A question which has always
bothered me is: how did a Finn acquire a Latin last name and
a French first name? Well, it seems Sibelius’ grandfather had
latinized the family’s original last name, Sibbe, a fashionable
thing to do in the early nineteenth century. Our Johan (sic)
Christian Julius Sibelius was born at 12:30 Helsinki time in
Hameenlinna, Finland, on December 8, 1865, a nearly portentous
date since Finland would later declare its independence from
Russia on December 6, 1917. Johan was immediately shortened
to the affectionate Janne, and later his friends and family
would privately refer to him as Janne Sibbe. “Jean Sibelius”
came into being when he signed his name that way on his first
written out student compositions, and he kept to that name for
the rest of his life.
Sibelius’ family spoke Swedish
as did most middle class Finns, even though Russian was the
official language of the government as a semi-autonomous grand
duchy of the Russian empire. It wasn’t until Sibelius was in
school that Finnish language consciousness began to grow seriously
with the establishment of Finnish newspapers and a Finnish language
University. Naturally, Sibelius would learn German and Latin,
the languages of scholarship, in school, so that when his violin
teacher lent him theoretical works on composition in German,
Sibelius could study them profitably. Apart from these books,
he was largely self taught as a composer although he took lessons
and advice from various individuals. Later Sibelius learned
English, and was at one time offered a professorship at the
Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, USA. He had
also been offered a professorship at the Vienna Academy, but
he had been denied a position at the Helsinki University, a
fact which embittered him for life. Eventually he turned down
both foreign jobs as he needed to keep his home in Finland to
compose. His English was never good enough to provide English
texts to his songs, so an anglophone friend would translate
for him from the German. His intense emotional bond to the natural
environment never actually replaced his Evangelical Lutheran
Christianity (he complained when one of his daughters wanted
to marry a Theosophist) but he wrote virtually no formally religious
music. Once he declared that his vision of God was one of harmonious
inter-working of the forces of Nature. The grand theme of the
finale of the Fifth Symphony came to him in a flash of
inspiration while watching a flight of swans in the sunset.
Sibelius’ first triumph was
Kullervo, a long symphonic oratorio on the Finnish folk
legends of the Kalevala. This made him a hero of the Finnish
nationalist movement, a position he was to retain. However this
was not always a blessing as those critics opposed to Finnish
nationalism, mostly Russians and Swedes, viciously attacked
Sibelius’s music. Finland was fortunate; after their declaration
of independence on December 6, 1917, the Leninist government
of Russia recognized their independence on January 4, 1918 (try
to imagine a world in which Great Britain had recognized American
independence on August 2, 1776). A brief civil war between the
“reds” and “whites” was all but over by April with the victory
of the whites. By then most European countries had recognized
the new nation, the Sibelius family could move back to their
country house, and life went back to normal. In future years
Russia came to regret their generosity and seized back quite
a bit of Finnish territory, but for now all was friendly.
So, why did Sibelius never
publish his Eighth Symphony? The score was virtually
complete by the Spring of 1931. But the two people outside his
immediate family who meant the most to him, his brother Christian
and his lifelong friend Axel Carpelan, had both died leaving
him feeling alone and abandoned. “Who will I write for now?”
he said. Sibelius always revised his scores extensively after
hearing them performed with orchestra several times; the situation
with Tapiola, where the score was to be published before
the first performances out of his hearing way across the ocean,
frightened him, and likely made him all the more determined
never again to release a score until he was sure it was perfect.
His later attempt to fuss with Tapiola was squelched
by his publisher. His alcoholism, always severe, (He once said,
“alcohol is the one friend who never lets me down”) had caused
tremor in his hands which became worse with age, making it painful
to write out music, hence the extensive revisions he felt necessary
would be difficult and slow. Eventually so much time had passed
that in 1943, along with much other music, he burned the score,
no doubt feeling distanced from it and unable to work on it
further. His wife said that after that he was much calmer and
more relaxed.
The author points out a musical
figure used by Sibelius in virtually all his works, a sort of
signature motif. I won’t tell you what it is, I’ll let you read
the book to find out; you will kick yourself as I did for not
figuring it out yourself.
Soon all of Sibelius’ works
will have JSW numbers, from the in-progress Breitkopf &
Härtel systematic-thematic catalog. In the meantime, beyond
the opus numbers assigned by Sibelius, there are JS numbers
and HUL (Helsinki University Library) numbers for every surviving
small piece, sketch, and fragment.
I was surprised to read that
Sibelius was so prolific. Most people know his symphonies, but
they form a minority of his orchestral music which in turn constitutes
a minority of his total output. In the complete list at the
back of the book his large orchestral and choral works occupy
ten pages, followed by 31 pages listing hundreds of smaller
works — songs, choruses, violin pieces. The author tells you
more than you really want to know about every one of these smaller
works in the narrative as they were written, so after a while
you may do some skimming as I did; but be careful: there are
berries hidden among the leaves. I wondered why there was no
map of Finland, only to discover it after I finished the book
buried in the appendices; it should have been a frontispiece
and could have had more detail. Sibelius at one point specifically
repudiates Wagner and adopts Liszt as his model; nevertheless,
in the author’s analysis of the First Symphony I would
have pointed out the similarities between that work and Liszt’s
Symphonic Poem No.1 “Ce qu’on entend sur le montagne.”
It would have been nice to have included photographs of Jussi
Jalas and of the young Aino. Apart from these tiny cavils, the
work is exhaustively complete, beautifully balanced, acutely
perceptive, well written, a real page turner.
Paul Shoemaker
