Jean sibelius3/6/2023 ![]() ![]() He fails in the event, leaving the swan free to seduce the souls of the departed with its sad songs. The Swan of Tuonela, arguably Sibelius’s first true masterpiece, finds Lemminkäinen entrusted with the task of shooting the swan that lives in Tuonela (the kingdom of death) as a present for his future bride. This was swiftly followed by En Saga, the Karelia Suite, and the series of four orchestral Legends: in Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of the Island, Lemminkäinen (“the Don Juan of Finnish mythology,” according to Sibelius) abandons his young wife and goes to Saari, where he sports with the young maidens the men chase him off. The fearsomely nationalistic young Finn’s immediate response was a massive five-movement symphonic poem entitled Kullervo composed in 1892, the year he married Aino Järnefelt. ![]() After I heard Kajanus’s Aino, I became more and more fascinated by the idea of writing a work of my own with motifs from our national Finnish epic.” I remember that the legend of Kullervo fascinated me even at school. ![]() “It showed me the wonderful musical possibilities offered by the Kalevala. “My acquaintance with this work proved to be very important,” Sibelius later remembered. But what really set him on the road as a composer was the Berlin premiere of his conductor-composer friend Robert Kajanus’s symphonic poem Aino in 1890. Meanwhile, Sibelius had been receiving a thorough training in composition, including lessons in Vienna with Karl Goldmark of Rustic Wedding Symphony fame. The most notable musical outcome was the barnstorming Violin Concerto of 1903, composed for the virtuoso that Sibelius never became. The fact that he was turned down dealt a severe blow to his dreams and aspirations at the time yet, viewed in retrospect, had he succeeded we would have been denied some of the most remarkable music of the early 20th century. He didn’t begin having formal piano lessons until he was nine-years-old, although it was the violin that eventually fired his enthusiasm to the point that he set his heart on becoming a world-class virtuoso.įor a while everything seemed to be on track – he even got as far as an audition with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1891. Yet during an unusually frank and open discussion with Mahler, Sibelius insisted that when composing, one thing remained paramount: “the profound logic which binds together all the inner motifs.”Ĭonsidering his visionary insights, Sibelius caught the creative bug relatively late. Nowadays it is Mahler’s vast symphonic “worlds” which tend to grab the headlines due largely to their narcotising invention. In the 1934 edition of The Musical Companion the distinguished English musicologist Julius Harrison went so far as to claim that “Sibelius is the one recognised by cultured musicians as the most fitting successor to the immortal Brahms.”Īnd in many ways he was right. It is this kind of revolutionary thinking that led many inter-war commentators during the last century to view Sibelius as Europe’s greatest living composer. “Sibelius’s pedal-points create a vast slow motion of their own, like that of the sky as the Earth rotates,’” observed composer and musicologist Robert Simpson, “while upon the planet’s surface there is teeming human and animal movement.” ![]() Even when the surface of Sibelius’s music appears to be bustling with activity, it is often underpinned by long pedal-points – passages where the bass note remains constant – anchoring the music in such a way that it feels strangely as though you’re running on the spot. The blurring of day and night is reflected in a series of late masterpieces whose temporal multi-layering creates a thrilling frisson. Sibelius drew his inspiration from the Finnish soil, often going on long walks to commune with nature. It is a country quite unlike any other in Northern Europe and its impact on the music of its most celebrated son, Jean Sibelius, was incalculable. Three quarters of Finland is covered by thick pine forests, while a further 10 per cent is occupied by a staggering 190,000 lakes. ![]()
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