The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In the 29-volume second edition. Grove Music Online /General Editor – Stanley Sadie. Oxford University Press. 2001.

Sibelius, Jean [Johan] (Christian Julius)

(b Hämeenlinna, 8 Dec 1865; d Järvenpää, 20 Sept 1957). Finnish composer. He was the central figure in creating a Finnish voice in music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His most significant output was orchestral: seven symphonies, one violin concerto, several sets of incidental music and numerous tone poems, often based on incidents taken from the Kalevala, the Finnish-language folk epic. His work is distinguished by startlingly original adaptations of familiar elements: unorthodox treatments of triadic harmony, orchestral colour and musical process and structure. His music evokes a range of characteristic moods and topics, from celebratory nationalism and political struggle to cold despair and separatist isolation; from brooding contemplations of ‘neo-primitive’ musical ideas or slowly transforming sound textures to meditations on the mysteries, grandeurs and occasionally lurking terrors of archetypal folk myths or natural landscapes. A master of symphonic continuity and compressed, ‘logical’ musical structure, he grounded much of his music in his own conception of the Finnish national temperament. Throughout the 20th century Finland regarded him as a national hero and its most renowned artist. Outside Finland, Sibelius's reputation has been volatile, with passionate claims made both by advocates and detractors. The various reactions to his music have provided some of the most ideologically charged moments of 20th-century reception history.

JAMES HEPOKOSKI (text, bibliography), FABIAN DAHLSTRÖM (work-list)

Sibelius, Jean

1. 1865–89: Early years, first student compositions.

Christening records from Hämeenlinna (Swedish, Tavastehus), a small garrison town roughly 100 km north of Helsinki, clarify the original order of his given names: Johan Christian Julius. In March 1886, as a first-year music student in Helsinki, 20-year-old ‘Janne’ adopted the first name Jean as ‘my music-name’ (his uncle Johan, a sea captain who had died a year before the composer's birth, had also used that name). He was the second of three children born to Christian Gustaf Sibelius, a military physician and the town doctor, and Maria Borg: the eldest was his sister Linda (1863–1932), the youngest his brother Christian (1869–1922), born after his father's death.

When Christian Gustaf died, from typhus, in 1868, the family was plunged into debt and received the support of close relatives. The children often spent their summers with their paternal grandmother and their aunt Evelina Sibelius in the southern coastal town of Loviisa (Lovisa). Young Janne, who had been attracted to the family's piano from about the age of five, received a few piano lessons when he was about seven from Evelina's sister, Julia, although at the time he was more interested in improvising than in disciplined study. Even more important was the unflagging encouragement of his uncle Pehr Sibelius in Turku (Åbo), a seed merchant who was also an amateur violinist and music lover. Much correspondence from the 1880s between the two still survives; most of it concerns Sibelius's developing love of music.

In the second half of the 19th century Finland was stirring with the economic and cultural changes with which the young Sibelius would soon be identified. Long controlled by Sweden (from the 12th century up to the early 19th), it had since 1809 been an autonomous grand duchy governed by Russia. Its population was divided by rival languages. On the one hand, its government, education, coastal commerce and fine arts were dominated by a longstanding élite culture of Swedish-speaking Finns, a minority within the country. On the other, the Finnish-speaking majority in the interior had traditionally wielded no social power, although a movement (‘Fennicization’) was under way to legitimize the language and to embrace it as the driving force of an authentic, assertive self-identity. The cultures articulated by these unrelated languages – the two sides of the Finnish character – were substantially different: the one Scandinavian, and hence potentially more urbane, sophisticated and international in outlook; the other Finno-Ugric (or Uralic), rooted in the rugged peasantry, uncompromisingly idiosyncratic, inscrutable to the outside world.

Sibelius grew up amid this growing language dispute, and his life and career reflect the aspirations of both sides and the tensions between them. He came from a Swedish-speaking family; even later in life his letters and diaries would be written largely in that language. His first extended exposure to Finnish came when he was ten: in 1876, after four years of Swedish-language education, he enrolled in the country's first Finnish-language secondary school, the Normaalilyseo, in Hämeenlinna. Although Sibelius learnt the rudiments of Finnish at this time, the language is absent from his ‘Hämeenlinna letters’ of the 1870s and 80s. There is little evidence that he had a high regard for it during those decades (although in a letter to Uncle Pehr dating from August 1885, shortly before his move to Helsinki, Sibelius mentioned that he ‘could give lessons in Finnish’ to earn money; a letter two months later suggests in passing, though somewhat unclearly, that he might have made himself available for such work). Whatever young Sibelius's initial abilities with Finnish might have been, his fuller, more sympathetic immersion in this language-world came only in the 1890s.

The traditional date of 1875 assigned to his earliest preserved composition, Vattendroppar (‘Water Drops’), a 24-bar trifle in E minor for violin and cello, both pizzicato throughout, seems suspiciously early. As is clear from the recently published ‘Hämeenlinna letters’, his formal study of music began in September 1881 (not 1880, as commonly cited), when at the age of 15 he started taking violin lessons with Gustaf Levander, the local military bandmaster. By the late 1880s the intense, nervous Sibelius would become a competent violinist, although one temperamentally suited more to chamber and ensemble performances than to solo appearances. Much of his chamber-music activity was in conjunction with a string quartet in Hämeenlinna (in which he played second violin), although music-making also took place at home, where he and his brother and sister constituted a piano trio: Janne on the violin, Christian on the cello and Linda on the piano.

During most of the 1880s he regarded himself primarily as a violinist, but his thoughts were also turning to composition. The gift of a ‘long desired but unbelievably expensive’ harmony book from Aunt Evelina in August 1882 led in the following year to the composition of the earliest surviving pieces after Vattendroppar: a three-movement Trio and a small Minuet in F for two violins and piano. He wrote to Uncle Pehr on 25 August 1883, ‘The compositions are, of course, very bad, but on rainy days it is fun to have something to work on’. Another letter to Pehr (24 February 1884) refers enthusiastically to his work with a newly acquired copy of J.C. Lobe's Lehrbuch der musikalischen Komposition, although later in life he reported that his conception of musical form in the early 1880s had crystallized around A.B. Marx's Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition. Thus towards the end of this ‘Hämeenlinna Period’ (1880–85) Sibelius began to write chamber works more or less imitative of the Viennese Classical or early Romantic style (Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert), albeit in a simplified manner. 1884 saw a few larger chamber works, and in summer 1885 he wrote his first piano pieces and his earliest string quartet, in E , sometimes charitably described as Haydnesque.

In autumn 1885 Sibelius left Hämeenlinna, supported by a loan from Pehr, to enrol both in Helsinki University as a student of law – a half-hearted aspiration lasting only a year – and in Martin Wegelius's newly-founded Helsinki Music Institute as a violinist. This phase of his music study would last four years (1885–9). Under the teachers Mitrofan Vasil'yev and (from 1887) Hermann Csillag his violin technique improved remarkably, but during this time ‘Jean’ Sibelius found himself drawn more deeply into composition. In spring 1887, following some terms of classroom harmony, he began to study composition privately with Wegelius, a former pupil of Reinecke in Leipzig who now favoured the harmonic and contrapuntal textbooks of Ludwig Bussler. A wellspring of energy and organization, Wegelius was an educational traditionalist who nonetheless admired Wagner and Liszt.

Sibelius soon became Wegelius's protégé. In the years 1887–9 the young violinist composed over a dozen conservatory-style chamber works and individual movements flavoured with Nordic mannerisms and sentimental earnestness. Some were written for the institute itself, others for private performances. Hints of the mature Sibelius are rare in these student works, which he never sanctioned for publication. They typically feature simple melody-plus-accompaniment textures, along with a striving for ‘serious’ sonorities and tonal colours; contrapuntal interplay (thematische Arbeit) rarely pervades all of the voices. They include: a Piano Trio in C ‘Loviisa’, a virtuoso Suite for violin and piano in E; a Grieg-influenced Violin Sonata in F, whose slow movement, a set of variations on a folk-like tune (intended to represent, he told Pehr, ‘an authentic Finnish girl’ singing with ‘sadness and melancholy’, unaffected by flirtatious efforts to cheer her up), was his first explicitly ‘nationalistic’ piece; a String Trio (Suite) in A; and a laboured fugue for Martin Wegelius for string quartet. The most promising of these early works was the String Quartet in A minor, performed at the institute in May 1889 and praised by the influential Helsinki Swedish-language music critic Karl Flodin, who welcomed Sibelius to the front lines of Finnish composition. These years also saw his first published work: in 1888 his song Serenad, with text by the celebrated Swedish-Finnish poet Johan Runeberg, was printed in an anthology, Det sjungande Finland 2. By 1889 his future path was clear: ‘Jean’ Sibelius had determined to become a composer.

During his final year at the Helsinki Music Institute (1888–9) Sibelius's circle widened to include figures that were to become increasingly important in his life. In Ferruccio Busoni, freshly hired as a professor of piano, he discovered a kindred, sympathetic artist (and vice versa). The two musicians, along with three Finnish contemporaries – pianist and writer Adolf Paul and the two Järnefelt brothers, the composer Armas and the painter Eero – joined together convivially as the ‘Leskovites’ (named after Busoni's dog Lesko) and exchanged ideas in Helsinki's cafés and restaurants. The connection with the Järnefelts proved especially significant: it was at this time that Sibelius fell in love with the Järnefelts' younger sister Aino, his future wife. Moreover, that distinguished family staunchly supported the pro-Finnish-language cause. The Järnefelts' lobbying on behalf of Finnish history and literature as virtually a moral imperative, along with their preference for speaking and writing in that language, must have begun to influence the Swedish-speaking Sibelius. His interest in the Finnish language and its recently collected folk poetry was doubtless rekindled at this point; it would deepen remarkably in the next few years.

Sibelius, Jean