Celebrating the music and musician

In 1921, the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin elected Jean Sibelius as an honorary fellow. Even if, as a foreigner, he could not become a full member, it was a great honour for a Finnish composer. In a letter to the composer dated 21 July 1921, the committee chairman, conservative composer Friedrich E. Koch, cited the exceptional ‘truthfulness’ (Wahrhaftigkeit) of Sibelius's music as the basis for their decision. Ironically, the concept of Wahrhaftigkeit in Sibelius's work has subsequently been one of the most problematic areas of his critical reception: the notion of ‘musical truth’ had very different connotations for the theorists of the Frankfurt School such as Adorno. Yet at the time, the accolade was a sign of deep appreciation, based on Sibelius's output as far as his Fifth Symphony. By the time the distinguished Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome had asked him to join the Comitato Internazionale d'Onore in 1916, Sibelius had been widely acknowledged as a leading representative of the last Romantic generation in European music. In Santa Cecilia he joined a host of other musical celebrities, including Guido Adler, Arrigo Boito, Max Bruch, Claude Debussy, Edward Elgar, Alexander Glazunov, Carl Goldmark, Engelbert Humperdinck, Vincent d'Indy, Giacomo Puccini, Camille Saint-Saëns, Max Reger, Alexander Skryabin, Charles V. Stanford and Richard Strauss. This was, by any standards, an impressive range of great turn-of-the-century European musicians, even exceeding the Bertin Academy, and eloquently attests to the international reputation that Sibelius's music already enjoyed.

It must have been in 1968 that I found myself sitting with a group of fellow undergraduates in Professor Wilfrid Mellers' first-floor study in the music department of the new University of York. At that time the department was in two elegant former town houses in the centre of the medieval city. It was spring or early summer and shadow-patterns of leaves moved across the walnut-coloured grand piano by the window as Mellers played and talked his way through Tapiola, weaving his own magic spells with words about ecstasy, terror and infinity and echoing with cryptic grandeur the concluding sentence of his piece on Sibelius in Man and his Music: ‘Perhaps we have to “go through” Tapiola in order to live again.’ At the end we listened to the whole piece on record, the mood of enthralled absorption disturbed only by a colleague's insistence that Sibelius should have ended it in B minor. But Mellers had persuaded us that we were listening to an unequivocally ‘great’ work which he had once, he told us, learned to score-read all the way through at the piano.

We were, of course, being introduced to Tapiola little more than ten years after Sibelius's death in 1957 – a point emphasised by the uncorrected tense in Mellers's Man and his Music (first published in 1962): ‘in the thirty years that have elapsed since he wrote Tapiola he seems to have created no music of consequence’. Mellers had clearly devoted himself to the study of Tapiola during the composer’s later, silent years,when Sibelius’s reputation in Britain was still unshaken by the critical implications of a more contemporary ‘new music’ and the pending inrush of American and continental avant-garde experimentation. Devotees of such experimentation in the 1960s would find in Mellers one of their most significant educational gurus, but his pioneering music course at York was defined by its stylistic and historical diversity.

For all of its fame, Finlandia has not been much examined from an analytical point of view. Perhaps some commentators have considered this work too self-evident in its meaning and structure to merit extended study. Perhaps the piece's primitivist surface has discouraged close attention – its coarse-grained rhetoric, its thick brush-strokes, its stark primary colours. Or it may be that Sibelius's most widely known composition, a shopworn concert favourite and a national emblem, has seemed to exist in a space beyond commentary. And yet there is much of interest to observe about Finlandia. In addition, recent archival work in Finland, uncovering and recording two early endings for the piece – first presented to the public in 1899 as ‘Suomi herää’ (Finland Awakens) – has invited a reconsideration of the music. It may therefore be appropriate that we ask ‘Suomi herää’ to awaken into the world of more sustained reflection. The following discussion will proceed in two arcs: first, an elementary overview of the music alone; second, a consideration of hermeneutic questions of representation, allusion, and meaning, questions informed especially by an awareness of its original 1899 context.

The encounter of a young, virile, and heroic male subject with an alluring, seductive yet dangerous feminine ‘Other’ is an archetypal mythic narrative. It is an erotic topos that is repeatedly evoked in musical works of the Romantic and early modern period and is a crucial one in the early symphonic works of Sibelius. Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of the Island, Op. 22/1 (1895–6), based on the episode in the Kalevala recounting the hero's adventures with the young virgins of the island, is one of the most overt of such examples. Features of this work relate closely to the musical character of the first two symphonies, so that the apparently ‘absolute’ symphonies can persuasively be heard to engage with a similar nexus of meanings.

In the symphonic poem, first performed in 1896 but withheld from publication until after the Second World War, an opening horn call is followed by an Allegro first-subject group initially rather plaintive and yearning but which leads to playful, pastoral figures characterised by an increasing rhythmic energy over harmonic stasis. A long held tonic E♭ pedal finally moves to D♭, which enharmonically turns to C #(Fig. H; bar 127) as a contrasting thematic character is introduced. When the accompaniment turns to pulsating syncopated chords in strings and woodwind a surging melody in the cellos reaches the ‘heights of sensuousness’. Two features drive this increasingly erotic thematic process. First, the expansion of arabesque decorations into ardent melodic turns. In the first thematic group the melodic turn figure had been rather discreetly, even apologetically introduced by the triplet decorative tailpiece to the oboe melody (Fig. A; bars 13–16).

Though Sibelius conducted the premieres of the vast majority of his major symphonic works himself, he committed none of them to record. As Bethany Lowe points out in the preceding chapter, unlike with Elgar, we do not have a recorded legacy of Sibelius's interpretative view of his own music. During his lifetime, however, Sibelius enjoyed the support of a wide range of leading interpreters, from Robert Kajanus in Finland, to Sir Thomas Beecham in England and Herbert von Karajan in Germany, many of whom committed their work to recording on gramophone. The contrast with the relative lack of international interest in music of Sibelius's Danish contemporary, Carl Nielsen, is both striking and significant: the recorded reception history of the two great Nordic composers could hardly be more different. Even during the period, following his death, when Sibelius's music seems to have occupied a less prominent place in the concert repertory, new recordings of his work continued to appear, and recent years have witnessed a remarkable number of new interpretations issued on compact disc.

The relationship between performance and academic criticism has sometimes seemed rather a distant and ambivalent one. The final chapter is an attempt to bridge the divide and find common ground, by examining aspects of Sibelius interpretation from the perspectives of two authoritative interpreters of his work, Sir Colin Davis and Osmo Vänskä. The two conductors were chosen not simply for their pre-eminence, but also because their work is the product of very different interpretative contexts. Davis's performances are among the most powerful and original in the Anglo-American Sibelius tradition, while Vänskä leads a younger generation of Finnish interpreters.

There are few great composers whose miniatures seem so problematic as those of Sibelius. Grieg, Paderewski, Rakhmaninov, Chabrier, Debussy and Ravel have all at some point been criticised for their preference for working in smaller genres, but Sibelius is a rather different case. His achievements in large-scale symphonic forms are widely recognised, but his miniatures have often been neglected or misunderstood and demand critical re-evaluation. The majority of Sibelius's smaller works were written for the piano, and his piano music has been the object of particular critical scorn. According to the English critic Cecil Gray, who held a lofty opinion of Sibelius as a symphonist, it was strange that Sibelius wrote so many pieces for an instrument that he did not understand and that he reputedly disliked. Gray stated that Sibelius's piano works were ‘for the most part completely undistinguished in conception and musical substance’, and concluded that ‘they are also singularly ineffective from the point of view of the instrument’. Gray also felt that Sibelius's piano music suffered by comparison with his other works, and that, ‘so far from there being any discernible process of development from the early [piano pieces] to the late, the contrary rather is the truth … and the latest volumes are definitely the weakest’.

When Jean Sibelius, approaching the age of twenty-five, left Finland in October 1890 to study in Vienna, he had never composed anything on a symphonic scale. His teachers, Martin Wegelius in Helsinki and Albert Becker in Berlin, had restricted him to the writing of contrapuntal exercises and chamber works. The young man's experience with orchestral instruments was largely defined by his knowledge of the strings, although he had produced a few works for brass septet. Kullervo, an enormous five movement symphony for full romantic orchestra, baritone and soprano soloists, and male choir, marked an astonishing technical as well as creative breakthrough. Because Kullervo was begun in Vienna, attention has naturally fallen on that city and the composer's experiences there as marking a creative turning point for Sibelius. His love for Aino Jäarnefelt, to whom he had just become engaged, his awakening to the Kalevala, Elias Lönnrot's great collection of epic poetry, and the music he heard have been considered the most important shaping events of those months. Yet Vienna itself was one of the most intellectually fertile cities of the nineteenth century, and the composer's teeming sketchbooks and lively correspondence strikingly attest to its milieu. When studied against their Viennese background, these sources suggest a far richer experience for Sibelius in the Austrian capital than has been portrayed. They also lead to some surprising insights about the most important product of that stay, Sibelius's first symphony, Kullervo.

Categories of genre in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century music engage with many levels of musical interpretation. Placed in their historical context, generic conventions define our understanding of musical works and serve, above all, to inform our sense of musical meaning. Nevertheless, identifying the precise boundaries between individual genres such as the tone poem and the symphony can be problematic. Despite the hybrid construction of the term ‘symphonic poem’ (Synfonische Dichtung), first coined by Liszt in the 1840s, the tone poem often seems generically opposed, rather than closely related, to the symphony. Throughout the nineteenth century, after Beethoven, the symphony was principally concerned with notions of breadth and monumentality. Regarded as the highest form of absolute music, the symphony aspired to high levels of motivic unity, formal abstraction and goal-directed (teleological) musical form. Symphonies consciously and powerfully engaged in a dialogue with canonical works of the past. Tone poems, by contrast, are concerned at a fundamental level with the evocation of a particular mood or atmosphere, or with the articulation of an extra-musical narrative or programme. In response to such literary or pictorial subject matter, tone poems are characterised by their freer, innovative approach to musical form, particularly the tendency towards structures that telescope the traditional four-movement scheme of a symphony into a single musical span. Such forms often sacrifice dynamic motivic or harmonic development in favour of radically static moments of sonorous or poetic contemplation, intended as musical depictions of the (super-) natural world.

Sibelius as a nineteenth-century and post-nineteenth-century composer

Sibelius's historical position is tricky to define. He continued the tradition of harmonic tonality well into the 1920s, but in a way that was far removed from the neo-tonalities of Stravinsky, Hindemith or Les Six. When reading historical accounts of Sibelius's music, it is easy to recognise a sense of embarrassment with regard to Sibelius's work. He is sometimes compared with Beethoven, and sometimes included in the same category as modernist composers such as Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf, and Max Reger. The comparison with Strauss is not an implausible one. Both composers approached atonality around 1910: Strauss in Salome (1903/1905) and Elektra (1909) and Sibelius in his Fourth Symphony (1911) and Luonnotar (1912). Neither composer, however, followed Schoenberg's line of development, but turned instead to a more tonal musical style. For Strauss the turning point was Der Rosenkavalier (1911), and for Sibelius The Oceanides (1914) and the Fifth Symphony (1914–19). Thus, the idea of placing Sibelius in the same historical category as Mahler and Strauss can be defended from the point of view of technical musical details such as tonality, but if ideological and cultural factors are considered, a more elastic categorisation is needed.

The inherited view of the East-End, largely working-class, theatres of Victorian and Edwardian London, is all too often that of someone firmly planted in the West End. Many of the contemporary reports on East-End entertainments come to us via critics and commentators who are ostentatiously “visitors”: explorers who will report back to an audience of middle- and upper-class readers on the amusements of the denizens of “darkest London.” The problem, for historians and students of the nineteenth-century theatres of London, is to discern the ways in which the East-End theatres were both like and unlike their better-known and much commented-on counterparts to the west.

Certainly the East-End theatres merit analysis, if only for the sake of the sheer number of theatregoers they entertained. Even before the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843 broke the patent system restricting the performance of spoken drama to Drury Lane and Covent Garden, “illegitimate” theatres such as the Pavilion in Whitechapel were catering to a booming population. The area encompassed by the East End was remarkably diverse, and changing. Hackney, for instance, was considered, in the 1860s, to be “one of the handsomest suburbs in London” (although this district would suffer economic decline in later decades); while Stepney in the 1850s had “no public drainage, but a name for cholera.” In mid-century London, more than half of the population was “working class.” The rise in population was the result of the building boom of the first half of the century, particularly the development of the London Docks.

Anyone skimming the columns of the Pall Mall Gazette in the 1890s might assume that English drama was flourishing, and that theatrical topics were on everyone's lips. New plays and productions are given long reviews; actor-managers' plans for future offerings and seasons are trailed in some detail; and a European dimension is assured by the frequent references to Ibsen and the close attention paid to the visits of the Comédie-Française, or of Eleanora Duse. On 17 February 1893, for example, there is an article by Henry James on The Master Builder, with Elizabeth Robins as Hilda Wangel, followed four days later by an edition of the Gazette that includes both an interview with George Moore on his forthcoming The Strike at Arlingford, and another review - a hostile one - of The Master Builder. At the end of February, Wilde's Salomé, published in French, is savaged, but the reviewer at least discusses it in a theatrical context. In March comes a revival of A Doll's House, in April, the premiere of Wilde's A Woman of No Importance, in May the enthusiastic reception of Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, in June reviews of performances of Rosmersholm at the Opéra Comique, of Duse as Nora Helmer, and of the publication of Shaw's Widowers' Houses. These are all names or works that retain their resonance a century or more later. Theatre, and theatrical form, was alive.

One of the earliest descriptions of melodrama - only it wasn't called melodrama but tragi-comedy - partly explains melodrama's ambiguous reputation. Writing in 1611, the English dramatist John Fletcher stated:

It was this deformed hybrid – this state of being neither one thing nor another, which refused to equate disaster and tragic excess with death, which acknowledged and celebrated common folk, and which did, despite Fletcher’s denial, inject moments of mirth into serious business – which brought onto the English stage a theatrical genre previously found in the ironic “tragedies” of Euripides and in the “pastoral” plays of Renaissance Europe. Although Fletcher sought to link “tragi-comedy” with the Athenian satyr play, his plea for respectability and critical status was ignored.

For many, the Victorian theatre is the scruffy orphan of high culture, somewhat redeemed by the cultivation of its Edwardian successors. Today's high-minded aficionados take their antitheatrical tone from the stuffiest Victorians: the stage was and is crude, embarrassing, primitive, compared to its sister arts, prose, poetry, and painting. In any case, the medium is by definition ephemeral, and so impossible to study. Its scripts, when they exist at all, are not moored by weighty volumes as literature is, or heavy canvases like paintings; like most screenplays today, Victorian plays are sketches for productions and performances now vanished in the mists that engulfed the world before film preserved it.

Collaborative, messy, and lost, the theatre is generally, and wrongly, dismissed as sub-canonical, at least until the 1890s, when the self-conscious literacy of Wilde and Shaw elevated it to the verbal sophistication that would become Edwardian drama. But the theatre’s elusive art can be retrieved and, in books like this, it is. Once we begin to piece this hybrid medium back together, we restore the prism through which all Victorian artists and audiences – and these were most Victorians – saw their world.