Jean Sibelius

1865–1957, FINNISH

The most powerful composer ever produced by the Nordic countries, Sibelius found remarkable ways of renewing the forms of orchestral music, especially the symphony.

JEAN SIBELIUS
This portrait, showing Sibelius brooding and with disheveled hair, is by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, a friend of the composer.

IN PROFILE

Robert Kajanus

Sibelius was fortunate that, unlike many composers, he never had to wait long to hear a new orchestral work for the first time. In 1882, Robert Kajanus (1856–1933) founded the Helsinki Orchestral Society, Finland’s first professional orchestra (today the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra). A lifelong friend (and drinking companion), Kajanus often conducted Sibelius’s music, and also made his orchestra available for Sibelius to conduct himself. In the early 1930s, he made the very first commercial recordings of Sibelius’s orchestral music; these are still regarded as unsurpassed classics.

ROBERT KAJANUS

Johan Sibelius (he took the French version of his first name in later life) was born in December 1865 in the small town of Hämeenlinna in Finland, a region that until 1918 was a Grand Duchy of Czarist Russia. The educated classes—among them Johan’s parents—were generally Swedish-speaking; the broader population spoke Finnish, which was increasingly associated with a spirit of growing national unease and restlessness at Russian political domination.

Early struggles and success

Sibelius’s father was a doctor, who died in a typhoid epidemic when Johan was only two, leaving Maria Sibelius, his pregnant young widow, a mountain of debts. Maria took her family to live with her mother elsewhere in Hämeenlinna. They could not afford to give the three children an elite, Swedish-speaking education, so Johan was sent to a local Finnish-speaking school.

In 1885, aged 20, having graduated from high school, Sibelius moved to Helsinki and studied violin at the Music Institute. During his time there, he adopted his father’s feckless habits and struggled with debt and drinking issues for the next four decades.

His dream of becoming a virtuoso violinist was tempered as a result of his friendship with Ferruccio Busoni, the master-pianist who taught at the Institute. Realizing that this level of performance would be beyond him, Sibelius spent a year as a promising student-composer in Berlin, then another in Vienna. But he could never have envisaged the astonishing success of his first major work, Kullervo, when he conducted its premiere in Helsinki in 1892. In this work, Sibelius tells the story of the principal character in the Kalevala, the Finnish folk epic, in the form of a 90-minute, five-movement “symphonic poem” for two soloists, male chorus, and orchestra.

In 1888, Sibelius had met Aino Järnefelt, the 17-year-old daughter of an aristocratic family who, unusually for their class, were Finnish-speaking nationalists. The couple were married soon after Kullervo’s premiere, and the first of their six daughters (one died in infancy) was born the following year.

SCENE FROM THE KALEVALA
A 19th-century watercolor depicts the character in the Finnish epic the Kalevala on whom Sibelius based his symphonic poem, Kullervo. The music’s surging symphonic command and ultra-vivid evocation of the Finnish landscape were instantly acclaimed.

New directions

Sibelius now grappled with the issues of how to earn a living (part-time teaching at the Music Institute helped) and what to compose next. His first response was the symphonic poem En Saga (1892), commissioned by the conductor Robert Kajanus (see box). He also produced the first of many unaccompanied choral works, Rakastava (The Lover), a beautifully imagined small masterpiece. In 1893, his Karelia—incidental music written for a pageant in the town of Viipuri (now Vyborg)—celebrated the culture of the northeastern province of Finland (now part of Russia).

The composer’s next major statement was a symphonic suite that was based on the exploits of Lemminkäinen, the adventurer-warrior of the Kalevala. The premiere in 1896 was a lukewarm success, but one of the movements, “The Swan of Tuonela,” soon took on an independent life of its own; the music’s long cor anglais solo, uncoiling against a background of muted and divided strings, is one of Sibelius’s great feats of imagination.

His First Symphony, strongly influenced by Tchaikovsky, premiered in 1899 and was followed by the far more individual Second Symphony, with its masterly first movement that stitches together fragmentary themes into a central development section, and then unpicks them again.

Meanwhile, the waves of Finnish nationalism were rolling high. In 1899, a Russian-imposed “February Manifesto” abolished Finnish freedom of speech and right of assembly. A pageant was organized in Helsinki to protest at the suppression of press freedom, and Sibelius composed a six-movement orchestral sequence for the occasion; the last item, Finland Awakes, later revised and renamed Finlandia, secured his international fame.

SCORE FOR SYMPHONY NO. 2,
The remains of Sibelius’s original score for Symphony No. 2 are held in the Sibelius Museum in Turku, southwest Finland.

Growing mastery

Sibelius also began to compose incidental music for Helsinki’s theater scene. Kuolema (Death), by his brother-in-law Arvid Järnefelt, was a Symbolist play in the style of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande (the source of Debussy’s opera, and Schoenberg’s symphonic poem). Sibelius supplied six musical numbers, arranging one of them as Valse triste and selling it to a music firm. They, in turn, sold it to his German publisher, who issued it in multiple arrangements: Valse triste was soon being played by hotel and salon bands all over Europe. Sibelius never quite forgave himself for missing out on a small fortune in royalty payments. His next major works were a virtuosic Violin Concerto and a Third Symphony in a leaner, more Classical style and with a quietly introspective poetic streak. In 1903, Sibelius took out a loan to build a family home in the village of Järvenpää, near Lake Tuusula, north of Helsinki. He financed the construction of “Ainola” (Aino’s Home) with help from his annual stipend from the Finnish government (first granted in 1897) and his erratic earnings from music. The family moved into their new home in 1904.

Four years later, however, Sibelius was diagnosed with throat cancer. Painful surgery in Berlin proved successful, but the experience influenced the dark, austere mood of his Fourth Symphony in 1911.

LAKE KEITELE, 1905
This tranquil landscape was painted by Sibelius’s collaborator, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, whom the composer hailed as “Finland’s greatest painter.” The scene’s contemplative mood is evocative of Sibelius’s more meditative works.

“AINOLA,” SIBELIUS’S HOUSE
Sibelius is shown here with members of his family in the grounds of his house, “Ainola,” at the picturesque lakeside village of Järvenpää.

The war years

Next came a symphonic poem, The Oceanides, evoking the sea-nymphs of Greek mythology. The piece was commissioned by Carl Stoeckel, a wealthy US businessman who ran a music festival in Norfolk, Connecticut. Sibelius arrived home from an acclaimed US visit just before World War I broke out in 1914 and thereafter found himself unable to travel abroad, with royalties cut off from his German publishers, where many of his works had been placed.

Nonetheless, the composer made good progress on a Fifth Symphony for his fiftieth birthday concert in 1915. He then withdrew it for revision, conducting a new version a year later; for this, he spliced the two opening movements together, so that the first flowed into the second. Still not happy, he worked on a final revision while the Civil War (see box) raged around him, and his longed-for independent Finnish Republic came into being.

Two more symphonies followed in 1923 and 1924: the Sixth Symphony’s quiet, poised tone and four-movement design are very different from the grandly glowing single movement of his Seventh (which was originally named Fantasia sinfonica). Then a commission arrived from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. The result was Tapiola, named after the forest god of Finnish mythology. It is the wildest and greatest of all Sibelius’s nature evocations and is, at the same time, a supreme feat of closely worked orchestral mastery.

A long silence

Sibelius’s famous “creative silence” from then on was never complete; minor works sometimes appeared, and he revised or orchestrated some of his earlier music. Yet between Tapiola in 1926 and his death 31 years later, he released no major new work. In the late 1920s, he was busy with an Eighth Symphony, but no manuscript existed at his death. It is believed that Sibelius destroyed it, but the reasons for this are not known—most likely a combination of self-criticism (always extreme, in his case) and the pressures of international fame.

Following his death, Sibelius’s music was increasingly regarded as old-fashioned, and today is not as widely performed in concerts as it once was. However, a huge recorded catalog indicates that his work continues to be much loved by classical music listeners throughout the world.

IN CONTEXT

Finnish nationhood

Although a supporter of Finnish national independence, Sibelius was hostile to the Russia-backed “Red” militia that took over the Helsinki area in 1917, following the Russian Revolution and the seizure of power there by Lenin’s Communist Party. A vicious civil war broke out between the “Reds” and the anti-Communist “White” military forces. Sibelius composed his choral Jäger March to honor the German battalion that fought alongside the “Whites.” Their victory in 1918 led to the foundation of the modern Finnish Republic.

CARL MANNERHEIM, FINNISH “WHITE” MILITARY LEADER IN THE CIVIL WAR