A Critic at Large

Apparition in the Woods

Rescuing Sibelius from silence.

by Alex Ross

July 9, 2007 .

Composing music may be the loneliest of artistic pursuits. It is a laborious traversal of an imaginary landscape. Emerging from the process is an art work in code, which other musicians must be persuaded to unravel. Nameless terrors creep into the limbo between composition and performance, during which a score sits mutely on the desk. Hans Pfitzner dramatized that moment of panic and doubt in “Palestrina,” his 1917 “musical legend” about the life of the Italian Renaissance master. The character of Palestrina speaks for colleagues across the centuries when he stops his work to cry, “What is the point of all this? Ach, what is it for?” 

The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius may have asked that question once too often. The crisis point of his career arrived in the late nineteen-twenties and the early thirties, when he was being lionized as a new Beethoven in England and America, and dismissed as a purveyor of kitsch in the tastemaking European music centers, where atonality and other modern languages dominated the scene. The contrasts in the reception of his music, with its extremes of splendor and strangeness, matched the manic-depressive extremes of his personality—an alcoholic oscillation between grandiosity and self-loathing. Sometimes he believed that he was in direct communication with the Almighty (“For an instant God opens his door and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony,” he wrote in a letter) and sometimes he felt worthless. In 1927, when he was sixty-one, he wrote in his diary, “Isolation and loneliness are driving me to despair. . . . In order to survive, I have to have alcohol. . . . Am abused, alone, and all my real friends are dead. My prestige here at present is rock-bottom. Impossible to work. If only there were a way out.” 

Sibelius, who was born in 1865 and died fifty years ago this September, spent the better part of his life at Ainola, a rustic house outside Helsinki. On his desk for many years lay the Eighth Symphony, which promised to be his summary masterpiece. He had been working on it since 1924 and had indicated several times that it was almost ready for performance. In 1933, a copyist transcribed twenty-three pages of the score, and at a later date Sibelius’s publisher may have bound the manuscript in a set of seven volumes. There were reportedly parts for chorus, as in Beethoven’s Ninth. But the Eighth never appeared. The composer finally gave in to the seduction of despair. “I suppose one henceforth takes me as—yes!—a ‘fait accompli,’ ” he wrote in 1943. “Life is soon over. Others will come and surpass me in the eyes of the world. We are fated to die forgotten. I must start economizing. It can’t go on like this.”

Aino Sibelius, the composer’s wife, for whom the house was named, recalled what happened next. “In the nineteen-forties there was a great auto da fé at Ainola,” she said. “My husband collected a number of manuscripts in a laundry basket and burned them on the open fire in the dining room. Parts of the ‘Karelia Suite’ were destroyed—I later saw remains of the pages which had been torn out—and many other things. I did not have the strength to be present and left the room. I therefore do not know what he threw onto the fire. But after this my husband became calmer and gradually lighter in mood.” 

Ainola stands much as the composer left it. The atmosphere of the house is heavy and musty, as if Sibelius’s spirit were still pent up inside. But you get a different feeling when you walk into the forest that abuts one side of the house. The treetops meet in an endless curving canopy. The ground is uncluttered: many paths fork among the trunks. Venturing a little farther into the wood, you lose sight of all human habitation. A profound stillness descends. The light begins to fail, the mists roll in. After a while, you may begin to wonder if you will ever find your way back. Many times in Sibelius’s music, the exaltation of natural sublimity gives way to inchoate fear, which has less to do with the outer landscape than with the inner one: the forest of the mind. 

Milan Kundera, in his 1993 essay collection “Testaments Betrayed,” anatomizes the more peripheral European cultures, using his native Czechoslovakia as a specimen. “The small nations form ‘another Europe,’ ” he writes. “An observer can be fascinated by the often astonishing intensity of their cultural life. This is the advantage of smallness: the wealth in cultural events is on a ‘human scale.’ ” Kundera warns, however, that the familial feeling can turn tense and constricting: “Within that warm intimacy, each envies each, everyone watches everyone.” If an artist ignores the rules, the rejection can be cruel. Even those who rise to fame may experience isolation at the summit—the burden of being a national hero.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, each of the “small nations” had a celebrity composer. Edvard Grieg in Norway, Antonín Dvorák in Czechoslovakia, and Carl Nielsen in Denmark, among others, served as ambassadors for their local cultures. In Russia and Britain, too, composers took on outsized roles, embodying ideas of national greatness, whether or not they desired the assignment. A little later in the twentieth century, certain composers who had come of age around 1900 became symbols, in a wider sense, of a rapidly fading pre-First World War world. They tended to be conservative in style, and they were haunted by feelings of obsolescence, to the point where they found it difficult to keep writing. The iconic British composer Edward Elgar, who died in 1934, failed to finish another large-scale work after his supremely elegiac Cello Concerto of 1918-19. Sergei Rachmaninoff produced only five major works from 1917 until his death, in 1943. 

“I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien,” Rachmaninoff wrote in 1939. “I cannot cast out the old way of writing, and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me. . . . I cannot cast out my musical gods in a moment and bend the knee to new ones.” Sibelius felt the same pang of loss. “Not everyone can be an innovating genius,” he wrote in his diary. “As a personality and as an apparition from the woods you will have your small, modest place.”

And yet the so-called “regional” composers left an imposing body of work, which is integral to the century as a whole. Their music may lack the vanguard credentials of Schoenberg’s or Stravinsky’s, at least on the sonic surface, but Nielsen, in his 1925 book “Living Music,” makes a good counter-argument: “The simplest is the hardest, the universal the most lasting, the straightest the strongest, like the pillars that support the dome.” And, precisely because these composers communicated general feelings of mourning for a pre-technological past, or, more simply, a yearning for vanished youth, they remained acutely relevant for a broad public.

Mainstream audiences often lag behind the intellectual classes in appreciating the more adventurous composers, but sometimes they are quicker to perceive the value of music that the politicians of style fail to comprehend. In 1952, Nicolas Slonimsky put together a delightful book,“Lexicon of Musical Invective,” an anthology of wrongheaded music criticism in which now canonical masterpieces are compared with feline caterwauling, barnyard noises, and so on. Slonimsky should also have written a “Lexicon of Musical Condescension,” gathering high-minded essays in which now canonical masterpieces were dismissed as middlebrow, with a long section reserved for Sibelius. 

Sibelius was not merely the most famous composer Finland ever produced but the country’s chief celebrity in any field. He played a symbolic but active role in the drive toward Finnish independence, which was finally achieved in 1917. When Finns are asked to characterize their culture, they invariably mention, along with such national treasures as the lakeside sauna, Fiskars scissors, and Nokia cell phones, “our Sibelius.” Mostly because of him, classical music has retained a central role in Finnish culture. The country’s government invests enormous sums in orchestras, opera houses, new-music programs, and music schools. The annual Finnish expenditure on the arts is roughly two hundred times per capita what the United States government spends through the National Endowment for the Arts.
Finns are strangers to the European family. Descendants of an errant Mongolian tribe, they speak a language unrelated to the Indo-European linguistic group. For centuries, they were governed by the Swedes; then, in 1809, they became a semi-autonomous grand duchy of tsarist Russia. In the late nineteenth century, the Swedish influence remained strong, with a minority of Swedish-speakers forming the élite. Sibelius belonged to this group; he learned Finnish as a second language. Yet, like many of his generation, he avidly joined in the independence campaign, which became more urgent after Tsar Nicholas II introduced measures designed to suppress Finland’s autonomy.
The national legends of Finland are contained in the “Kalevala,” a poetic epic compiled in 1835 by a country doctor named Elias Lönnrot. Cantos 31 through 36 tell of the bloodthirsty young fighter Kullervo, who has his way with a young woman who turns out to be his sister. She commits suicide; he goes off to war. One day, finding himself again in the forest where the rape occurred, he asks his sword what kind of blood it wishes to taste. The sword demands the blood of a guilty man, whereupon Kullervo rams his body on the blade. In 1891 and 1892, Sibelius, who had just completed two final years of study in Berlin and Vienna, used this dismal tale as the basis for his first major work, “Kullervo,” an eighty-minute symphonic drama for men’s chorus, soloists, and orchestra.
The Finnish epic has a metre all its own: each line contains four main trochaic beats, but vowels are often stretched for dramatic effect. Instead of smoothing out the poetry into a foursquare rhythm, Sibelius bent his musical language in sympathetic response: in the third movement, for example, the orchestra maintains a pattern of five beats in a bar, while the chorus elongates its lines to phrases of fifteen, ten, eight, and twelve beats, respectively. 

In 1892, “Kullervo” had a decisively successful première in Helsinki. For the remainder of the decade, Sibelius worked mainly in the tone-poem genre, consolidating his fame with such works as “En Saga,” “The Swan of Tuonela,” the “Karelia Suite,” and the tuneful “Finlandia.” Sibelius’s mastery of the orchestra, already obvious in “Kullervo,” became prodigious. “The Swan of Tuonela,” which was conceived as the overture to an unfinished “Kalevala” opera, begins with the mirage-like sound of A-minor string chords blended one into the next over a span of four octaves.
Sibelius finished his first two symphonies in 1899 and 1902. On the surface, these were typical orchestral dramas of the heroic soul, although Sibelius’s habit of breaking down themes into murmuring textures sounded strange to many early listeners. Finns quickly appropriated the Second as an emblem of national liberation; the conductor Robert Kajanus heard in it “the most broken-hearted protest against all the injustice that threatens at the present time,” together with “confident prospects for the future.” In other words, the symphony was understood as a gesture of defiance in the face of the Tsar. Although Sibelius rejected this interpretation, images of the Finnish struggle may have played a role in his thinking. In the finale of the Second, a crawling, rising-and-falling figure in the violas and cellos evokes a recurring pattern in the second scene of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov”—the scene in which Pimen the monk records the villainies of Tsar Boris.
Sibelius’s other “hit” scores of the period, the brilliantly moody Violin Concerto and the affectingly maudlin “Valse Triste,” cemented his international reputation and therefore increased his stature at home. Around this time, though, alcohol became an issue. Sibelius, who often conducted his own works, would fortify himself with liquor before engagements, then disappear for days. A widely discussed painting by the Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela, “The Problem,” depicted Sibelius drinking with friends, his eyes rolled back in his head. Although he was supported by a state pension, he ran up large debts. He was also beset by illnesses, some real and some imagined. Fissures were appearing in the façade that “Finland’s hero” presented to the world.
In 1904, Sibelius tried to escape the embarrassments of his Helsinki life style by moving with his wife and three daughters to Ainola. There he set to work on his Third Symphony, which was itself a kind of musical escape. In contrast to the muscular rhetoric of “Kullervo” and the first two symphonies, the Third speaks in a self-consciously clear, pure language. At the same time, it is a sustained deconstruction of symphonic form. The last movement begins as a quicksilver Scherzo, but it gradually, almost imperceptibly, evolves into a marchlike Finale: the listener may have the feeling of the ground shifting underfoot.

Shortly after finishing this terse, elusive work, Sibelius got into a debate with Gustav Mahler on the nature of symphonic form. Mahler went to Helsinki in 1907 to conduct some concerts, and Sibelius presented his latest ideas about “severity of form” and the “profound logic” that should connect symphonic themes. “No!” Mahler replied. “The symphony must be like the world. It must be all-embracing.”
Sibelius kept a close eye on the latest developments in European music. On visits to Germany, he became acquainted with Strauss’s “Salome” and “Elektra” and Schoenberg’s earliest atonal scores. He was variously fascinated, alarmed, and bored by these Austro-German experiments; more to his taste was the sensuous radicalism of Debussy, whose “Prelude to ‘The Afternoon of a Faun,’ ” “Nocturnes,” and “La Mer” revealed new possibilities in modal harmony and diaphanous orchestral color.
Sibelius, in his Fourth Symphony, completed in 1911, presented his listeners with music as tensely forbidding as anything from the European continent at the time. (Perhaps the most searching rendition of this symphony on disk is Osmo Vänskä’s, with the Lahti Symphony, on the Bis label. Herbert von Karajan’s recordings of the last four symphonies, on D.G., remain satisfying, and Leif Segerstam recently conducted a superb complete cycle for Ondine.) Sibelius wrote the Fourth in the wake of several risky operations on his throat, where a tumor was growing. His doctors instructed him to give up drinking, which he agreed to do, although he resumed in 1915. The temporary loss of alcohol—“my most faithful companion,” he later called it—may have contributed to the claustrophobic grimness of the music, which, at the same time, bespoke a liberated intellect. The first few bars of the symphony extrapolate a new dimension in musical time. The opening notes, scored darkly for cellos, basses, and bassoons, are C, D, F-sharp, E—an ambiguous whole-tone collection. It feels like the beginning of a major thematic statement, but it gets stuck on F-sharp and E, which oscillate and fade away. Meanwhile, the durations of the notes lengthen by degrees, from quarter notes to dotted quarters and then to half notes. It’s as if a foreign body were exerting gravitational force on the music, slowing it down.
The narrative of the Fourth is circular rather than linear; it keeps revisiting the same insoluble conflicts. An effort at establishing F major as the key of the initially sunnier-sounding second movement founders on an immovable obstacle in the form of the note B-natural, after which there is a palpable shrug of defeat. The third movement dramatizes an attempt to build, note by note, a solemn six-bar theme of funerary character; the first attempt falters after three bars, the second after five, the third after four, the fourth after three. The fifth attempt proceeds with vigor but seems to go on too long, sprawling through seven bars without coming to a logical conclusion. Finally, with an audible grinding of the teeth, the full orchestra plays the theme in a richly harmonized guise. Then uncertainty steals back in.
The finale thins out as it goes along, as if random pages of the orchestral parts had blown off the music stands. This is music facing extinction, a premonition of the silence that would envelop the composer two decades later. Erik Tawaststjerna, Sibelius’s biographer, reveals that the middle section of the movement is based on sketches that Sibelius made for a vocal setting of Poe’s “The Raven,” in a German translation. It is easy to see why a man of Sibelius’s psychological makeup would have been drawn to its melancholia. The German translation follows the rhythm of the original, so Sibelius’s music can be matched up with lines in Poe’s poem. Softly crying flute and oboe lines in the epilogue fit the famous words “Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore.’ ” The symphony closes with blank-faced chords that are given the dynamic marking mezzoforte—half-loud. The instruction is surprising. Most of the great Romantic symphonies end with fortissimo affirmations. Wagner operas and Strauss tone poems often close pianissimo, whether in blissful or tragic mood. Sibelius’s Fourth ends not with a bang or a whimper but with a leaden thud.
“A symphony is not just a composition in the ordinary sense of the word,” Sibelius wrote in 1910. “It is more a confession of faith at different stages of one’s life.” If the Fourth is a confession, its composer might have been on the verge of suicide. Yet, like so many Romantics before him, Sibelius took a perverse pleasure in surrendering to melancholy, and finding joy in darkness. “Joyful and sorrowful,” he wrote in his diary. In his next symphony, he set himself the goal of bringing to the surface the joy inherent in creation.
Joy is not the same thing as simplicity. The Fifth begins and ends in crystalline major-key tonality, but it is a staggeringly unconventional work. The schemata of sonata form dissolve before the listener’s ears; in place of a methodical development of well-defined themes, there is a gradual, incremental evolution of material through trancelike repetitions. The musicologist James Hepokoski, in a monograph on the symphony, calls it “rotational form”; the principal ideas of the work come around again and again, though each time they are transformed in ways both small and large. The themes really assume their true shape only at the end of the rotation—what Hepokoski calls the “telos,” the epiphanic goal. Music becomes a search for meaning within an open-ended structure—an analogue to the spiritual life.
At the beginning of the Fifth, the horns present a softly glowing theme, the first notes of which spell out a symmetrical set of intervals: fourth, major second, fourth again. Fifty years later, John Coltrane used the same configuration in his jazz masterpiece “A Love Supreme.” Sibelius’s key is E-flat major, but the melody turns out to be a flighty thing, never quite touching the ground. A rhythmic trick adds to the sense of weightlessness. At first, it sounds like a standard 4/4 metre, but, after a syncopated sidestep, it turns out to be 12/8. A rotation process begins: the melodic material is broken into fragments and repeatedly reshaped. In the fourth iteration, an electrifying change occurs: the tempo accelerates by increments, until the music is suddenly hurtling forward. Sibelius achieved this effect by way of an exceptional feat of self-editing. After the première of the first version of the symphony, in 1915, he decided to rework it completely, and one thing he did was cut off the ending of the first movement, cut off the beginning of the second, and splice them together. The accelerating passage becomes a cinematic “dissolve” from one movement to another.
The second movement of the Fifth provides a spell of calm, although beneath the surface a significant new idea is coming to life—a swaying motif of rising-and-falling intervals, which the horns pick up in the finale and transform into the grandest of all Sibelian themes. The composer called it his “swan hymn”; he recorded it in his diary next to a description of sixteen swans flying in formation over Ainola. “One of my greatest experiences!” he wrote. “Lord God, that beauty! They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a gleaming, silver ribbon. . . . That this should have happened to me, who have so long been the outsider.” The swans reappeared three days later: “The swans are always in my thoughts and give splendor to [my] life. [It’s] strange to learn that nothing in the whole world affects me—nothing in art, literature, or music—in the same way as do these swans and cranes and wild geese. Their voices and being.”
The swan hymn transcends the depiction of nature: it is like a spiritual force in animal form. When the horns introduce the theme, during a flurry of action in the strings, it’s as if they had always been playing it, and the listener had 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 Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies.”
This is not “masculine” heroism on the order of Beethoven’s “Eroica,” which is also in the key of E-flat major. As Hepokoski suggests, Sibelius’s later music implies a maternal rather than paternal logic—God-given themes gestating in symphonic form. Only by way of wrenching dissonances does the music break loose from 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, and 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 a production of Shakespeare’s “The 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 had evolved in the Fifth, he began to dream of a continuous blur of sound without any 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 that 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, his sonic narratives end not in a blaze of victory, as in the Fifth, but in “dissolution,” “decay,” “liquidation.” The Sixth Symphony echoes the sober 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 Seventh Symphony is anchored on a grand theme for solo trombone, which sounds three times against a mercurially changing background. In its final appearance, it generates such a heat of elation that it teeters on the edge of chaos. The “dissolution” takes the form of a metallic smear of dominant-seventh chords in chromatic sequence followed by a high, exposed line in the violins. And “Tapiola,” a twenty-minute tone poem conjuring the Finnish forest, turned out to be Sibelius’s most severe and concentrated musical statement. 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, with no exit in sight.

Finally came the music for “The Tempest,” commissioned by the Danish Royal Theatre, in 1925. 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:
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 infuses the cue for “solemn music” that follows, with dissonances sounding at earsplitting volume. 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 tempest 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 nineteen-twenties and the early thirties. 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. 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 voted 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 American orchestral programming of the period. Serge Koussevitzky, the conductor of the Boston Symphony, presented a cycle of Sibelius symphonies in the 1932-33 season, and hoped to cap the series with the world première of the Eighth.
Olin Downes, who from 1924 to 1955 served as music critic of the Times, was crucial to Sibelius’s American reputation. The son of Louise Corson Downes, a crusading feminist and Prohibitionist, Downes believed that classical music should appeal not just to élites but to common people, and in the Times he 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.”
Downes travelled to Finland in 1927 to meet Sibelius. The composer had fallen into one of his periodic bouts of depression. 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 première of the Eighth Symphony in Boston, Downes pestered Sibelius for the completed score. In 1937, Downes 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 the 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 his music’s reception in Europe. Paris had no time for him. Berlin, before Hitler came to power, viewed him with condescension bordering on contempt. In those cities, expansive symphonies and evocative tone poems had little intellectual market value. The critic Heinrich Strobel referred to Sibelius’s Violin Concerto as “boring Nordic dreariness.”
In America, Downes’s pugilistic praise of Sibelius aroused resentment among Stravinsky’s many followers and admirers. In 1940, Virgil Thomson became the music critic of the New York Herald Tribune, and in his début review he tore lustily into Sibelius, calling the Second Symphony “vulgar, self-indulgent, and provincial beyond all description.” Equally venomous attacks emanated from the Schoenberg camp. The émigré theorist Theodor W. 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 almost every month, pleading for the Eighth. Sibelius replies in an elegant, slanting hand on parchment-like paper, tantalizingly mentioning a symphony that is almost, but not quite, finished.
In January, 1930, Sibelius reports, “My new work is not nearly ready and I cannot say when it will be ready.” In August, 1930, 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 piracy. 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: “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.” Another apologetic telegram from Finland arrives two weeks later. Sibelius probably heard 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,” he writes just a 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 had been checking the mailbox every day. Two weeks later, he receives yet another terse telegram, yet another postponement. There are a few 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 anything 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. In 1941, though, Finland aligned itself with the Germans, partly because Fascist elements had infiltrated the government and the Army, and partly because the Nazis would have taken over the country anyway. 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. Now he became almost an official German artist, receiving as many performances as Richard Strauss. He allegedly said, in a message to Nazi troops, “I wish with all my heart that you may enjoy a speedy victory.”
Sibelius was privately tormented by the promulgation of Nazi-style race laws in Finland. In 1943, he wrote in his diary, “How can you, Jean Sibelius, possibly take these ‘Aryan paragraphs’ seriously? . . . You are a cultural aristocrat and can make a stand against stupid prejudice.” But he made no stand. As the culture god of the Finnish state, he had long since ceased to see a difference between music and history, and now with the world in flames his music seemed destined for ruin. At the same time, obscure private agonies consumed him. The diary again: “The tragedy begins. My burdensome thoughts paralyze me. The cause? Alone, alone. I never allow the great distress to pass my lips. Aino must be spared.” The final page of the diary, in 1944, contains a shopping list for champagne, cognac, and gin.
Sibelius lived to the age of ninety-one, making wry jokes about his inability to die. “All the doctors who wanted to forbid me to smoke and to drink are dead,” he once said. In a more serious mood, he observed, “It is very painful to be eighty. The public love artists who fall by the wayside in this life. A true artist must be down and out or die of hunger. In youth he should at least die of consumption.” One September morning in 1957, he went for his usual walk in the fields and forest around Ainola, scanning the skies for cranes flying south for the winter. They were part of his ritual of autumn; when he was writing the Fifth Symphony, he had noted in his diary, “Every day I have seen the cranes. Flying south in full cry with their music. Have been yet again their most assiduous pupil. Their cries echo throughout my being.” When, on the third-to-last day of his life, the cranes duly appeared, he told his wife, “Here they come, the birds of my youth!” One of them broke from the flock, circled the house, cried out, and flew away.
There is a curiously moving photograph of Igor Stravinsky kneeling at Sibelius’s grave, a horizontal metal slab on the grounds at Ainola. The visit took place four years after Sibelius’s death. The master of modern music had practical reasons for making the pilgrimage: the Finnish government had promised him the Wihuri Sibelius Prize, worth twenty-five thousand dollars. But the gesture had a certain gallantry. In the past, Stravinsky had belittled Sibelius: on the occasion of the old man’s death, he had slammed down the phone when a reporter called for a comment. In his last years, though, Stravinsky warmed to a few Sibelius scores, and made an arrangement for octet of the Canzonetta for strings.
The notion that there might be something “modern” about Sibelius was risible to self-styled progressives of the immediate postwar era. The Schoenbergian pedagogue René Leibowitz summed up the feelings of many new-music connoisseurs when, in 1955, he published a pamphlet titled “Sibelius: The Worst Composer in the World.” Surveys of twentieth-century music labelled the composer a marginal figure in the central drama of the march toward atonality and other intellectual landmarks. Yet performances of Sibelius’s music continued unabated; conductors and audiences had it right all along.
In the last decades of the century, the politics of style changed in Sibelius’s favor. He began to be understood in terms of what Milan Kundera called, in another meditation on the culture of small nations, “antimodern modernism”—a personal style that stands outside the status quo of perpetual progress. Suddenly, composers and scholars were paying heed to Sibelius’s effects of thematic deliquescence, his ever-evolving forms, his unearthly timbres. New-music luminaries, from the hyper-complex Brian Ferneyhough to the neo-Romantic John Adams, cited him as a model. Among them was a group of Finns—Magnus Lindberg, Kaija Saariaho, and Esa-Pekka Salonen—who found new respect for the national hero after having rejected him in their punkish youth. Lindberg made his name with a gripping piece called “Kraft” (1983-85), whose orchestra is augmented by scrap-metal percussion and a conductor blowing a whistle. At any given point, it sounds nothing like Sibelius—Lindberg cites the influence of German noise-rock bands—but the accumulation of roiling sonic masses from microscopic material feels like a computer-age reprise of “Tapiola.”
In 1984, the great American avant-garde composer Morton Feldman gave a lecture at the relentlessly up-to-date Summer Courses for New Music, in Darmstadt, Germany. “The people who you think are radicals might really be conservatives,” Feldman said on that occasion. “The people who you think are conservative might really be radical.” And he began to hum the Sibelius Fifth. ♦