The Rest Is Noise Series: Apparition from the Woods: The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius

This is a chapter from Alex Ross's groundbreaking history of 20th century classical music, The Rest is Noise.

It is released as a special stand-alone ebook to celebrate a year-long festival at the Southbank Centre, inspired by the book. The festival consists of a series of themed concerts. Read this chapter if you're attending concerts in the episode The rise of nationalism: rediscovering roots and folk culture.

Alex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker, is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Belmont Prize in Germany and a MacArthur Fellowship. The Rest is Noise was his first book and garnered huge critical acclaim and a number of awards, including the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of Listen to This.

APPARITION FROM THE WOODS

The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius

From The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross

Contents

Apparition from the Woods

Notes

Suggested Listening and Reading

Copyright

About the Publisher

5 APPARITION FROM THE WOODS

The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius

Composing is a difficult business. “Desperately difficult,” says the devil in Doctor Faustus. It is a laborious traversal of an imaginary landscape. What emerges is an artwork in code, which other musicians must be persuaded to unravel. Unlike a novel or a painting, a score gives up its full meaning only when it is performed in front of an audience; it is a child of loneliness that lives off crowds. Nameless terrors creep into the limbo between composition and performance, during which the score sits mutely on the desk. Hans Pfitzner dramatized that moment of panic and doubt in Palestrina, his “musical legend” about the life of the Italian Renaissance composer. The character of Palestrina speaks for colleagues across the centuries when he stops his work to cry, “What is the point of all this? Ach, what is it for? What for?”

Jean Sibelius may have asked that question once too often. The crisis point of his career arrived in the late 1920s and the early ’30s, when he was being lionized as a new Beethoven in England and America and dismissed as a kitsch composer in the taste-making Austro-German music centers. The contrasts in the reception of his music matched the manic-depressive extremes of his personality—an alcoholic oscillation between grandiosity and self-loathing. Sometimes he believed that he was in direct communication with the Almighty—“For an instant God opens his door,” he wrote in a letter, “and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony”—and sometimes he felt worthless. In 1927, when he was sixty-one years old, he wrote in his diary, “Isolation and loneliness are driving me to despair ... In order to survive, I have to have alcohol ... Am abused, alone, and all my real friends are dead. My prestige here at present is rock-bottom. Impossible to work. If only there were a way out.”

Sibelius spent the last part of his life at Ainola, a rustic house outside Helsinki, Finland. On his desk for many years lay the Eighth Symphony, which promised to be his summary masterpiece. He had been working on it since 1924, and had indicated several times that it was almost ready for performance. A copyist transcribed twenty-three pages of the score, and at a later date Sibelius’s publisher may have bound the manuscript in a set of seven volumes. There were reportedly parts for chorus, as in Beethoven’s Ninth. But the Eighth never saw the light of day. The composer finally gave in to the seduction of despair. “I suppose one henceforth takes me as—yes!—a ‘fait accompli,’ ” he wrote in 1943. “Life is soon over. Others will come and surpass me in the eyes of the world. We are fated to die forgotten. I must start economizing. It can’t go on like this.”

Aino Sibelius, the composer’s wife, for whom the house was named, recalled what happened next: “In the 1940s there was a great auto da fé at Ainola. My husband collected a number of manuscripts in a laundry basket and burned them on the open fire in the dining room. Parts of the Karelia Suite were destroyed—I later saw remains of the pages which had been torn out—and many other things. I did not have the strength to be present and left the room. I therefore do not know what he threw on to the fire. But after this my husband became calmer and gradually lighter in mood.”

Ainola stands much as Sibelius left it. The atmosphere of the house is heavy and musty, as if the composer’s spirit were still pent up inside. But you get a different feeling when you walk into the forest that stretches out on one side of the house. The treetops meet in an endless curving canopy, tendrils of sunlight dangling down. The ground is uncluttered: many paths fork among the trunks. Venturing a little farther into the wood, you lose sight of all human habitation. A profound stillness descends. The light begins to fail, the mists roll in. After a while, you may begin to wonder if you will ever find your way back. Many times in Sibelius’s music the exaltation of natural sublimity gives way to inchoate fear, which has less to do with the outer landscape than with the inner one, the forest of the mind.

In his 1993 essay collection Testaments Betrayed, Milan Kundera anatomizes the more peripheral of the European cultures, taking his native Czechoslovakia as a specimen. “The small nations form ‘another Europe,’ ” the novelist writes. “An observer can be fascinated by the often astonishing intensity of their cultural life. This is the advantage of smallness: the wealth in cultural events is on a ‘human scale’; everyone can encompass that wealth.” Kundera warns, however, that the familial feeling can turn tense and constricting at a moment’s notice. “Within that warm intimacy,” he says, “each envies each, everyone watches everyone.” If an artist ignores the rules, the rejection can be cruel, the loneliness crushing. Even those who rise to fame may experience isolation at the summit—the burden of being a national hero.

Each of the “small nations”—a category into which Western European music experts have tended to dispose not only Nordic and Eastern European countries but also Great Britain, formerly known to Germans as the “land without music”—had its retinue of locally famous composers. A few of them broke out to wider renown, becoming standard-bearers of patriotic feeling. Edvard Grieg, in the late nineteenth century, wrote the “song of Norway.” Karol Szymanowski established a Polish modernist tendency. Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax, and William Walton built up a modern British repertory just as the glory of empire was fading. And Carl Nielsen, in Denmark, wrested music of brilliance and violence from rough-hewn folk melodies. Sibelius, the great composer of the small nation of Finland, set the pace for many others, not only because he forged a vital relationship with his native land but because he succeeded in stamping his own voice on seemingly worn-out, antiquated symphonic forms. Both Bax and Vaughan Williams revered the Finnish master and dedicated works to him; Walton opened his First Symphony with a nod to Sibelius’s Fifth.

As the twentieth century rumbled on, composers with strong national ties were haunted by feelings of obsolescence. Many twentieth-century symphonies, concertos, oratorios, and chamber works of the so-called conservative type were rich in lamentations for a lost world, elegies for the golden age, forebodings of disaster. Some found it difficult to keep writing: Elgar, who died in 1934, failed to finish another large-scale piece after his supremely elegiac Cello Concerto of 1918–19, and Rachmaninov, whom Tchaikovsky had anointed his heir apparent, produced only five major works from 1917 until his death in 1943.

“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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