Jean Sibelius

Finnish composer

• Born: December 8, 1865
• Birthplace: Hämeenlinna, Finland
• Died: September 20, 1957
• Place of death: Järvenpää, Finland

Closely identified with Finnish nationalism, Sibelius not only is a national hero in his own country but also is considered by many to have been the greatest symphonic composer of the twentieth century.

Early Life

Jean Sibelius (zhahn seh-BAY-lee-uhs) was the son of a surgeon of the territorial army battalion. His family was of mixed Swedish and Finnish ancestry, and like most middle- and upper-class Finns, he grew up speaking Swedish as his first language. When Sibelius was less than three years old, his father died during a cholera epidemic, and the boy was reared by his mother and grandmother. As a youth, he took the first name of an uncle who had been a sea captain and was ever after known as “Jean.”

Like many great composers, Sibelius displayed a precocious talent: He was playing the violin and had composed his first piece (a duet for violin and cello) by age ten. He began formal studies in violin and composition at fourteen, hoping, at least for a time, to become a great violin virtuoso. During his teens, he wrote numerous chamber works and also developed a deep interest in the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic collected from traditional ballads in the 1860’s. This was later a great inspiration to him, as was his passionate love of nature.

Though his family enjoyed his music, his mother wanted him to have a more secure profession, and he acceded to her wishes by entering the law school of the University of Helsinki in 1885. Somewhat covertly, however, he also took courses in the school of music and, after a year, gave up the law for full-time training on the violin and in music theory. His teacher, Martin Wegelius, was a versatile and widely experienced composer, pianist, and conductor, who recognized Sibelius’s talents and took the young musician under his wing. Sibelius was also befriended by the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni, who was teaching at the time in Helsinki.

After three years of Wegelius’s patient encouragement, Sibelius left for Berlin to study with the famous theorist Albert Becker, a thorough and demanding teacher. He also indulged a taste for high living, hard drinking, and financial extravagance. Apparently, this lifestyle led to problems, and, after only a year, he left for Vienna to study with Karl Goldmark, a popular Romantic composer. Under Goldmark’s tutelage, he expanded his studies from solo and chamber music and began to work toward composing for the orchestra.

In 1891, Sibelius returned to Finland, possibly because his high-society lifestyle had exhausted his resources. He made his living by teaching, but most of his energies were directed toward the composition of his first orchestral work, Kullervo , based on the Kalevala. In view of the fact that Sibelius had only recently had any training in writing for the orchestra, Kullervo seems little short of miraculous. Not only is it a work of very large proportions more than one hour long but also it includes a highly dramatic central movement with vocalists. Once Kullervo had received its first performance, in April, 1892, Sibelius’s position as the leading Finnish composer was never again seriously questioned.

Life’s Work

A few months after the premiere of Kullervo, Sibelius was married to Aino Järnefelt, the daughter of a prominent Finnish nationalist. Since 1809, Finland had been an autonomous grand duchy, with its own popular assembly, under the sovereignty of the Russian Empire. A movement for independence had started in the 1870’s, gaining momentum toward the end of the century because of the czarist government’s attempt to impose the Russian language and culture on the Finns. Sibelius had always been strongly patriotic, and, following the success of Kullervo, he expressed these feelings in a series of powerful orchestral works based on Finnish legends. Among these were the well-known En saga and a group of four tone poems called the Lemminkäinen. In 1899, he composed Finlandia , a short tone poem that remains his most famous and popular work. It has been claimed that this piece did more to promote Finnish independence than a thousand speeches and pamphlets. Many Americans, in fact, have mistakenly assumed that it is the national anthem of Finland.

By the 1890’s, Sibelius had developed a very personal style of composition. Most composers are affected, at least to some extent, by models from the past, and Sibelius was no exception. His early works reveal the influence of his studies of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, Edvard Grieg, Joseph Haydn, and even Richard Wagner, though he rejected Wagner’s dense, grandiose orchestral textures by the turn of the century. The most important factor in the evolution of Sibelius’s musical style, however, was his fascination with the natural landscapes and folk culture of his country. In 1892, he had visited Karelia, a somewhat primitive area of eastern Finland, where he absorbed the rhythms and harmonies of native folksinging. Though Sibelius always insisted that he had never used any actual folk tunes in his works, their spirit, at any rate, can be clearly discerned. Most of his later music evokes images from the myths of the ancient Finns, as well as the mystery and power of Finland’s primeval forests and lakes.

In 1897, in acknowledgment of his achievements, the Finnish assembly granted Sibelius a state pension. Though this was not a large amount, and certainly not enough to support the composer’s expensive tastes, it did free him to begin work on his greatest compositions, the seven symphonies. The first of these was created in 1899, after Sibelius returned from a tour of Italy and Germany. Though both his first and second symphonies are relatively conventional works in the late Romantic idiom, already Sibelius was moving toward a sparseness of texture and condensation of form that would later be referred to as “neoclassicism.” It has been said that Sibelius had a natural affinity for the processes of musical logic and development, which is demonstrated by his ability to weld coherently short, even fragmentary, motives into great organic structures full of dramatic tension and momentum.

Around the turn of the century, Sibelius began to achieve international fame. When the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra toured Europe in 1900, several of Sibelius’s tone poems were on its program, and concert audiences loved them. Over the next few years, Sibelius himself was invited to conduct performances in cities throughout the Continent. By 1903, however, his insouciant lifestyle began to catch up with him, and his mounting debts and episodes of drunkenness seem to have provoked changes in both his personal life and his method of composition. In 1904, he bought a plot of land at Järvenpää, in the forests outside Helsinki, and he had a villa built there. Though he continued to travel until the beginning of World War I, much of the rest of his life was spent in seclusion in this new home.

In his next major works, the Violin Concerto (1903) and Symphony no. 3 (begun in 1904, but not completed until 1907), Sibelius turned away from the exuberant nationalism of his earlier music, and both of these pieces create instead a moody, somber sense of loneliness and dissonant energy. Such feelings are fully realized in Symphony no. 4, finished in 1911. Highly dissonant, even savage, harmonies dominate, and, of all Sibelius’s symphonies, the fourth comes closest to the atonal and twelve-tone systems that would soon characterize much of European serious music. In this symphony, however, as in everything he wrote, Sibelius clearly demonstrated total independence from any “school” or movement: His style was uniquely his own.

Throughout the period before the beginning of World War I, Sibelius’s international reputation continued to grow, and he was honored in England, France, and Austria. In 1914, he made a triumphant visit to the United States, where he was amazed by his popularity. This was his last major tour for many years; the beginning of the war disrupted international travel, and, by its end, Sibelius had largely retired from the world.

Seclusion did not, however, end his artistic activity. His expansive, uncomplicated Fifth Symphony was finished in time for his fiftieth birthday celebration in December, 1915; this was treated in Finland as a national holiday. Sibelius continued to revise this symphony, though, as he did many of his works, and it did not reach its final form until three years later, by which time his world had been completely disrupted.

The Russian Revolution of October, 1917, led Finland to declare its independence, but, early in the following year, Communist Red Guards invaded the country and provoked a civil war. Sibelius, whose sympathies were not only nationalist but also anticommunist, was forced to flee Järvenpää when the Red Army invaded his home. He did not return until after the war, and, from that time onward, he composed less and less. The Sixth Symphony, not completed until 1923, may reveal his feelings in this era, for in it Sibelius again eschews any nationalist exuberance or heroism; its themes are bleak and full of anguish. Though it is the least popular of his major works, many music critics regard the Sixth Symphony as Sibelius’s greatest achievement, the most complete demonstration of his mastery of orchestral technique.

Both the Sixth and Seventh symphonies have been characterized as being “religious” in spirit, and Sibelius himself has been said to have had the sensibilities of religion but not the faith. The Seventh Symphony(1924), especially, seems to have left Finland and perhaps even the earth itself behind, for it suggests a kind of final cosmic vision of the reaffirmation of life. In fact, the seventh symphony seems also to signal the end of Sibelius’s creative inspiration, for he wrote only one other major work, Tapiola , a tone poem for orchestra, in 1926. Tapio was the ancient forest god of Finland, and Tapiola, like some of Sibelius’s earlier pieces, portrays the awesome mystery of the Finnish forests and the power of the spirits said to inhabit them. Unlike his earlier images, however, the world depicted in Tapiola is one of desolate isolation, an appropriate, but nevertheless devastating, portrait of life in the twentieth century.

After the completion of Tapiola, Sibelius’s musical voice was stilled, and his last published work, a group of relatively insignificant pieces for piano, appeared in 1929. Though his sixtieth and seventieth birthdays were, like his fiftieth, celebrated in Finland as national holidays, Sibelius seldom ventured from the seclusion of his country villa. His last concert tour occurred in 1921; after conducting several of his symphonies in London, Rome, and Göteborg, Sweden, he returned permanently to Järvenpää, where he died of a cerebral hemorrhage on September 20, 1957, only three months short of his ninety-second birthday.

Significance

Though for many years, especially in England and the United States, Sibelius’s music enjoyed great critical acclaim, an apparently inevitable reaction set in among critics on the Continent. In Germany and France, particularly, music was now dominated by the cerebral, acrid dissonances of composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and the French group known as “Les Six.” Though he expressed an affinity with a few of the “modernists,” among them Béla Bartók, Sibelius generally rejected the avant-garde movements. They, in turn, rejected him as representing an obsolete tradition of tonality and emotionalism. Perhaps most damning, Sibelius’s music remained popular with concert audiences, a sure sign that he was not “in tune” with the latest trends in serious music.

Throughout his productive life, Sibelius had pursued what may be seen as two creative paths. One of these is expressed in his “lesser works,” the nationalistic tone poems and other popular pieces such as the Valse triste , a beautifully lyrical work composed in 1904. His First and Second symphonies might also be considered as following this more accessible, popular style. His other approach may be seen in the Fourth, Sixth, and Seventh symphonies, as well as certain tone poems, such as Barden (1913) and Tapiola. These pieces demonstrate both Sibelius’s mastery of classical technique and his success in concentrating melodic and harmonic development into austere, unaffected motives of great clarity and classical purity.

However, to attempt to classify or categorize Sibelius’s works into any kind of consistent “system” would have repelled him, for, as many critics have noted, with particular reference to his symphonies, each is unique, a theoretical and creative unity unto itself, expressing a deeply personal concept of symphonic structure. As a result, no other twentieth century composer has excited such deep and enduring controversy. Writers of the “modernist” schools have often viciously attacked Sibelius as trite, sentimental, and old-fashioned, and his retention of the tonal system despite the highly innovative ways in which he used it has been regarded as showing his lack of originality. Some have relegated him to the nineteenth century as a “late Romantic” or purely “nationalist” composer, or have even chosen to dismiss him altogether. On the other hand, to many critics, especially in England and the United States, Sibelius remains the finest symphonic composer of the twentieth century and one whose individuality stands above the transient fads and intellectualism of much of today’s serious music. In any case, his works remain extremely popular with audiences, and their many recordings assure Sibelius of a prominent and permanent place in the history of great music.

Bibliography

Abraham, Gerald, ed. The Music of Sibelius. New York: W. W. Norton, 1947. A compilation of eight essays. Only the first, by Ralph Hill, is biographical. The others analyze Sibelius’s music, classifying it by type. Therefore, much of this volume may be beyond those without musical training. It does include, however, a very useful bibliography, a chronology, and an indexed list of compositions.

Ekman, Karl. Jean Sibelius: His Life and Personality. Translated by Edward Birse. New York: Tudor, 1946. Ekman is Sibelius’s principal biographer. Since he was a close friend of Sibelius, and because this work was written before the composer’s death, it cannot be called objective. Sibelius was often given to somewhat melodramatic and less-than-accurate claims about himself and his music, all of which Ekman faithfully recorded as truth. Nevertheless, this is a valuable and entertaining account of Sibelius’s creative life.

Grimley, Daniel M., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Collection of essays examining Sibelius’s early career, major musical achievements, historical reception and influence, and the performance and interpretation of his music.

Lambert, Constant. Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline. London: Faber & Faber, 1934. Lambert, himself a prominent British composer before his premature death in 1951, offers a challenging view that dissents from the critical bombast, gnosticism, and pedantry that has often characterized discussions of “revolutionary” twentieth century music. Lambert was one of Sibelius’s most enthusiastic critics, and he suggests that it is Sibelius, rather than Schoenberg or other “modernists,” who should offer a model for the music of the future.

Layton, Robert. “Jean Sibelius.” In Schuetz to Spinto, vol. 17 in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie. London: Macmillan, 1980. Though articles in this set are often too technical for those without musical training, this essay on Sibelius is among the best brief sources available. While some sections will be difficult for general readers, the wealth of biographical information, as well as the clarity and balance with which it is presented, make this article well worth the effort. Contains an extensive bibliography.

Machlis, Joseph. Introduction to Contemporary Music. New York: W. W. Norton, 1961. Essential for general readers interested in twentieth century music. Introduces modern music through comparison with earlier periods, providing a painless introduction to music theory. European and American composers are grouped by types; each receives a concise biographical treatment and analysis of important works. Includes an excellent bibliography, discography, and texts and translations of vocal works.

Mellers, Wilfrid. Romanticism and the Twentieth Century, from 1800. Fair Lawn, N.J.: Essential Books, 1957. An excellent analysis of romantic music in the late nineteenth century and its relationship to the first fifty years of twentieth century music. Useful comparisons and contrasts of twentieth century composers, especially those considered to be inheritors of the Romantic tradition. Sibelius is discussed in this framework as a nationalist and “naturist” composer.