Notes on the Piece
Jean Sibelius
tends to be described, like most Nordic composers, as a nationalist (though
this same description seems never to be applied to Richard Wagner, who had much
more definite and dangerous notions of nationhood than his colleagues to the
north). Sibelius is also perceived as having a strong interest in representing
the landscape of his homeland, which has inspired critics to find within his
works musical images of the forest, cold, and even silence. His final large-scale
orchestral work, Tapiola,
has been adopted by environmentalists as a metaphor for present-day concerns
about the destruction of nature.
The Finnish
nation and its landscape are different things, however, and it could be argued
that Sibelius was less interested in being reduced to a cultural ambassador or
musical portraitist than in reinventing orchestral music.
His First
Symphony of 1899–1900 is pivotal in this respect. It is part of a cluster of
scores associated with Finnish struggles for political freedom from the Russian
Empire. (At the time of its composition, Helsinki was the capital of an
autonomous Grand Duchy of Russia. The Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, sought to
exert greater political control over Finland, which sparked a long struggle for
independence.) Musicologist James Hepokoski notes these factors in claiming
that the First Symphony finds Sibelius forging “a stubbornly separatist,
regionally resonant musical idiom.” Yet Sibelius also freely borrows from the
techniques of non-Finnish composers like Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and even Wagner.
The original
version of the First Symphony does not survive. A perfectionist obsessed with
revision, the composer is thought to have burned the manuscript, leaving little
information as to his first thoughts about the score, other than mention of the
writers who inspired its odd assemblage of nature scenes (northern pines
seeking the weather enjoyed by southern palms, for example). The “regional”
elements Hepokoski identifies in the revised version include references to the
rhythmic recitation formulae of Finnish epic tales and the minor-mode,
five-note (pentatonic) collection found in many folk genres.
The marvel of the
score—and what distinguishes Sibelius from other symphonists of his
generation—is the intricate and innovative structure of the four movements. The
symphony begins with a striking, brooding clarinet solo, the first of several
aphoristic passages in the woodwinds. The harmonic underpinning of the melodic
writing tends to be static, suspended, as though the composer wanted us to
focus on each chord as a single sonority rather than part of a progression; this
practice is most evident in the pedal points of the second movement andante and
pizzicatos of the third movement scherzo. Most notably, the symphony is
cyclical: The fourth movement reprises the melodic material of the first three,
albeit with different orchestration. And it relies on orchestral timbre and
texture, rather than harmonic patterns, as structural supports.
Listeners should also note
Sibelius’s inside-out approach to form. Instead of presenting melodies in
expositions, fragmenting them in middle development sections, and then
reassembling them in recapitulations, the process is inverted: Sibelius tends
to begin and end with fragments, finding cohesion in the middle. The audience
is asked to listen to the music from another perspective. For Sibelius, the
symphony was less a vehicle for dramatic storytelling—with a triumphant or
tragic conclusion—than a way to explore different modes of being in the
world.
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