3. 1891–8: Forging a Finnish national music.

Once returned from Vienna, Sibelius threw himself into the grand Kullervo project, continuing to construct his new ‘Finnish-culture’ self-image in ways that were to inform the rest of his life. He ruled out the direct citation of folksong, for example, and sought instead to capture the essential feeling that animated such music. This self-definition demanded slow, cautious work, particularly because, as he wrote to Aino on 21–2 October 1891, ‘I would not wish to tell a lie in art … But I think I am now on the right path. I now grasp those Finnish, purely Finnish tendencies in music less realistically but more truthfully than before’. At the same time he was becoming engrossed in Finnish-language Karelianism, a political and artistic feature of the ‘National Romanticism’ that swept through Finland in the 1890s. The Karelianists paid special homage to the pre-industrial region of Karelia, much of which lay in Russian hands to the east of Finland's legal borders, although a portion, centred on Viipuri (Vyborg), then formed Finland's south-easternmost province. This region was venerated as preserving the most authentic traditions of Finnish music and poetry: larger Karelia had been the source-area of much of the Kalevala epic.

Sibelius sought out touchstone representatives of these folk-music practices during at least two periods at this time. The first occurred not in Karelia but in the coastal town of Porvoo (Borgå), between Helsinki and Loviisa. In later 1891 the Ingrian-Karelian singer Larin Paraske had been brought there as part of the preparation of a new edition of the Kalevala. By that point the 57-year-old woman had become widely famous as the leading memorizer and most authentic performer of these folk traditions. Sibelius heard Paraske perform laments (and probably also Kalevalaic rune-formulae) at the Porvoo home of the folksong collector Adolf Neovius in the final weeks of December 1891. ‘We have become good friends’, he boasted to Aino on 21 December, and he reported that he had penned the quasi-runic lullaby theme of ‘Kullervo's Youth’, the second movement of the future symphonic poem (ex.3c). Within a few days he mentioned the completion of the first movement.

Sibelius's second direct encounter with folk music occurred the following year, after the completion of Kullervo and immediately preceding the composition of the tone poem, En saga. During June and July 1892, following his marriage to Aino, he made a pilgrimage to Karelia itself – a personal extension to his honeymoon travels in south-eastern Finland – and noted down numerous melodies, especially from the remote Korpiselkä region.

About two months earlier, on 28 April 1892, the Helsinki première of Kullervo, conducted by Sibelius himself, had scored a telling success. This large-scale work established him overnight as the musical voice of a rising generation of pro-Finnish-culture activists. An unrelenting, mythic tale of hardship, incest and tragedy, Kullervo combines features of the standard programmatic symphony with cantata-like epic recitation and quasi-operatic soliloquies and brief dialogues. The non-texted movements, the first, second and fourth, provide a sonata-form structure, a slow movement and a scherzo. The texted movements, the third and fifth, with Finnish texts from the Kalevala, were recognized immediately as landmarks in the proper, idiomatic setting of Finnish. Sensing that Kullervo, despite its local triumph, was not yet the utterance he had hoped it would be, Sibelius never consented to its publication (it was printed only in 1966 – though with a copyright date of 1961 – nine years after his death).

Kullervo may have been compositionally untidy and occasionally sprawling, yet it proclaimed his new artistic identity in a startlingly original style. Most importantly, it seemed to bypass significant features of the academic-classical traditions altogether – traditions that Sibelius may never have fully mastered – in favour of a colouristic, grippingly earnest plunge into folk-saturated content and quasi-ritualized musical objects. With Kullervo, Sibelius began to turn a potential weakness into an immense strength. Pushing conservatory correctness to the sidelines, the work gave prominence to modally-tinged (‘Finnish’) melodies and reiterative accompaniment patterns; obsessive ostinato repetition, long pedal points and epic recyclings of brief melodic ideas; bluntly cut rhythms; broodingly thick, dark and often minor-mode textures, redolent of stern historical burdens and inescapable tragedy; unmediated juxtapositions of utterly contrasting timbre fields; and a favouring of texturally stratified, prolonged sound-images at the expense of traditional, linear-contrapuntal development.

The natural-minor opening pages, among the boldest in all of Sibelius, convey the sense of a dam breaking, a releasing of mythic floodwaters, a rushing and roaring rhythmic stream bursting in from silence, turbulently churning up ancient memory. The hauntingly original, Dorian lullaby theme of the second movement (‘Kullervo's Youth’), harmonized with pungent dissonances, is among the most characteristic runic-styled ideas in early Sibelius (ex.3c). In the work's dramatic centrepiece, the texted third movement (‘Kullervo and his Sister’), Sibelius grappled with the problem of writing differing styles of music in ‘Karelian’ quintuple metres, a characteristic concern of these early years: the opening ritornello, ex.2b, is dance-like (perhaps a trepak); ex.2c is recitational. The same movement provides an early instance of embracing the non-standard formal practice of unfolding ideas in epic or ritualistic semi-parallel cycles. The first third of the movement, for example, is built around three varied rotations (cycles) of the pattern: orchestral ritornello – male-chorus recitation – brief dialogue. The pattern unravels only towards the end of the third cycle, probably to suggest, along with the text, a slide into disorder.

The next few years saw Sibelius developing further his local-nationalist musical image and busying himself with the conflicting demands of family, career and anti-bourgeois, immoderate personal impulse. Three of his six daughters were born in the 1890s, Eva (1893), Ruth (1894) and Kirsti (1898, died 1900). In autumn 1892 he began teaching theory (and violin) both at the Helsinki Music Institute and at Kajanus's Philharmonic Orchestra School: he continued to teach until the end of the decade. He also made periodic trips abroad. In summer 1894 he visited Bayreuth (and later Innsbruck and Venice): ‘overwhelming’ experiences with Parsifal, Tristan and Die Meistersinger plunged him into a short-lived Wagner crisis, which he managed to resolve within a month. By 19 August 1894 he declared himself closer to Liszt and the symphonic poem than to Wagnerian music drama; by 22 August he wrote, ‘I am no longer a Wagnerian’, and two weeks later he was studying Liszt's Faust Symphony. In spring 1896 he travelled to Berlin with Aino and visited Busoni. Summer 1897 brought a holiday in Venice. In November 1897 the Finnish Senate voted to support Sibelius as a national artist with a pension of 3000 marks for each of the next ten years; after that time it was renewed to extend over the rest of his life.

In the mid-1890s, Sibelius's loyalties shifted away from the pro-Swedish-Finnish Wegelius (who had disapproved of the Finnish nationalism of Kullervo) and towards a group of ‘modern’, more pro-Finnish intellectuals dedicated to agitated aesthetic debates, typically prolonged – sometimes for days – by alcohol. Sibelius's self-styled ‘Symposium’ circle included Wegelius's rival, Robert Kajanus, the gifted painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela (then undertaking his ‘Karelian-Symbolist’ Kalevala canvases, now Finland's most celebrated paintings; see fig.2), Adolf Paul and Armas Järnefelt. Gallen-Kallela immortalized this camaraderie in a notorious 1894 painting, ‘Symposium: the Problem’: it depicted the bottle-flanked ‘discussions’ of three of the group (Sibelius, Gallen-Kallela himself and Kajanus) in the bleary-eyed, dishevelled company of a fourth (perhaps Oskar Merikanto) who had already passed out on the table (fig.1). The bon vivants frequented, among other establishments, the Kämp restaurant in Helsinki. These visits gave rise to dozens of still-repeated ‘Kämp stories’ featuring Sibelius's irresponsibility, characteristically counterpointed with Aino's long-suffering patience.

In autumn 1896 Sibelius, Kajanus and the musicologist Ilmari Krohn competed for a prestigious academic appointment at the University of Helsinki. In pursuit of the position (ultimately awarded to Kajanus), Sibelius delivered a lecture at the university on 25 November that was something of a nationalistic musical manifesto: ‘Some Perspectives on Folk Music and its Influence on the Art of Music’. The subject had long occupied him: apart from his intersections with folk music in 1891–2, he and the folklorist Lähteenkorva (Borenius) had edited a selection of Finnish folktunes for the Finnish Literary Society in 1895.

The 1896 lecture emphasized three points. First, folk and recitation melodies were instinctive products of nature. Modern composers should not harmonize them artificially or intellectually; only someone steeped in their folk spirit would be able to provide an intuitively correct harmonization or adaptation. Secondly, the most stable feature of Finnish folk music was the minor pentachord, representable as D–E–F–G–A. The pentachord had no mandatory final; melodies or phrases could end on any of its pitches, and they could be backlighted with different harmonizations carrying diverse tonal implications. Moreover, in some melodies the Finnish pentachord was extended upwards to include B and C (6 and 7) as tense upper auxiliary notes; the five-pitch complex also implied a complementary pentachord a 5th below, G–A–B( )–C–D, all of which encouraged a variety of modally inflected harmonizations. Thirdly, the repetitive Kalevalaic recitation formulas (rune melodies) were not static; rune singers varied these melancholy cycles through improvisation and personalization, especially as the text grew more intense. The nearest art-music analogue to these varied cycles (as Sibelius had noted in 1890) was ‘theme and variations’.

Throughout this decade Sibelius continued to develop the style first declared in Kullervo. At that time he surely regarded his formulation of this new language as an aggressively ‘modern’ project in the sense carried by that newly circulating term in younger German and Austrian artistic circles. The style was modern in several ways: its sheer strangeness was a mark of the brash generational difference separating Sibelius from his musical predecessors, whose norms it challenged; it strove unapologetically for vivid primitivist effects through an intensely personalized, non-academic treatment of harmony, melody, orchestral colour and musical continuity; and in its stern, anti-traditional manner it claimed to uncover a deeper human truth than that afforded by the complacent conservatory traditions.

His own command over this idiom expanded with a series of promising orchestral compositions, although in each case – as with Kullervo – he held back from immediate publication, preferring to set the works aside for possible later revision. These were: the tone poem En saga (1892, revised 1902); the set of tableau-vivant music for the Viipuri (Karelian) Student Association (1893, movements of which were published as the Karelia Overture and Suite, 1906); the tone poem Skogsrået (‘The Wood Nymph’, 1895, unpublished; recovered and recorded in 1996); and the Lemminkäis-Sarja (‘Lemminkäinen Suite’), four tone-poem ‘legends’ from the Kalevala, in effect a programme symphony (1895, subjected to multiple revisions in the ensuing years). The period also saw a handful of pioneering Finnish-language pieces for male chorus, such as Venematka (‘The Boat Journey’, 1893: ex.2d), the mini-triptych Rakastava (‘The Lover’, 1894; ex.2e), Saarella palaa (‘Fire on the Island’) and Sortunut ääni (‘The Broken Voice’, 1898; ex.2f). In addition, he was intermittently attracted to post-Wagnerian opera: towards that end he worked in 1893 and 1894 on the Kalevala-based Veneen luominen (‘The Building of the Boat’; it was ultimately abandoned but material from its prelude was recast as Tuonelan joutsen, ‘The Swan of Tuonela’); and in 1896 he completed an unsuccessful one-act opera, Jungfrun i tornet (‘The Maiden in the Tower’).

Sibelius's modern nationalism of the 1890s was a confluence of several musical streams. At first the impact of Liszt was keen – the liberation from (or radicalized dialogue with) formal conventions and the narrative-pictorial aspirations of the symphonic poem – but reverberations of Wagner and Bruckner were also present (vibrant colours, chromatic shifts, reiterative background ostinatos, muscular eruptions). By the end of the decade his growing self-criticism, reinforced by occasional stinging disapproval in the Helsinki press, led to an increased discipline and formal concentration: with time he came to aspire to the motivic severity (though not the counterpoint) of the Austro-Germanic tradition of Haydn and Beethoven. He also absorbed features of the Scandinavian and Russian nationalists: Grieg, Sinding, Svendsen and the St Petersburg school (including Borodin and Glazunov). In works from the late 1890s onwards, especially, one often senses a strong influence of Tchaikovsky in the general approach to orchestral sound and in certain local effects, though not in larger questions of structure. And nourishing the whole was his personal adaptation of Finnish language rhythms and folk idioms: obsessive, rune-like melodies, modal harmonies and a spirit of unflinching determination.

To grasp Sibelius's maturation throughout the 1890s (and to come to terms with the seasoned composer thereafter) is to recognize that a substantial part of his creativity was propelled by a deep-seated conflict of contradictory aesthetics and personal motivations that would gnaw as irreconcilables throughout his life and music. On the one hand, as the insecure, self-doubting outsider, he longed time and again to prove himself within the traditional circles and musical formats of the idealistic, neo-romantic establishment. One side of Sibelius ached for acceptance, yearned to thrive and be praised in the plushy afterglow world of the European institution of art music and its comforts, longed to furnish with appropriately Nordic, melancholy sentiments the culturally contented and luxuriate in the polished-mahogany satisfactions of ‘art’ as it existed. In these wishes, however, he was destined to fall short, never to achieve satisfaction. Whenever the aesthetic balance tipped too far in this direction, he would stumble, handling matters awkwardly or selfconsciously.

On the other hand, a compensatory, rebellious drive, even a streak of early-modernist defiance, incited him to transgress commonplace or outworn stereotypes, regardless of the consequences for his reputation. This neo-primitivist side of Sibelius sought to plunge recklessly towards an essential truth hidden in sonority (Klang) itself, to reawaken sound back to its crude or primal essence, to do violence – abrupt violence – to the conventions. Thus Sibelius the ‘Finnish barbarian’ undertook his mission to validate himself by defamiliarizing sonic norms, endeavouring to startle sound awake with surprising strokes. The tension between these two impulses – a residual longing for recognition within bourgeois conventions versus a defiant attraction to the break-up of the same conventions – tears at the heart of Sibelius from Kullervo onward. Wrestling with their complex interactions was central to his musical career.

During the 1890s then, Sibelius cultivated and blended not one style but two, generated by different aspects of his personality. At the risk of oversimplification, one might also suggest that these differences intersected in vital ways with the ever-present dialectic of language and world-view in Sibelius's (and Finland's) life: the ‘Finnish-language’ (or Kalevalaic) and ‘Swedish-Finnish’ tendencies. The two styles were not mutually exclusive: there was much overlap between them, but certain compositions tilted towards one or the other. While the rugged Finnish manner, concerned with burning issues of ethnic authenticity and cultural legitimacy, was the more politicized and disruptive, the Swedish-Finnish impulse sought a larger, more international audience on traditional terms. This latter tendency favoured the conventionally melodic; more frankly mercantile, it sought out the sentimental and confessionally sincere: although generally smoother it was still tinged with Finnish (or Scandinavian) melancholy. Sometimes this latter style came to the fore in lighter orchestral works, such as Vårsång (‘Spring Song’, 1894, revised 1895 and 1902) or some of the later incidental music. For Sibelius its most elevated home was the Swedish-Finnish (Swedish-language) ‘romantic’ Lied, which occupied him throughout his career, sometimes in experimental ways. The seven Runeberg songs op.13 was his first publication with his name on the title-page (1892). In 1895 the Finnish soprano Ida Ekman managed to perform for Brahms another early song on a Runeberg text, Se'n har jag ej frågat mera (‘Then I questioned no further’) (1891–2). According to her report almost 50 years later, Brahms's reaction was positive: ‘Aus dem wird was’ (‘Something will become of him’).

There can be no doubt, however, that Sibelius made his strongest utterances in orchestral works in which the radically Finnish style was pushed to the forefront. The high points before the First Symphony (1899) were Tuonelan joutsen (‘The Swan of Tuonela’) and Lemminkäinen palaa kotitienoille (literally, ‘Lemminkäinen Returns to his Home Districts’), two movements of the Lemminkäinen Suite that he published separately, after revision, in 1901 (the remaining two movements were revised again in 1939 and were not published until 1954). Broodingly immersed in the vaporous presence of its prevailing A minor tonal colour, the suite's slow movement, The Swan of Tuonela, depicts the gloom and near-immobility of the world of Death (tuoni) from the Kalevala. In this Northern-symbolist work Sibelius emerged as a master of orchestral atmosphere. The famous, extended solo for english horn (featuring the twisting rhythm of the ‘Sibelius triplet’) is supported by a bed of sustained, muted strings, each group of which, with the exception of the double basses, is normally subdivided into four parts: 17 string parts in all, some of which are occasionally divided further for searching solo phrases. The result is an uncommonly rich background texture, subjected to register shifts, dynamic swells and chromatic slippages. (Some of the colours recall passages in the Parsifal prelude and Act 3 of Tristan; Swan Lake and other works by Tchaikovsky might also be present as residual memories.) As one phrase merges into the next, the piece's impression of ‘inexplicable’ organic cohesiveness relies more on the varied resurfacing of interrelated themes, colours and motifs treated as independent sound objects than on any standard formal plan. The slow transformations build towards climactic textures near the end, where the divided strings merge to produce a sonorous, death-march cantabile melody in octaves.

Sibelius's experimentation is even bolder in the suite's finale, Lemminkäinen's Return, a watershed in his career and, at least in the 1901 revision, a harbinger of formal innovations more characteristic of his later works. This breathless moto perpetuo shrugs off references to traditional architectonic forms in favour of a coherent process of cumulative growth towards the production of a goal statement (or telos). In this case the goal to be achieved (the Kalevala hero's home to which he is returning) involves three elements in succession: attaining the ‘colour’ of the suite's tonic key, E major (bar 315, letter ‘N’, a ‘border-crossing’); sounding an ecstatic telos-melody in that key (bar 342, one bar after letter ‘O’); and, at the end, producing an adrenalin-driven accelerando to secure E major with an assertive IV–V⁷–I authentic cadence (bars 431–7, letter ‘R’). The piece begins off-tonic in a ‘modal’ C minor (in vi, ‘away from home’) with a 19-bar block bristling with scarcely contained fragments and wild cries. This energetic block is then subjected to continuous recyclings, but each rotation of the cycle accumulates additional motifs, expanding the size of each rotation block and gradually generating later telos-events. The whole piece is best described as a single-minded process unfolding in three stages: bars 1–139 (C minor, vi); bars 140–314 (letter ‘D’, wide-ranging tonal shifts, attaining the tonic minor – E minor – in bar 243, letter ‘I’); bars 315–481 (E major, production of goal statements). Two decades later, Sibelius recreated the excitement of the manically rhythmic, E major conclusion of Lemminkäinen's Return at the end of the first movement of his Fifth Symphony.

Sibelius, Jean