JeanSibelius

In Vienna in 1891, Sibelius auditioned for the Philharmonic and failed. He wanted to be a violinist; the jury found him too nervous even for an orchestral post. He was twenty-five, studying composition with Robert Fuchs and Karl Goldmark, spending money he did not have at parties and going to as much of the city’s music as he could. After hearing Bruckner’s Third Symphony he thought its author the greatest living composer. In his lodgings during the same period he was studying the rhythms of the Finnish Kalevala.

He was born in Hämeenlinna in 1865, when Finland was a grand duchy of the Russian Empire. His father, a doctor, died three years later, leaving debts. At home the family spoke Swedish; at school Janne learnt Finnish. He played chamber music with his sister Linda and brother Christian, and in 1885 went to Helsinki, nominally to study law. He was soon spending his days at Martin Wegelius’s Music Institute, where he befriended Ferruccio Busoni and worked through quartets by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. He took his professional name from a dead uncle’s visiting cards, which he had found. “Jean is now my musical name,” he told Uncle Pehr on 31 March 1886. After Helsinki he studied with Albert Becker in Berlin, and then in Vienna.

1892–⁠99Kullervo to Finlandia

The young husband taught violin and theory, composed, and spent long sessions at the Hotel Kämp with Kajanus and Gallen-⁠Kallela. Their discussions could last for days. Gallen-⁠Kallela’s Symposium shows the men at their table in 1894, with Sibelius on the right and bottles in front of them. The following year he was at work on the four Lemminkäinen legends. In The Swan of Tuonela, a cor anglais plays a solo over divided strings; the hero’s return home is built on short repeated figures.

In 1899 Nicholas II’s February Manifesto threatened Finnish autonomy. The Press Celebrations that November raised money for journalists and protested against censorship. Sibelius wrote music for tableaux of Finnish history; the last, Finland Awakens, became Finlandia. Brass chords open it before the woodwinds introduce the hymn. Words were later set to the tune. The First Symphony, premiered the same year, opens with one clarinet over a distant timpani roll. Its string writing shows the influence of Tchaikovsky. The first movement ends with two plucked chords.

1901–⁠07Ainola, the Violin Concerto, symphonies

He sketched part of the Second Symphony in Rapallo, Italy, in 1901. Its première in Helsinki in 1902 was another national triumph; Kajanus heard a protest against oppression in its slow movement. Sibelius’s sketchbook contains notes about Don Juan and Death. In the first movement, fragments that at first appear unrelated are gradually fitted together. The scherzo leads into the finale through a long rising transition, and the finale’s D major tune arrives at the end of it.

In 1904 the family moved to Ainola, the timber house Lars Sonck designed near Lake Tuusula. Helsinki was further away, but its debts and temptations still reached him. “Wake up Janne, wake up and see what you are!” Aino wrote on 4 December, after a drunken telephone call. He promised to change. The Violin Concerto, first performed that year, was also revised. Sibelius rewrote it for the 1905 Berlin performance under Richard Strauss, cutting one of the first movement’s two cadenzas. The remaining cadenza develops the opening theme in double-stops and rapid scales, with the orchestra silent.

The Third Symphony of 1907 dispensed with the harp and tuba. Its finale begins in fragments, from which a broad tune gradually forms and then dominates the movement. When Mahler visited Helsinki that autumn, Sibelius praised the symphony’s “strictness and style and deep logic”, as he later remembered the conversation. Mahler wanted it to encompass everything.

1908–⁠13Illness and the Fourth Symphony

1915–⁠19The Fifth Symphony

On 21 April 1915 sixteen swans flew over Ainola. “One of the great experiences of my life! God, how beautiful,” Sibelius wrote in his diary, noting an idea that he used in the finale of the Fifth Symphony. Horns swing between widely spaced notes, with woodwinds above and fast strings below. He conducted the first version on his fiftieth birthday, 8 December 1915, a national celebration in Finland. He then went on revising.

The revision of 1916 joined the first two movements; another followed in 1919. In the finished score a horn call opens a movement whose pace gradually quickens until it has become the scherzo. The finale ends on six chords separated by silences. The years of revision covered a world war, the loss of foreign royalties, Finnish independence and civil war. In 1918 the family temporarily left Ainola for his brother Christian’s home at Lapinlahti Hospital in Helsinki.

1923–⁠26Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, Tapiola

The Sixth (1923) begins with interlocking string lines in D Dorian, whose B♮ raises the sixth degree of the usual minor scale. It ends quietly. The Seventh, premiered in Stockholm in 1924 as Fantasia sinfonica, lasts about twenty minutes and is in one movement. A trombone plays its C major theme above the orchestra three times; between those statements the music speeds up, takes on dance rhythms and slows again, without a break. Tapiola, commissioned by Walter Damrosch and first played in New York in 1926, is built from a small number of related figures. Near the end the strings play a storm passage.

After 1926The fire at Ainola