sibelius will not be in the public domain until 2028! Meanwhile he features in
concerts as a classic amongst classics, be they Bach, Beethoven or Brahms. He
was entirely familiar with the work of his contemporaries in the European
mainstream. His almost-exact contemporary Richard Strauss said of him; ‘I have
more skill but he is greater.’
Subjecting his (‘non-salon’) works to
musicological analysis is tricky since he scarcely follows the conventional
sonata form of first subject, second subject, recapitulation and so on. Much of
the time it’s difficult to know where he’s going in terms of structure; in some
cases one has to hear the work in question two or three times before one grasps
how he has achieved its unity. But even on first hearing the climactic endings
are often powerfully convincing, while individual strokes have an insidious way
of sticking in the memory. Not unlike following the plot of one of Raymond
Chandler’s detective stories! Or predicting the course of the Mississippi River
across a decade. The nature analogy is deliberate. With the discovery of DNA we
learned that nature is ordered ‘logically’, intricately and sublimely in its
fundamentals or ‘building blocks’ – but look at the diversity and
unpredictability of the results! Unlike one
who writes scores for natural history TV programmes, Sibelius is not a purely
descriptive or imitative ‘nature’ composer: he is himself a force of nature in
the way he uses musical structure to produce seemingly spontaneous effects. No
wonder in writing of his major work musicologists so frequently fall into usage
of the word ‘organic’ to describe it, that is in the way he generates different
themes growing out of each other that form a whole. The 7th Symphony
brings this to perfection. God hurled His creation to the ground, said
Sibelius, whereupon it shattered into myriad small fragments. It had been his
own destiny to piece them together again
to make a new wholeness.
Sibelius’s works are apparently so
artless and spontaneous that we may fail – at least on first listening – to realise
how tightly structured they really are. The structure that conceals structure.
The overall effect is to create a kind of ‘miraculous’ aura about them;
listeners are often quite mystified as to quite why a particular work had such
a powerful effect on them. For that matter, why is nature so beautiful when one
really looks at it? It is surprisingly difficult to say, in so many words.
It may seem strange for Sibelius to
appear on a socialist blog: unconventional he was, and hopeless over his
finances. But he was bourgeois to the core, even as a believer in national
independence. He lived, and outlived, both in his life and in his music, within
and beyond the high bourgeois musical culture of his youth and early
heyday. His legacy transcends his own
times, a mark of his greatness.
No, I’m not hi-jacking Sibelius for
socialism but we need him now as much as the Finns needed him to help them realise
their identity and celebrate their liberty. I think we can appreciate through
his music much more about ourselves vis-à-vis nature and the nature in
ourselves than we might have done otherwise. Sibelius weaponised to save the planet?
The idea would certainly never have occurred to him. But it’s worth realising
that the wilderness that inspired him (however literally or otherwise) is
elsewhere being concreted over, ploughed under, or poisoned beyond
regeneration. Even swans die when gobbling up bits of plastic.
A postscript. Sibelius was outwardly
taciturn but really quite genial and humorous.
Both these facets are caught in my favourite Sibelian saying:
‘No one ever erected a statue to a
critic.’
With a likeness indeed captured in
stone, this stern-looking figure is immensely reassuring in all sorts of ways.
Right on, Johan, as I would never have said to his face.
No one, at least till now, has erected
a statue to a fracker.
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