Jean Sibelius

by Guy Rickards

Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) is perhaps Finland’s most important cultural figure; his beautiful music, inspired primarily by Finnish landscapes and literature, helped to form a national identity for his homeland. Sibelius’s innovative symphonies and descriptive tone poems encapsulate the composer’s desire to create 'pure' music, and have become staples of the orchestral repertoire all over the world. This intriguing biography, which includes previously unavailable material, examines the life and work of this radical yet understated composer.

Genres: Music, Biography

240 pages, Paperback

First published August 28, 1997

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

While clearly indebted to Tawaststjerna's five-volume biography (1965-88) of Sibelius - based on Sibelius's papers - as Rickards acknowledges immediately in his Preface, this (relatively brief) biography of an enigmatic and oftentimes difficult and contrary personality and thoroughly affecting composer is thoroughly well-written, readable and enjoyable, and can be read in a couple of days.

While reading it, I worked through the very familiar Sibelius symphonies (1-7) and tone-poems which I already had, suffered a poor mono recording of the Violin Concerto and the Four Scènes Historiques (I & II), updated my database of smaller works which came to my notice, ordered a copy of some of the tone-poems of interest I did not have, and noted in particular that I should give the early choral symphonic poem Kullervo (Op. 7, 1892) a listen before it's too late. It can - like Mahler's choral Das Lied Von Der Erde (1909), be considered an unnumbered symphony, and the Lemminkäinen Suite (1896) could too, Rickards contests (p.198), being symphonic in structure - though it bears little of the quality of the numbered symphonies, in my view, being such an early work.

Sibelius's first two symphonies (1899, r. 1900; 1902) are the closest of the seven to the Classical form in the Romantic Russo-European mode (p.198). With the Third (1907), he became much more abstract, and in the 4th (1911), quite bleak and atonal. Discovering what personal vicissitudes lay behind his increasingly torturous and extended compositional periods for these symphonies really only cements two things in the mind regarding the symphonies: that Sibelius wrote symphonies like no other composer - even Mahler, a contemporary and probably the greatest symphonist of them all, really only wrote three abstract symphonies, the 7th (1905), the 9th (1909), and the 10th (1910) - and that his symphonies feel highly spiritual and emotional, or intimate such an inner world, yet also feel distinctly Finnish; they combine the intimate and private with the nationalistic and public.

Mahler's 7th is distinctly atonal throughout, with its magical-mystical two 'Nachtmusik' movements, and it may well have influenced Sibelius in his writing of his own 3rd and 4th, the latter distinctly veering towards atonality as it progresses. But interestingly, Rickards makes no comparison between them, even though the pair met in October 1907 (pp.94-6); he does, however, note that in that same year, Sibelius had written his pared-down half-hour long 3rd, while Mahler had just completed his hour-and-a-quarter long 'Symphony Of A Thousand' (8th, choral); Sibelius had turned away from the programmatic structure of the 1st and 2nd, while Mahler's 1st, 2nd and 3rd, 7th and 8th were clearly programmatic in nature.

Another lyrical milestone at the time was Rachmaninov's 2nd (1908) - but no mention is made of this phenomenal symphony, nor its composer; just an occasional debt of Sibelius's 1st and 2nd to the Russian romantic-epic symphonic style, and a mention of Tchaikovsky. Rachmaninov's symphony is very much not programmatic, yet conforms strongly to the sonata form. Was Sibelius aware of this profound and spiritual symphony? I’d love to have known.

But if Mahler inherited the Romantic classical symphonic structure from Bruckner (his mentor), Brahms, Beethoven and Mozart before him, espousing that 'the symphony must be like the world' (p.96), and write all but one (his 4th) to mirror such scale, why did Sibelius abandon any such classical archetypes and move in the direction of abstraction, yet whose symphonies nonetheless sound so characteristically Finnish? Partly, this is the answer - the very Finnish landscapes of the frozen mountainscape of the 4th, the sounds of the swans landing on the lake at Järvenpää in the 5th, the increasingly abstract yet subtly Finnish (or is it simply Sibelian) flavours of the 6th and 7th. And partly, it was because the symphony was his personal idiom, his essays of his inner self, where he - like Mahler - felt guided by God, unable to express himself fully any other way, except in similar symphonic pieces such as the other tone-poems, like Tapiola, his last major orchestral work.

At around this time, Schoenberg was writing his rather difficult Kammersymphonie (1906), which succeeded his equally difficult string sextet Verklärte Nacht (1899), a tone-poem, both avant-garde pieces of distinct atonality. Perhaps the former influenced Sibelius's 4th, but Rickards does not refer to any known knowledge by Sibelius, and the two did not meet. Yet Schoenberg re-arranged Verklärte Nacht for string orchestra in 1917, and that is one of the most beautiful pieces in the 'classical' canon. Was Sibelius aware of that? Could it have been an influence?

This was the period when Sibelius was labouring, between 1914 and 1919, on his 5th symphony, without doubt in my mind as beautiful as any of Mahler's, Brahms, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, or Rachmaninov or Prokofiev's. Such protracted labours illustrated Sibelius's difficulty during these war years, but also his difficulty in locking down his structure in his new departure from the classical sonata form, which represents his fingerprint style of bridging themes through movements, while still ostensibly retaining the sonata form, a very distinctive new style in his last three symphonies. These are the sort of correspondences even a lay person like myself wonders at, and I would very much have loved Rickards's biography to venture into such areas, but the brevity of discussion over his meeting and discussion with Mahler, and the occasional comparison (Epilogue) with Nielsen, for instance, did not mine such a potentially rich seam.

Naturally, a short biography of this nature cannot diverge much from the disquisition of facts, and so there are parts included (discussion of songs, for example, which are not my forté, and a later concentration on politics), where I'd rather more attention on cross-fertilisations and influences. But I am not a musicologist, and while this is where my lay listening ear goes when listening to such as Sibelius's 5th (or Verklärte Nacht, or Mahler's 3rd, or Rachmaninov's 2nd...), I accept the limitations of a 220-page narrative. And I enjoyed it all the way through, but for those small sections outlined, and despite the omissions I desired.

As for the man, he had his demons (drink), but he also had his angels (the 1st, the 2nd, the 5th, the 7th, Valse Triste), and a great deal more that I like, but have yet to come to love (the 3rd, the 4th, the 6th, Tapiola, the Lemminkäinen Suite, and possibly the Kullervo, who knows - but I will get it and find out). But the detail provided on both these scores did not alter my view of the man or the composer: Sibelius is a symphonist that I always come back to, along with Mahler, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Prokofiev. I love some Bach, I love some Bruckner and Brahms, I love some Satie, I love a little Schoenberg, I love a little Ravel... But Sibelius has a special place in my heart, alongside Mahler, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Prokofiev. And no biographical account of any of them will change the feeling I have for them within the chambers of my heart.

And Sibelius clearly belongs in Rickard's. A good job, and an enjoyable read.

[Nicholas Whyte]

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1109920.html[return][return]A handsomely illustrated Phaidon Press publication, a real bargain at 9.95.[return][return]Sibelius was a particularly long-lived composer (born 1865, died 1957) but the productive part of his career was really only from 1891 to 1926 - mind you, 34 years of production is still pretty good. [return][return]He was a real bastard to his wife and daughters, basically drinking and smoking away every mark he ever got, surviving on handouts from the Finnish state and from wealthy patrons, which he had often spent even before the cash arrived. Even a period of medically enforced abstinence from alcohol and nicotine from 1907 to 1915 didn't improve his general spending habits. And yet... his most lasting works are those from the first half of his career - the Kullervo symphony, the First and Second Symphonies, the Swan of Tuonela and of course Finlandia - written when he seems to have been permanently drunk. (Symphonies Three and Four are the product of sobriety, but he was drinking again by the time he wrote the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh.) Then he spent thirty years agonising over the Eighth Symphony, which Rickards suspects he had actually completed in 1933 but then burned in 1945, while pretending almost to his dying day that he was still working on it (a bit reminiscent of a certain never-published sf anthology).[return][return]Sibelius was two when his father died; he grew up in an atmosphere of unstable poverty; and his sister ended up in residential care for (unspecified) mental illness. There's obviously an untold psychiatric story here, and Rickards is rather disappointingly superficial about this - he mutters about ADD and SAD, but I think I want more substance than that - Sibelius clearly had an addiction problem, and also tended to a self-destructive perfectionism in the way he treated his own work (the lost Eighth Symphony being merely the best known case).[return][return]Rickards is particularly good on tracing Sibelius' intellectual and patronage links with other composers, especially in his early studies in Berlin and Vienna (though there are later links with Bax and Vaughan Williams as well). And the illustrations are great, tracking the composer's transformation from young seducer with floppy hair and trailing moustache to national monument with totally shaven head.[return][return]One of my fascinations with Sibelius is how he got folded into the politics of the time, to the point where he became a national icon. He was always a Finnish nationalist, but a Swedish speaker, yet devoted to the Kalevala legends. The period of his career exactly coincides with Finland's national awakening and evolution to an independent state, and his music was a vital part of that national awakening - it is, after all, so very evocative of the Finnish landscape, which Swedish speakers and Finnish speakers, Red and White, had in common. That is all right until independence and civil war transform the situation; Rickards hints that the political uncertainties of the inter-war period may be part of the explanation for his three decades of silence. [return][return]Sibelius seems to have coped well with becoming a fixture on the tourism agenda of distinguished visitors in his final years. No doubt he had a few drinks with them as well. I'll look out for more books about this fascinating and aggravating character.[return]

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another of the Phaidon contemporary composer biographies, this one on Sibelius was very interesting. He had a rather interesting career trajectory, achieving great fame and stature by the middle of his life, but then writing nothing in the last 30 years before his death in 1957. Also, Sibelius wrote both great works and trivial commercial pieces (mainly in order to ease his persistent financial troubles). I wish Rickards had explored those issues in more detail, but I suppose that's out of the scope of this kind of book. I did like the way Rickards was frank about Sibelius' self-absorption and alcoholism. He must have been a very difficult person to deal with a lot of the time. His discussion of Sibelius' working methods and creative struggles was quite interesting, though.

[Craig Maki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fine introductory read of Jean Sibelius' life and works, including personal and public events and how they contributed to the development of his art.