Jean Sibelius
(1865–1957)
Who Was
Jean Sibelius?
A Brief Introduction
Jean Sibelius was in his thirties before he achieved a fully distinctive style, having gradually moved away from the Viennese and Russian traditions in which he was trained. He immersed himself in his native Finland’s deep past and found subjects for many of his compositions in the Kalevala—a collection of Finnish epic poetry. His music thus came to embrace not only Bach and Beethoven but also bards chanting by firelight whom, in his imagination, he accessed through the use of church modes—scales with Greek names (Dorian, Phrygian, etc.) that survive in church music and folksong. Sibelius, however, who was neither a regular churchgoer (he went only at Christmas) nor a scholar of folk music, learned them as a student. In time, they yielded him new harmonies and forms, which developed through relentless growth.
That narrative of growth and eventual triumph aligned with his country’s aspirations. Finland at the time of his birth was a province of the Russian Empire, and so it remained until the Russian Revolutions of 1917 allowed it to establish independence. Sibelius’s Finlandia (1900) gave voice to the spirit of self-determination and, more broadly, to a new kind of musical power.
Early Years: Discovering a New Voice
Sibelius was a member of the Swedish-speaking upper-middle-class minority in Finland and did not become fluent in Finnish until he was a young man. Even after that, he almost always chose Swedish poems to set as songs. The French version of his first name (originally Johan) he took from an uncle.
He studied in Helsinki, Berlin, and Vienna, before returning to Helsinki. There, in 1892, he produced his first major work, the choral symphony Kullervo, and married Aino Järnefelt, the sister of a student friend. The symphony, based on a story from the Kalevala, set him on a path into legend. His wife, with whom he had six daughters, remained a lifelong companion.
More tales from the Kalevala gave Sibelius his first important composition purely for orchestra, the Lemminkäinen Suite (1893–95), which includes the brooding elegy The Swan of Tuonela. In 1896 came his only venture into opera, the one-act The Maiden in the Tower. In 1898 he was granted a state pension that freed him from the teaching duties which had limited his time for composing. IImposing works followed: the First Symphony (1898–99), Second Symphony (1901–02), Finlandia (1899–1900), and the Violin Concerto (1903)—the last of the great Romantic works in this genre. Although he traveled widely in Europe to conduct, in Helsinki he took to nights of heavy drinking with friends. That behavior came to a stop in 1904, when, at Aino’s insistence, the family moved to a villa in the country.
Middle Period: Maturity
Among the first works Sibelius began at his rural retreat, his Third Symphony (1904–07) was simpler in style, moving in a direction subsequently countered by his heavily dissonant Fourth Symphony (1911). Other compositions from this productive period include his string quartet Voces intimae (Intimate Voices, 1909) and more explorations of the Kalevala, including the tone poem Pohjola’s Daughter (1905–06) and Luonnotar (1913), a powerful song for soprano and orchestra.
Sibelius: Quartet in D minor for Strings, Op. 56, "Voces intimae"
The work starts as if the first violin and cello were singing alternate lines of a folk song from which the music develops. Sibelius follows string quartet conventions of form and instrumental interplay, although there are five movements instead of the usual four. It was over the Adagio di molto—the central, longest, and most personal movement—that Sibelius wrote “Voces intimae!” His publisher thought these words were suitable as a title for the whole work.
In 1914 Sibelius made his only visit to the United States, principally to conduct the premiere of another tone poem, The Oceanides (1913–14), at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival in Connecticut. Enthusiasm for his music across the Atlantic remained strong, and a commission from the New York Symphony Society (now the New York Philharmonic) would result in his final orchestral work, Tapiola (1926).
Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony occupied him for half a decade (1914–19), during which he revised the piece twice to maximize its strength and drive. Whether deliberately or not, the work mirrored the challenges facing the new Finnish republic. Although there were always commissions for choral works, theater music, and other genres to keep him busy, a hiatus from symphonic composition followed. He had a flair for theatre music, which he continued to produce throughout his creative life—the outstanding survivor being the orchestral Valse triste (1903), taken from incidental music he composed for the play Kuolema (Death) by his brother-in-law Arvid Järnefelt.
After the enigmatic Sixth Symphony (1914–23), the run of his great works came to a magnificent climax in 1924–26 with three successive achievements: the single-movement Seventh Symphony (1924), an elaborate score for Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1926), and the mighty and mysterious tone poem Tapiola (1926).
Late Period: Silence
Sibelius then fell virtually silent for three decades. There were sets of pieces in 1929 for solo piano, and for violin and piano, as well as some later music for Masonic rituals. There was also an eighth symphony that the composer at least started but eventually burned along with other manuscripts in 1945.
Legacy
Sibelius’s work, especially in the symphonic genre, was important to his compositional successors, such as Ralph Vaughan Williams. In Finland, Sibelius’s presence in musical life was so powerful that the prospect of symphonic composition intimidated later composers. Eventually, however, the strength and continuity of his music made him a guardian spirit to a new generation of Finnish composers, such as Kaija Saariaho and Esa-Pekka Salonen.
Watching and Listening
Sibelius grew up playing the violin, and in his youth produced a large quantity of chamber music—at first piano trios to be performed by his sister on piano, his brother on cello, and himself on violin. By the time he was 30, his chamber music output had dwindled to almost nothing. The orchestra had taken over as his principal medium. The only chamber work from the years of his maturity was Voces intimae, which can be found in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Digital Archive. The work starts as if the first violin and cello were singing alternate lines of a folk song from which the music develops. Sibelius follows string quartet conventions of form and instrumental interplay, although there are five movements instead of the usual four. It was over the Adagio di molto—the central, longest, and most personal movement—that Sibelius wrote “Voces intimae!” His publisher thought these words were suitable as a title for the whole work.
Sibelius’s piano music, though strangely neglected, shows an unexpected and remarkable side of the composer: an adeptness at small forms with quirky turns. Often the texture is sparse, with only two lines fitting together in odd ways, as if Bach were composing in the era of Debussy and Scriabin. Juho Pohjonen’s performance of the Ten Pieces, Op. 58 and Five Esquisses, Op. 114 demonstrates the music’s ability to twist and tumble without ever quite losing its balance.
