Jean Sibelius

Jean Sibelius: Thirty-One Years of Deliberate Silence

On 20 September 1957 Finnish radio was broadcasting the Fifth Symphony from Helsinki at the moment its composer died of a brain haemorrhage at Ainola, his house above Lake Tuusula. He was ninety-one and had produced no major work in thirty-one years. At the United Nations the General Assembly president, Leslie Munro of New Zealand, called for a moment of silence and said that Sibelius "belonged to the whole world." The silence was, in the circumstances, an unusually apt tribute.

A Doctor's Son in a Russian Grand Duchy

Johan Christian Julius Sibelius was born on 8 December 1865 in Hämeenlinna, in the Grand Duchy of Finland, then a possession of the Russian Empire. The family was Swedish-speaking, an important detail for a man later conscripted as the voice of Finnish nationhood. His father, the physician Christian Gustaf Sibelius, died of typhoid in July 1868 and left debts that forced the household to move. Sibelius was raised largely by women, including his maternal grandmother Katarina Borg. The critical intervention came from an uncle, Pehr Ferdinand Sibelius, who handed the ten-year-old a violin and encouraged him to compose.

The Violinist Who Wasn't

At the Hämeenlinna Normal Lyceum he was strongest in mathematics and botany. He enrolled at the Imperial Alexander University to read law and transferred almost immediately to the Helsinki Music Institute, where he studied from 1885 to 1889 and received his first formal composition teaching from the founder, Martin Wegelius. What he actually wanted was to be a violin virtuoso — he played David's E minor Concerto in 1886 and movements of the Mendelssohn — and what he eventually accepted was that he had begun too late for it. He went on to Berlin in 1889 to study with Albert Becker and to Vienna in 1890 with Robert Fuchs and Karl Goldmark, where he acquired a durable admiration for Bruckner.

Kullervo, Aino, and a Volcanic Eruption

He met Aino Järnefelt, daughter of General Alexander Järnefelt, in the autumn of 1888 and married her on 10 June 1892 at Maxmo; the honeymoon in Karelia fed several works. They had six daughters — Eva, Ruth, Kirsti, Katarina, Margareta and Heidi — of whom Kirsti died of typhoid at one year old. Their house, Ainola, was finished at Järvenpää in 1904.

Weeks before the wedding, on 28 April 1892, the choral symphony Kullervo had its Helsinki premiere. Drawn from the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, it was received as "a volcanic eruption" and made him, at twenty-six, the country's composer.

Finlandia and the Russification

As Russia tightened its administrative grip on Finland at the end of the century, Sibelius's music was pressed into service. The Song of the Athenians (1899) and above all Finlandia (1899) — written as part of a fundraising Press Celebration — turned him into a national hero, and the tone poem became a vehicle for independence sentiment it had not been designed to carry. Worth noting: he never directly quoted folk melodies. The Finnishness was an invention, not a transcription. In 1898 the state awarded him an annual grant, first for ten years and then for life, which released him from teaching.

Seven Symphonies and a Concerto

The symphonies came out across a quarter-century: the First in 1899 with its solo clarinet opening; the Second, premiered 8 March 1902, still the most played; the Third in 1907; the introspective Fourth in 1911, written around throat surgery; the Fifth premiered on his fiftieth birthday, 8 December 1915, and revised in 1919; the Sixth in 1923, in the Dorian mode and largely outside sonata form; and the single-movement Seventh, premiered in Stockholm in March 1924. The Violin Concerto failed at its premiere on 8 February 1904 for lack of rehearsal; rebuilt, it triumphed on 19 October 1905 under Richard Strauss and is now the most recorded violin concerto of the twentieth century. Tapiola, commissioned by Walter Damrosch for the New York Philharmonic and premiered on 26 December 1926, was effectively his last word. Alex Ross calls it "Sibelius's most severe and concentrated musical statement"; Cecil Gray argued that "even if Sibelius had written nothing else, this one work would entitle him to a place among the greatest masters."

The Silence of Järvenpää

After Tapiola and The Tempest music of 1926 — nothing, for thirty-one years. He promised an Eighth Symphony to Serge Koussevitzky for 1931–32, and a London performance under Basil Cameron was advertised for 1933. Only fragments survive. Around 1945 Sibelius burned manuscripts at Ainola; Aino remembered him gathering "a number of the manuscripts in a laundry basket" and feeding them to the dining-room fire, including portions of the Karelia Suite. Afterwards, she said, "my husband became calmer and gradually lighter in mood." He had endured an operation for a suspected throat tumour in 1907 and another removal in Berlin in 1908, and drank heavily for most of his life; the journalist Vesa Sirén has argued that an essential tremor dating from youth drove the drinking. Sibelius's own account of the silence was plain: he had written enough.

Why Jean Is Called a Genius

The quality at issue is structural, not melodic. Sibelius progressively stripped the signposts out of sonata form and replaced them with continuously evolving cells and fragments — thematic permutations that grow organically rather than being stated, developed and recapitulated. It is the opposite procedure to Mahler's abrupt juxtapositions, and it produced symphonies that seem to have no seams. Constant Lambert's verdict is the strongest specific claim on record: Sibelius was "the first great composer since Beethoven whose mind thinks naturally in terms of symphonic form." Vaughan Williams dedicated his own Fifth Symphony to him with the line, "You have lit a candle in the world of music that will never go out." Jonathan Blumhofer has noted the "singular way with large-scale forms" that won him rare academic respectability among popular composers, and John Adams and Arvo Pärt have both acknowledged the debt.

The counter-case was ferocious and is not fully retired. In 1938 Theodor Adorno charged that Sibelius's quality invalidated "standards of musical quality that have persisted from Bach to Schoenberg" — that is, if this was good, nothing was. René Leibowitz published a pamphlet in 1955 calling him "the worst composer in the world." Less polemically, Tim Page finds him "terribly uneven," and Harold Schonberg noted that a substantial portion of the catalogue is salon trifles. The honest position is that the genius claim rests on a narrow shelf — the last four symphonies, the Violin Concerto, Tapiola, a handful of tone poems — and that Sibelius wrote a great deal of music that does nothing to support it.

Legacy

In 1935 a New York Philharmonic survey found him the favourite composer of American radio listeners, a recognition no other living composer has matched. He was given a state funeral and buried at Ainola beside Aino, who outlived him until 1969. His face was on the Finnish 100-mark note until the euro arrived in 2002; since 2011 his birthday has been Finland's Day of Finnish Music. Ainola opened as a museum in 1974, and a sixty-volume critical edition of his works has been in preparation since 1996 by the National Library of Finland, the Sibelius Society and Breitkopf & Härtel.