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Tragically, Gershwin did not live to fulfill his entire vision. Not long before his
sudden death in 1937, of a brain tumor, he told his sister: “I don’t feel I’ve really
scratched the surface of what I want to do.”
The Harlem Renaissance, insofar as W. E. B. Du Bois and others defined it,
aspired to create an African-American version of “high culture.” By the early
thirties, that mission was becoming more difficult to sustain. A terrible riot in
1935 exposed the misery and rage behind the illusion of an upwardly mobile
black culture.
The Duke
As Paul Allen Anderson explains in his book Deep River,
The split between the Harlem Renaissance elders and the new radical Negroes
formed the backdrop for Duke Ellington’s career. Like Gershwin, Ellington had a
flair for ambivalence. He partook of Du Bois and Locke’s cosmopolitanism, their
rhetoric of uplift and transcendence. Yet he also adopted Hughes’s slogans of
resistance and subversion.
a split opened
between the original leaders of the Renaissance and younger artists such as
Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, who disavowed what Hughes called
the “Nordicized Negro intelligentsia” and sought a less status-conscious, less
politely affirmative definition of black culture. Du Bois and his colleagues had
dreamed, in Anderson’s words, of a “hybridic fusion” of African-American,
mainstream-American, and European ideas. Alain Locke, in his musical
commentaries, remained suspicious of commercial jazz and saved his highest
praise for the symphonies of William Grant Still, William Dawson, and Florence
Price. By contrast, the young rebel Hughes—whose great-uncle John Mercer
Langston had been a good friend of Will Marion Cook’s father—celebrated the
authenticity of “hot” jazz and rural blues. “We build our temples for tomorrow,
strong as we know how,” Hughes wrote, in a widely quoted 1926 essay, “and
we stand on the top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”
There’s a wonderful scene in a 1944 New Yorker
Black musicians had to work fast and hard to escape appropriation. The great
early jazz records, from Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens onward,
profile in which Ellington is
shown deflating the expectations of an Icelandic music student who tries to
nudge him toward the “classical,” “genius” category. The student keeps
peppering the master with questions about Bach, and, before answering,
Ellington makes an elaborate show of unwrapping a pork chop that he has
stowed in his pocket. “Bach and myself,” he says, taking a bite from the chop,
“both write with individual performers in mind.” With that pork-chop maneuver,
Ellington put distance between himself and the European conception of genius,
though without rejecting it entirely. Another time he addressed the issue head-
on: “To attempt to elevate the status of the jazz musician by forcing the level of
his best work into comparisons with classical music is to deny him his rightful
share of originality.”
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show an art form developing at blinding speed. As the composer Olly Wilson
has said, jazz composers compensated for the limitations of the three-or four-
minute track by exploiting a “heterogeneous sound ideal”: multiple rhythms, call-
and-response patterns, and diverse timbres conspire to create “a high density of
musical events within a relatively short musical time frame.” Albert Murray
writes in his classic book Stomping the Blues: “The phonograph record has
served as the blues musician’s equivalent to the concert hall almost from the
outset. It has been in effect his concert hall without walls, his musée imaginaire
Dvorak had assumed that American music would come into its own when it
succeeded in importing African-American material into European form, but in
the end the opposite thing happened: African-American composers
appropriated European material into self-invented forms of blues and jazz.
…” European harmonies were one more ingredient added to the mix.
When Duke Ellington set about making his name, he went for advice to Will
Marion Cook. The grand old man of African-American music would give him
informal lessons in the course of extended horse-and-buggy rides around
Central Park. “I’d sing a melody in its simplest form,” Ellington recalled, “and
he’d stop me and say, ‘Reverse your figures’ … Some of the things he used to
tell me I never got a chance to use until years later, when I wrote the tone poem
Black, Brown, and Beige.”
Ellington’s “inner self” is present in his first original recording, “East St. Louis
Toodle-oo,” from 1926. The piece is distinctive because it creates a distinctive
tension between a blues theme on solo trumpet and a straitlaced
accompaniment in the band. The lead tune, written and played by the master
trumpeter Bubber Miley, depicts an old man shuffling in wearily from the
cornfield. The minor-key accompaniment, Ellington’s work, takes the form of a
hypnotic string of closely voiced chords, circling around like a cool crowd of
onlookers.
Cook was expounding Brahmsian principles of
variation and development: “Reverse your figures” suggests the notes of a
theme spelled in inversion or retrograde. Cook also directed Ellington to
discover his individual voice: “You know you should go to the conservatory, but
since you won’t, I’ll tell you. First you find the logical way, and when you find it,
avoid it, and let your inner self break through and guide you. Don’t try to be
anybody else but yourself.”
An improvising soloist was, of course, hardly a novelty in musical history;
Mozart’s and Beethoven’s concertos offered spells of cadenza freedom, and
opera singers had freely ornamented their parts for centuries. The difference in
Ellington’s jazz pieces—as in Armstrong’s and Fletcher Henderson’s—was that
the distinction between the composed and the improvised broke down at an
almost subatomic level. Players moved in and out of the improvisatory circle,
taking their solos. They burst into exhilarating runs that sounded spontaneous
but were in many cases intricately rehearsed beforehand. The entire ensemble
was in a state of flux. Yet it all came out sounding like Ellington.
What distinguished Ellington from most of his contemporaries was that he set
himself the goal of expanding the time frame of the jazz piece, stretching it well
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beyond the limits of the 78-rpm side and into the realm of the large-scale
classical work. Rhapsody in Blue was the obvious model, a jazz-based work
that had grown into symphonic dimensions. In a 1931 article titled “The Duke
Steps Out,” Ellington announced that he was writing “a rhapsody unhampered
by any musical form in which I intended to portray the experiences of the
coloured races in America in the syncopated idiom.” It would be “an authentic
record of my race written by a member of it”—the italics are Ellington’s. In the
same year he wrote Creole Rhapsody, which required two record sides.
Whether or not this is the work described in “The Duke Steps Out,” Creole
Rhapsody has clear ties to Rhapsody in Blue,
Gershwin and Ellington were friendly on a personal level, appreciative of each
other’s work. Ellington liked the fact that Gershwin stood around backstage at
his shows dressed like a stagehand, as incognito as a celebrity composer could
be. Gershwin, for his part, listened intently to Ellington’s records, reportedly
filing them separate from the rest of his collection at home. There were,
however, moments of tension between the two, as the dispute over
and at one point it alludes directly
to Gershwin’s opening flourish—the upward scale that turns into a glissando. In
essence, Ellington was declaring that he would follow Gershwin in uniting jazz
and classical procedures, but that he would do it his own way.
Porgy and
Bess
Right around the time of
showed. Ellington flatly rejected the idea that a white composer could be
hailed as the composer of a “Negro opera.”
Porgy’s premiere, Ellington set down initial ideas for his
own opera, which was to have been called Boola, and which would presumably
have shown how Negro opera should really be done. The title character was
imagined as a mythic being who would sum up the entire African-American
experience, from his crossing to America on a slave ship, to his experiences as
a soldier in the Civil War, to his emancipation and emigration north, and on to
his arrival in the renaissance city of Harlem—where, Ellington once reminded
the New York Times, churches outnumber cabarets.
Boola never got past the sketching stage. While Gershwin would happily spend
month after month tinkering with his material, Ellington had a fundamentally
collaborative temperament, and composition on the operatic scale defeated
him. He did use his sketches in two extraordinary instrumental works, both of
which mix jazz and classical devices. Ko-Ko, written in 1939, evokes the drum-
and-dance ceremonies that slaves once performed on Sunday afternoons in
New Orleans. Anticipating the postwar modal jazz of Miles Davis, it is derived
almost entirely from an E-flat-minor Aeolian scale. A driving four-note figure
echoes the Morse-code rhythm of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth, as the
Ellington scholar Ken Rattenbury points out. Ellington takes a long solo in the
middle, dancing between thick Romantic harmonies and Debussyan whole-tone
chords. The piece works up to a towering six-note dissonance that sets an F-flat
dominant seventh against B-flat, not unlike the “Da-doo-da” chords in Porgy and
Bess. But Ellington doesn’t use modernist harmony to connote conflict, crisis,
and collapse. Instead, he makes it the deep background from which solos
emerge and into which they disappear. It’s the way things are. In an interview,
Ellington pointed out a discord in one of his latest compositions. “That’s the
Negro’s life,” he said. “Hear that chord!” Ellington played it again. “That’s us.
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Dissonance is our way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an
integral part.”
The other spin-off from Boola was the forty-five-minute swing symphony Black,
Brown, and Beige,
The occasion is palpable in the music. The first movement,
first presented at a historic 1943 concert at Carnegie Hall
that marked Ellington’s twentieth anniversary as a bandleader. On that night the
future that Will Marion Cook had pictured on Lookout Mountain became real: a
black composer conquered the haughtiest of concert stages.
Black, begins with
drums pounding out a slow, martial pattern. Trumpets and saxophones declaim
the opening theme, “Work Song,” while a trio of trombones hold an E-flat-major
triad in first inversion. It has a Richard Strauss quality to it—Thus Spake Boola.
Yet the fanfare represents, in Ellington’s words, “not a song of great Joy—not a
triumphant song—but a song of Burden—a song punctuated by the grunt of
Heaving a pick or axe.” The drums might be tom-toms beating in the jungle,
warning of invaders. Proud Africa is under threat from the white West. In
keeping with symphonic procedure, Ellington presents a contrasting theme,
“Come Sunday,” which, in the never-to-be Boola opera, would have depicted
slaves congregating, listening, and humming outside the doors of a steepled
church. The soaring hymnal melody, as played by Johnny Hodges, is one of
Ellington’s finest inspirations, and words were later added for Mahalia Jackson
to sing. Throughout Black,
The reception of
these two themes undergo rigorous variation
(“Reverse your figures,” as Cook said). The remaining two movements have
their lulls—Ellington finished the score in his usual rush, with an assist from Billy
Strayhorn—but in the end the work outshines every symphonic jazz piece of the
time.
Black, Brown, and Beige exposed many of the same anxieties
over the mixing of races and genres that had shadowed Porgy and Bess.
Aesthetic policemen on both sides of the classical-jazz divide effectively united
in casting doubt on this latest attempt at “hybridic fusion.” The composer, critic,
and future novelist Paul Bowles, writing in the New York Herald Tribune,
Disappointed by the criticism, Ellington nonetheless persisted in employing
extended forms. He and Strayhorn later put together a masterpiece of a film
score for
called
Ellington’s piece “formless and meaningless … a gaudy potpourri of tutti dance
passages and solo virtuoso work.” He concluded that “the whole attempt to fuse
jazz as a form with art music should be discouraged.” The producer and critic
John Hammond, speaking for jazz purists, complained that Ellington had
deserted “hot” jazz and fallen under highbrow influence.
Anatomy of a Murder and a commanding series of jazz suites. Such
Sweet Thunder, a twelve-movement 1957 work, took its title from some lines in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
In the 1967 television documentary
and they nicely sum up Ellington’s aesthetic: “I
never heard / So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.”
On the Road with Duke Ellington, the grand
old man of jazz was asked why he still toured the country with his band. Sitting
in the back of a limousine on the way to the next date, Ellington replied:
“Anyone who writes music has got to hear his music … There used to be days
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years ago when people would come out of conservatory, after investing the
greater part of their lives, maybe ten years, and many times more, and …
mastered all the devices of the masters and they’ve written symphonies,
concertos, rhapsodies, and never got to hear them.” When he said this,
Ellington might have been thinking of Will Marion Cook, or of Will Vodery, or of
the “ex-colored” composer Maurice Arnold, or of any of the other invisible men.
Cook dreamed of a “black Beethoven”; Ellington carved out his own brand of
eminence, redefining composition as a collective art. Carnegie Hall was a hoot,
but he didn’t need it.
Once, when the critic Winthrop Sargeant expressed the hope that jazz
composers might rise to classical eminence, the Duke issued a gently
devastating riposte, saying, in essence, thanks but no thanks: “I was struck by
Mr. Sargeant’s concluding statement, that given a chance to study, the Negro
will soon turn from boogie woogie to Beethoven. Maybe so, but what a shame!”
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—analcoholic 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.”
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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 Scandinavian 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
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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
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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 Lönn-rot. 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
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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.
Kullervo, Kalervon poika, Kullervo, Kalervo’s offspring,
sinisukka äijön lapsi, With the very bluest stockings
hivus keltainen, korea, And with yellow hair the finest
kengän kauto kaunokainen And with shoes of finest leather
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 decade, 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.
Sibelius finished his first two symphonies in 1899 and 1902, respectively. On
the surface, these were typical orchestral dramas of the heroic soul, although
Sibelius’s habit of breaking down themes into murmuring textures sounded
strange to many early listeners. Finns quickly appropriated the Second as an
emblem of national liberation; the conductor Robert Kajanus heard in it “the
most broken-hearted protest against all the injustice that threatens at the
present time,” together with “confident prospects for the future.” In other words,
the symphony was understood as a gesture of defiance in the face of the tsar.
Although Sibelius rejected this interpretation, images of Finnish struggle may
well have played a role in his thinking. In the finale of the Second, a slowly
crawling, rising-and-falling pattern in the violas and cellos shows a distinct
likeness to a figure in the second scene of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov—the
scene in which Pimen the monk records the villainies of Tsar Boris.
At a time when verbal declarations of national feeling were censored by tsarist
overseers—at one performance Finlandia had to be presented under the title
Impromptu—the Second served as the focus of clandestine patriotic
demonstrations. It was thus the first in a series of politically charged twentieth-
century works; secret programs would, of course, later be attached to
Shostakovich’s symphonies.
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No such messages were detected in Sibelius’s other “hit” scores of the period,
the brilliantly moody Violin Concerto and the affectingly maudlin Valse triste, but
they cemented his international reputation and therefore increased his stature at
home. It was around this time that Sibelius’s alcoholism became an issue. He
would fortify himself with liquor before conducting engagements and afterward
disappear for days. A widely discussed painting by the Finnish artist Akseli
Gallen-Kallela, The Problem, showed Sibelius in the middle of a drinking bout
with friends, his eyes rolled back in his head. Although the composer was now
supported by a state pension, he ran up large debts. He was also beset by
illnesses, some real and some imagined. Cracks were appearing in the facade
that “Finland’s hero” presented to the world.
In 1904 Sibelius tried to escape the multiplying embarrassments of his Helsinki
lifestyle by moving with his family to Ainola. There he set to work on his Third
Symphony, which was itself a kind of musical escape. In contrast to the
muscular rhetoric of Kullervo and the first two symphonies, the Third speaks in
a self-consciously clear, pure language. At the same time, it is a sustained
deconstruction of symphonic form. The final movement begins as a quicksilver
Scherzo, but it almost imperceptibly evolves into a marchlike finale: the listener
may have the feeling of the ground shifting underfoot.
It was in the wake of composing this terse, elusive work that Sibelius got into a
debate with Gustav Mahler on the nature of the symphony. Mahler came to
Helsinki in 1907 to conduct some concerts, and Sibelius presented his latest
ideas about “severity of form,” about the “profound logic” that should connect
symphonic themes. “No!” Mahler replied. “The symphony must be like the world.
It must be all-embracing.”
Sibelius kept a close eye on the latest developments in European music. On
visits to Germany, he made the acquaintance of Strauss’s Salome and Elektra
and Schoenberg’s earliest atonal scores. He was variously intrigued, alarmed,
and bored by these Austro-German experiments; more to his taste was the
sensuous radicalism of Debussy, whose Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun,”
Nocturnes, and La Mer revealed new possibilities in modal harmony and
diaphanous orchestral color. In general, though, he felt ill at ease in the fast-
moving environs of Berlin and Paris. He resolved to stay true to his Alleingefühl,
his feeling of aloneness, to play his role as “apparition from the woods.”
In his next symphony, the Fourth, Sibelius presented his listeners with music as
forbidding as anything from the European continent at the time. He wrote it in
the wake of several risky operations on his throat, where a tumor was growing.
His doctors instructed him to give up drinking, which he agreed to do, although
he would resume in 1915. The temporary loss of alcohol—“my most faithful
companion,” he later called it—may have contributed to the claustrophobic
grimness of the music, which, at the same time, bespoke a liberated intellect.
The first few bars of the symphony extrapolate a new dimension in musical
time. The opening notes, scored darkly for cellos, basses, and bassoons, are C,
D, F-sharp, and E—a harmonically ambiguous whole-tone collection. It feels like
the beginning of a major thematic statement, but it gets stuck on the notes F-
sharp and E, which oscillate and fade away. Meanwhile, the durations of the