Alex Ross - The Rest Is Noise Series - Apparition from the Woods - The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius

“I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien,” Rachmaninov wrote in 1939. “I cannot cast out the old way of writing, and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me. Unlike Madame Butterfly with her quick religious conversions”—this is presumably Stravinsky—“I cannot cast out my musical gods in a moment and bend the knee to new ones.” Sibelius felt the same pang of loss. “Not everyone can be an ‘innovating genius,’ ” he wrote one day in his diary. “As a personality and ‘eine Erscheinung aus den Wäldern’ [apparition from the woods] you will have your small, modest place.”

And yet the so-called regional composers—for whom Sibelius speaks in this book as a representative—left behind an imposing body of work, which is integral to the century as a whole. Their music may lack the vanguard credentials of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, at least on the surface, but some words from Nielsen’s book Living Music make a good counterargument: “The simplest is the hardest, the universal the most lasting, the straightest the strongest, like the pillars that support the dome.” Precisely because these composers communicated general feelings of mourning for a pretechnological past, or, more simply, yearning for vanished youth, they remained acutely relevant for a broad public.

Mainstream audiences may lag behind the intellectual classes in appreciating the more adventurous composers, but sometimes they are quicker to perceive the value of music that the politicians of style fail to comprehend. Nicolas Slonimsky once put together a delightful book titled Lexicon of Musical Invective, anthologizing wrong-headed music criticism in which now canonical masterpieces were compared to feline caterwauling, barnyard noises, and so on. Slonimsky should also have written a Lexicon of Musical Condescension, gathering high-minded essays in which now canonical masterpieces were dismissed as kitsch, with a long section reserved for Sibelius.

Born in 1865, Sibelius was not merely the most famous composer Finland ever produced but the country’s chief celebrity in any field. He played a symbolic but active role in the drive toward Finnish independence, which was finally achieved in 1917. Asked to characterize their culture, Finns invariably mention, alongside such national treasures as the lakeside sauna, Fiskars scissors, and the Nokia cellular phone, “our Sibelius.” Before the advent of the euro, Sibelius’s monumental head graced every hundred-markka banknote. Mostly because of him, classical music has retained a central role in modern Finnish culture. The country’s government invests enormous sums in orchestras, opera houses, new-music programs, and music schools. The annual Finnish expenditure on the arts is roughly two hundred times per capita what the U.S. government spends on the National Endowment for the Arts.

In a certain sense, Finns are strangers in the European family. Belonging to the Finno-Ugrian category, they speak a language largely unrelated to the Indo-European group. For centuries they were governed by the kingdom of Sweden; then, in 1809, they became a semi-autonomous grand duchy of tsarist Russia. In the late nineteenth century, the Swedish influence remained strong, with a minority of Swedish speakers forming the upper crust of society. Sibelius belonged to this Swedish elite; his father spoke no Finnish, and he himself learned it as a second language. Yet, like many of his generation, he avidly joined in the independence campaign, whose cultural apparatus blended traces of ancient tribal ritual with invented mythologies in the Romantic vein. The nationalist movement became more urgent after Tsar Nicholas II introduced measures designed to suppress Finland’s autonomy.

The national legends of Finland are contained in the Kalevala, a poetic epic compiled in 1835 by a country doctor named Elias Lönnrot. Cantos 31 through 36 of the Kalevala tell of the bloodthirsty young fighter Kullervo, who “could not grasp things / not acquire the mind of a man.” While collecting taxes for his father, Kullervo has his way with a young woman who turns out to be his sister. She commits suicide, he goes off to war. One day he finds himself again in the forest where the rape occurred, and strikes up a conversation with his sword, asking it what kind of blood it wishes to taste. The sword demands the blood of a guilty man instead of an innocent one, whereupon Kullervo rams his body on the blade. In 1891 and 1892, Sibelius used this rather dismal tale as the basis for his first major work, Kullervo, an eighty-minute symphonic drama for men’s chorus, soloists, and orchestra.

Kullervo anticipates the folk realism of Stravinsky and Bartók in the way it heeds the rhythm and tone of a Kalevala recitation. In 1891, shortly after completing two years of study in Berlin and Vienna, Sibelius traveled to the old town of Porvoo to hear runic songs chanted by the folksinger Larin Paraske. The Finnish epic has a meter all its own: each line contains four main trochaic beats, but vowels are often stretched out for dramatic effect, so that each line has its own pattern. Instead of smoothing out the poetry into a foursquare rhythm, Sibelius bent his musical language in sympathetic response. In the setting of the passage below—from “Kullervo and His Sister,” the third movement of Kullervo—the orchestra maintains a pattern of five beats in a bar while the chorus elongates its lines to phrases of fifteen, ten, eight, and twelve beats, respectively.

The harmony, meanwhile, drifts away from major-and minor-key tonality. The runic melodies, with their overlapping modes, twine around the chords that lie beneath them; at moments, the accompaniment amounts to a rumbling cluster, a massing together of the available melodic tones.

Kullervo had a decisively successful first performance in Helsinki in 1892. For the remainder of the de cade, Sibelius worked mainly in the tone-poem genre, consolidating his fame with such works as En Saga, The Swan of Tuonela (part of the symphonic Lemminkäinen Suite), the Karelia Suite, and Finlandia. Sibelius’s mastery of the orchestra, already obvious in Kullervo, became prodigious. The Swan of Tuonela, which was initially conceived as the overture to an unfinished Kalevala opera, begins with the mirage-like sound of A-minor string chords blended one into the next over a span of four octaves. Sibelius’s early works, like contemporaneous works of Strauss, obey a kind of cinematic logic that places disparate images in close proximity. But where Strauss—and later Stravinsky—used rapid cuts, Sibelius preferred to work in long takes.

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