Sibelius: An Essay on his Significance

August 1985 Vol. 46 No3
BY
MICHAEL McMULLIN
When Sibelius died at the end of September, 1957 it was expected that something would be revealed of his creative activities during the thirty years that had elapsed since his last important published work. It seemed certain that there must be an eighth Symphony, which had even been scheduled for performance in 1939, and probably a ninth, and at one time it had been stated that the composer had decided that these works should not be released until after his death. It was known that he never ceased composing and that, in fact, he became during this last period less and less willing to be interrupted in his work; yet we were told after his death that he left no works in manuscript. Thus, far from being any nearer to an explanation of his long silence, we are presented, as a final gesture, with a complete enigma by one who, in many other respects, had been one of the most enigmatic figures of our time.
Most of the attempts that have appeared in print to account for the silence of Sibelius are too superficial to be worth attention. The fact is that for an artist of comparable stature to cease suddenly at the height of his creative power, in full maturity to drop the curtain and live in retirement for thirty years is a phenomenon unique in the history of art. Admittedly we cannot point to great masterpieces written by composers at the age of 90; but Sibelius would have been no more than at the time of the publication of Tapiola, his most powerful conception in that genre, and a sudden intellectual falling-off at that age, and at that height of achievement, a failure of creative energy or a drying-up of inspiration, would be exceedingly improbable and still without parallel. We must look rather for a philosophical explanation, connected with Sibelius's relation to art and with the historical situation in which he found himself.
The music of Sibelius appears for the most part, with the exception of earlier works and of those of the period of the fourth Symphony, to be aloof and detached from the contemporary world and to ignore the currents of the times that are so vividly expressed and exemplified in the music of other composers. For this reason Sibelius is often described as "not modem", with the implication that he is either out of date or a reactionary. The old world of European culture is felt to have passed so completely that its forms, systems of tonality and even musical sound itself have to be thrown out and an entirely fresh start made in order to express what is in the minds of modern composers. This is a true feeling, and in fact the new music does succeed succinctly, as music always does, in portraying the exact spiritual state of modem man and the underlying reality of modern civilization. This reality is dissociation or schizophrenia, and the new music corresponds, even to the dissociation of musical language. The conditions it reflects are discord and the soullessness of the machine, accompanied by alienation and despair of the individual, particularly the artist. In Sibelius, on the other hand, we find the very opposite characteristics — not a reflection of what we have around us but an emphasis upon what we need to make us whole. It is as though his music were a dream—that is to say a "big dream", a message from the unconscious to the conscious mind, to be interpreted as a pointer to a cure for alienation and neurosis.
The most un-modern thing about Sibelius's music is its quality of classicism. This means not an exterior conformity to so-called classical models but an interior spiritual classicism, an equilibrium between emotional, sensory and intellectual elements and, above all, the intellectual mastery and creative formal integration that characterize the art of classical periods. On the large scale and in a form embracing a whole outlook this quality becomes epic, or symphonic. We have in the later symphonies of Sibelius the phenomenon of an art that is classical and epic appearing out of nowhere in the middle of a post-Romantic era.
Besides this quality of classicism and creative form, Sibelius's music has two salient characteristics that relate it to currents that were flowing strongly in the latter part of the nineteenth century. One of these was a newly awakening nationalism in art, which was naturally associated mainly with small or more-or-less fringe or outlying nations that were aspiring to a new independence. This inspired an idealism that sought to restore and nurture the national cultural heritage of these nations and their folk-epics and also to express the soul and qualities of the land itself. The second of these currents is that centred in the Symbolist movement in France, which places a new emphasis on what I have called the Dramatic phase of art, or the associations arising from sense-impressions, and the sensory medium. In music one can say that tone-painting becomes dominant, not as representation, but as symbolism deriving from the concrete, objective world. The beginning of this current can be seen in the "impressionist" works of Liszt, the piano parts of the songs of Schubert and also in certain works of Beethoven. This current may merge to some extent with the nationalist current in so much as the tendency towards tone-painting agrees with the desire to express the features of the national landscape and gives rise to tone-poems such as those of Smetana; but this merging is only incidental in most cases, and the two currents are in reality distinct, one being ideological and not specifically artistic, the other being a question central to aesthetics. In Sibelius, however, they merge in a very special way, and both become artistically fundamental. Thus, while the main current of art in Europe flows from Romanticism through Wagner, Strauss and their successors into increasing dissociation and "abstraction", Sibelius came to represent a current in the reverse direction—towards, not "abstract", but concrete art and ending; not in dissociation, but in a new integration and in the development of symbolism into a highly evolved formal dimension.
There are, of course, other twentieth-century composers who did not, or do not, go the way of dissociation, and there are other currents, such as the reactionary one of "neo-classicism", just as we have every conceivable kind of movement and cult in politics and ideology. Sibelius came to a fullstop at the first quarter of the century, and the only composer, or even artist of any kind, of comparable stature to come after him was, in this writer's opinion, Shostakovich. He again is a fringe phenomenon, not really belonging to the main corpus of European culture, which, we could agree with Spengler, is finished. Russia is in certain ways even less "Western" than Finland and more than half Asiatic—politically quite outside. The music of Shostakovich, however, while sometimes having affinities with Sibelius in tone-painting (see the tenth Symphony), is for the most part very contemporary, not in technique or in being itself an example of schizophrenia, but in being the commentary by a great artist on the disastrous world in which he finds himself: "... in einer Zeit des geistigen Niederganges der Menschheit", to quote from the autobiography of Albert Schweitzer. In this he follows on from Mahler, more than from anyone else, whose later ironic vein has remarkable resemblances to that of both Prokofiev and Shostakovich.
One of the most striking qualities of Sibelius is the originality of his melodic idiom. In the first place, real melodic inventiveness and originality is an extremely rare quality and is, perhaps, one of the most important marks of a great composer of the first order. Sibelius's melodic idiom is certainly expressive of the Finnish environment; it has a uniquely Northern atmosphere and also expresses the remote and strange character of the Finnish language. It embodies the mysterious atmosphere of magic and sorcery that were traditionally associated with Finns and Lapps, This particular flavour is no doubt derived from translating into music the Kalevala, which it perfectly matches and with which much of Sibelius's earlier music is concerned. The Kalevala is a rather unique kind of folk-epos, and besides this there is no other example of a folk-epos being rendered in music so effectively by a civilized artist, of a musical idiom being created out of one in this way. The same feeling and atmosphere pervade works like En saga and The Bard, which are not directly linked to the Kalevala, and this expression has far more significance than mere nationalism or the expression of a particular type of landscape. It has nothing to do with Finnish folk-music, which is of a quite different, even contrasted, character. It does, however, suit the landscape, and the vast and similar areas eastwards, in which we can also find related languages; it is as different from the mountainous landscapes of Norway and Sweden as is the language itself. The steppes and forests of Russia are much closer in character and suggest the same kind of brooding atmosphere of vast extension, as we find in Shostakovich sometimes, especially in his tenth Symphony. The ocean presents the same aspect of extension, and it is natural, therefore, that Sibelius is equally at home in seascapes and makes use of this different oceanic environment and symbolism to an almost equal extent. This gives rise to a correspondingly different musical idiom—one might almost say style, which necessarily has affinities with Debussy's La mer, since both arise from the same background.
If his idiom matches these subjects and environments, they in turn exactly match what Sibelius has to say in terms of them, and so it is not important whether his idiom arose out of the environment or vice versa. It is important, however, to realize that there is much more involved than tone-painting for any obvious or popular, local or temporary motive and that what Sibelius has to say has deep, symbolic significance for all of us. This significance resides partly in the content, conjuring up the forgotten past, the age-old and archetypal symbols of the Kalevala, the feeling of infinite antiquity of die forests (En saga), brooded over by ancient deities (Tapiola), still very much alive beneath the surface. The Kalevala is an imaginative epic of elementals, of the forces of nature, with which Sibelius becomes identified. It harks back to Shamanistic times and to a feeling of oneness with nature.
The significance of Sibenus's music resides also in the method, which is at one with the content and concerns one of the basic principles of aesthetics. The word “symbolism” refers to the fact that all aesthetic effects and significance are realized in the first place through sense-effects and direct experience and continue to be so realized on successively higher planes through intellectual association. All artistic expression is concrete, whether or not we are consciously aware of it and whether we like it or not, and there can be no such thing as "abstract art". Symbolism is an identification with the outside world, or the realization of universal principles through particular concrete perceptions or associations. In painting, the inescapability of an association with objective visual perception is obvious. The nature of symbolism becomes clear in comparing either a representational painting or a mere design with the works of one of the great periods of Chinese landscape-painting. The Chinese have always shown in every sphere a predilection for the concrete, and the aesthetics of Chinese landscape-painting are based upon the religious insight of Zen Buddhism, a profound feeling for the ultimate unity of all things in nature, including man, and for the significance of all of them as parts in a whole. A study of this nature-symbolism will help us to understand that of Sibelius and the role of landscape-painting in his music. Sibelius's immediate precursors in this respect are the French symbolists and especially, of course, in music, Debussy. We may relate, for example, Debussy's three Nocturnes for orchestra on the one hand to Chinese art and, on the other, to Sibelius; there is the same entering-into and identification with the phenomena of nature, the same impersonal translation of their significance and the same dwarfing or complete absence of human figures in the landscape. Nuages, in particular, could almost equally well have been written by Sibelius, and it would be very difficult to find a musical work by anyone other than Debussy so akin in style and method to the major tone-poems of Sibelius. "Of all the arts", wrote Debussy, "music is closest to nature"; and the artist should "take counsel of no man, but of the passing wind that tells us the story of the world". This is symbolism, not imitation of nature/and it should be noted that Debussy himself was as opposed to "realism", "naturalism" or literary music (the musical equivalent of narrative verse) as was Mallarme: "exclus-en Ie reel, parce-que vil". He foresees the future development of music in the line leading to Sibelius:
We do not listen to the thousand sounds with which nature surrounds us ... This, to my mind, is the new path. But believe me, I have only caught a glimpse of it. Much remains to be done and he who does it... will be a great man.
Sibelius has carried this phase of symbolism still further, in terms of instrumentation, and has developed what I would call symbolic orchestration resulting in an integration of orchestration and form of an original kind. The implications of this may be studied in a work like Tapiola, both in the role of individual instruments and in the part played in the form by the main instrumental groupings of strings, woodwind and brass. In Tapiola the strings throughout are the forests, the woodwind various elements or moods within them and, of course, the wood-sprites in the section devoted to these; while the heavy brass is reserved for the two great climaxes, where the rounded-off version of the theme appears, the entry of the great dramatic or elemental forces, or the appearance of the forest god, Tapio, and the subjugation of the forests to him. The one theme persists throughout and consists of transmutations in terms of these various elements of a short figure, the whole resulting in a formal organization and a potency of suggestion that make this work unquestionably the most powerful creation of its kind in musical literature.
The same principle of symbolic orchestration is applied in the symphonies, and it is above all as a symphonist that Sibelius is an entirely isolated and unique phenomenon. A symphonic poem is centred on the associative phase of the aesthetic process, the suggestive, concrete or what I have called the Dramatic phase, while a symphony is, or should be, reflective and draws further consequences; it is philosophical rather than dramatic, "symphonic", or epic or all-embracing and developed, above all, in the formal dimension. It is in the creation of highly integrated forms that Sibelius is so remarkable—and this in combination with the principles we nave been studying above. Debussy stops short at the Dramatic and, hence, may aptly be termed a "Symbolist", while Sibelius goes on to become a symphonist. As such, in terms of everything I have implied in the word "symphonic", in relation to the three phases of art, Lyrical, Dramatic and Symphonic, and in terms of symphonies for orchestra, he is to be compared only with Beethoven; in principles of formal integration, and formal metamorphosis, also with Bach. Sibelius's works tend to be monothematic and built upon thematic transformation of short figures, like a fugue, and in exactly the same way as the later works of Beethoven, or even the C minor Symphony, even though this is not yet generally recognized in either case.
Sibelius's mature symphonic style does not emerge until the third Symphony, the first two belonging more to the Romantic era. These are strongly characterized by his Kalevala style and they are full of conflict and dramatic confrontations as well as of lyrical, poetic feeling for the northern landscape. The second Symphony begins to have some very Sibenan characteristics; the first movement looks forward in some respects even to Tapiola, opening with a very similiar short motif in the strings, even with the same key signature, though in D major as compared with B minor. The motif has a very similar significance in the two cases, but here it is continually contrasted with a theme of conflict in the brass, which, as Cecil Gray pointed out, is very prominent in these first two symphonies, while in the later ones it is very much more restrained and used sparingly and, consequently, to more powerful and purposeful effect. The opening string motif underlies much of the action and is developed in various ways, as a kind of background, anticipating the role of the strings in the fifth Symphony, even to very similar passages. It represents an element quite distinct from that of the woodwind motif that immediately follows and accompanies it, and it appears again in its original form to end the movement. The form of the movement has been described as the development of fragmentary motifs into a fully formed theme; however, the action involving these fragments, leading to all the conflict, and the theme itself, would seem to represent an element deriving from the initial woodwind motifs and distinct from, or contrasted with, the opening think this contrast is the more important feature. It is continued and again represented by strings and brass, where the second theme, or element, even takes on, significantly, a character reminding one of Finlandia. There is by no means an integrated form, in either movement, but a constant juxtaposition of contrasted elements and motifs, on the same principle as in sonata movements, but more so, and the effect is of disjointed fragments and conflict rather than cohesion.
The third movement offers a close parallel to the symphonic poem Pohjola's Daughter, where the chief demiurge of the Kalevala, driving through the darkness to the Northland, is confronted by the daughter of the North "sitting on a rainbow" (the Northern lights?), weaving her shuttle to and fro—an obvious anima figure, representing the unconscious. In the Symphony there is a similar furious ride, halted by a similar confrontation with an extremely feminine and anima-like theme, with its initial nine repeated notes.
The second Symphony, in what may be called its forest symbolism and telluric element, stands in a line with En saga, the fifth Symphony and Tapiola, while nos. 3, 4, 6 and 7 have a quite different setting and context. The finale is especially interesting, representing an apotheosis of the two contrasting elements noted in the other movements. Here the more obscure and underlying element, represented by the string figure that opens the Symphony, but now looking more like a "second subject" and which, on its first appearance, in D major, is quiet and almost insignificant, in its second statement, in D minor, is built up into one of Sibelius's great perorations, over a swelling or surging movement in the strings, looking forward to the seventh Symphony, and ends as the dominant motif or theme. In this it anticipates the finale of the Third and—still more—that of the Fifth. It has been suggested before that these two contrasted elements or types of theme, or simply contrasted themes, that run through the second Symphony, each of which reaches full development in the finale, represent, on a certain level, the inner soul of Finland, for example, as contrasted with the outer, political forms, or even Russian domination. It is certainly a question of outer versus inner, the pomp and circumstance of the mundane world versus the inner and spiritual reality (on a more fundamental level, the conscious mind confronted by the unconscious). There is something very significant about Sibelius's confronting us at this time with remote archetypes of an inexorable nature, strongly contrasted with the preoccupations of consciousness; for these archetypes are realities of the collective unconscious and confront us in dreams and wherever unconscious contents come to the surface. Sibelius was contemporary with, and parallel to, the great psychologist C. G. Jung, who taught us these things and also that such confrontations, and the recognition and integration of these realities, is the only possibility for modem humanity to regain any sort of sanity or to attain to psychological integration:
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
T. S. Eliot
With the third Symphony we enter a new symphonic world, one that is truly symphonic as opposed to dramatic. There is a new integration, both of substance is achieved and expressed through the form, from this Symphony onwards. This is not merely a technical or thematic integration but a one as well, and in that sense it constitutes a new classicism. In a similar sense, as well as a more literal one, this Symphony is oceanic. The ocean, of water (which also symbolizes the unconscious), replaces the forests—which also become an ocean, in their way, in the fifth Symphony—as the setting, or context. In the third Symphony it is possible to interpret the first movement in terms of sonata form, but at the same time it is conceived in terms of the new elements of instrumental groups and associative symbolism and of the metamorphosis and evolution of thematic material throughout the whole Symphony. It is in a way a dissertation on, almost a symbolization of, sonata form, an interpretation of it in new terms, and the central idea is development and metamorphosis. The associative symbolism and unifying medium throughout the Symphony is oceanic; and, while it is in three movements, each movement is a different aspect of the same idea.
In the fifth Symphony there is no longer any reference to sonata form, and the new formal elements alone are decisive. This is in many ways the most characteristic, original and completely Sibelian of the symphonies and, perhaps, the greatest. In its three-movement scheme and in the relationship of the movements it is parallel with the Third, the formal kinship being especially close between the middle movements and also the finales. Here again we are in the context of the forests, as we are to some extent in the second Symphony and in Tapiola, and these form the background. The fundamental melodic idea is the perfect 5th, in trumpets and horns, as the augmented 4th is the basic unit of the fourth Symphony and the major 7th the leading idea of the Seventh. These intervals perfectly characterize the respective symphonies with which they are associated, and in their very simplicity they express the all-embracing nature of the symphonic form. In the first movement there is a clear distinction between the original idea or motif, the trumpet theme featuring the perfect 5th, and the background, represented by the strings. All the thematic material is derived from this opening motif, and the movement consists of transformations of it in the furthest aspects of the setting, embracing ultimately the whole in its widest significance, and it is monothematic. There are six or seven (the seventh is more to be regarded as an extension of the sixth) such transformations, the last two and the latter part of the movement being climacteric and in a faster tempo, which has led to pedagogic hair-splitting as to whether it is to be regarded as one or two movements. During this development or metamorphosis there are four entries of the trumpet theme in its original form, including the final tutti and climax, suggestive of a fugal stretto over a pedal-point. Each of these entries is separated from one another by two transformations (fugal "episodes"?)—an arrangement that does not in the least resemble sonata form but could much more convincingly be made to correspond with the form of certain fugues of Bach. There is at least a much closer correspondence and similarity of method. At the beginning of the movement there is a reprise of a section including the theme and its first two transformations, in fuller and more developed form, which at once suggests to analysts the repeat marks at the end of the exposition of a Viennese sonata. This reprise may just as well be compared with the counter-exposition of a fugue.
The slow movement (variations) closely parallels that of the third Symphony, and the theme is an obvious transformation of the horn or trumpet theme of the first movement, while the finale is a most remarkable piece of music, ending on the greatest of Sibelius's perorations, which constitutes the climax of the Symphony. In this it follows the pattern of both the second and the third Symphonies, and it is more natural to have the climax at the end of a work. The movement opens with the strings, misterioso, divided and tremolo, moving in a pattern related to the symphonic theme (trumpet theme) and particularly to its ultimate form in this movement, which tends to emerge from the tremolo in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the finale of the Third. These strings are very suggestive of the forests—they are the background, the associative medium, rather than a "subject" or theme in the sonata sense, or they are an instrumental theme. Out of this tremolo, or over it, emerges, at first in the horns, the famous "Thor swinging his hammer" theme, which really amounts to a discursive assertion of the perfect 5th. This theme is the final transformation of the thematic material of the whole Symphony and, in this finale, might be compared with the appearance of Tapio; but it is mightier than he and may well be Thor indeed, or Jupiter (Zeus). We are certainly in the realm of universals, or planetary symbols (gods).
In the sixth Symphony the definition of form by instrumental colouring is carried much further. The ideas, or "themes", are primarily instrumental, and the melodic material is reduced to the general character of a conjunct movement and to a mood induced by the Dorian mode with an emphasis on the dominant, the note A (see Ex.I). This Symphony is one of textures and delicate colours, without strong melodic definition. The emotional range, therefore, is deliberately restricted and never departs far from the mood of the figure quoted, which is restrained and classical in poise. It is a water-colour, almost a monochrome, a pastoral symphony and, though to a large extent instrumental in its definitions, and closely associated with elements of a landscape, it is a symphony, if intensely poetical, and not a tone-poem, by the distinction already given. Ex. I recurs frequently, in various forms, in all the movements so that the work is to a large extent monothematic, so far as it is thematic in a melodic sense. It consists throughout of different instrumental treatments of the same mood, of variations of texture, so that it might almost be said to be in one movement. This is borne out by the fact that it is difficult to remember to which movement any particular section belongs, for the movements are not distinctly defined or contrasted and do not belong to entirely different aspects of the matter, as do the three movements of the Fifth, but are elements in one landscape-painting.

In the seventh Symphony there is a return to the dimensions of the Fifth with, again, strong melodic definitions, but the whole is explicitly in one continuous movement. Here the setting is once more oceanic and the key C major (as in the Third), but the basic theme or idea is the diatonic scale of C major with which the Symphony opens, representing in itself the basic musical idiom and melodic material of our culture. The great trombone theme, which plays a decisive formal role and which enters three times in the course of the work, is built on the tonic common chord of C major, as though to emphasize the idea of the diatonic scale. As Cecil Gray pointed out, the work is dominated by the progressions of the clausula vera, the full close, the progression from supertonic to tonic, or D to C, and from leading-note to tonic, or B to C. The tension between the leading-note and the tonic is the maximum produced by any combination of notes in music, and this is the source of the quite extraordinary tension that prevails in this Symphony, culminating in the unforgettable final bars where first the D and then the B are sounded over a chord of C major, with C in the basses, as though this were a final, definitive and symbolical full close.
The Seventh is the most enigmatic of the symphonies and is Sibelius's final testimony in relation to history. It is like a huge question-mark, or it is in itself a gigantic full close. As it has turned out, it appears to have been the full close to Sibelius's work as an artist, and the question presents itself, not only of why this is so, but of whether it is not also a full close to European music. The answers to both questions are probably related and contained within the seventh Symphony itself. The fact that both the sixth and the seventh Symphonies begin with an ascending scale, of a different kind in each case, and from a different period, seems to suggest a reflection on history. The Seventh, besides its theme of the melodic major scale and its basic features, the tonic chord and the progression of the full close, contains other features that bear this out, such as the extended polyphonic passages for divided strings, the antiphonal scale-passages for strings and woodwind and even the suggestion of sonata form in the third section, the Allegro moderate, or even in the Symphony as a whole. Formally it seems the culmination of the symphony, the ultimate achievement of a symphonic movement on the largest formal scale, embracing and constituting a whole symphony, to which all the tendencies of Sibelius's method and aesthetic principles as a symphonist lead up. After this it would be difficult to see where Sibelius could go, or that he could go any further, and much of the interest of awaiting an eighth Symphony lay in this very fact. Similarly, it is impossible to see how Tapiola could be surpassed in the genre of the tone-poem. Sibelius's position may perhaps be compared with that of Beethoven after the C sharp minor Quartet, except that Sibelius lived on for another thirty years.
As a result of following this line of development that led him to the seventh Symphony, Sibelius reaches a position of isolation. Intrinsically, the music of Sibelius cannot be looked upon as a last flowering of European culture. The line through Debussy and Sibelius goes in the opposite direction to that represented by Wagner, "this setting sun", as Debussy described him, or Mahler, in many ways perhaps the greatest and most impressive of the Romantics. In Mahler we feel an intense historical consciousness and a feeling for the cultural past. He is the great poet of the Farewell, of the Abschied, and in his great and most moving farewells, like those in the ninth Symphony and of Das Lied von der Erde, we seem to be taking leave of European culture and looking back on it from the last days of autumn (“Der Einsame im Herbst"), as on something that is over, with infinite nostalgia and regret. There is nothing autumnal, or nostalgic, about Sibelius's late music; it comes from a different region and is not involved in the present. In the fifth Symphony and Tapiola we are in a superhuman sphere that is beyond history and the world that we inhabit. The fourth Symphony is clearly concerned with the historical present and with the crisis of the contemporary artist. Its third movement seems to be the profound searching of an artistic and philosophical mind amid spiritual desolation, in a waste land comparable with that of T . S. Eliot. In this it is readily appreciable as contemporary art and is often singled out from the others for this reason. In the fourth Symphony we see the shadow, the opposite side of the coin, the underworld. One thinks of the fires of "Mordor", the dark realm in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, or of Hades. We are in a world of gloom and despair, which may be compared with that of Shostakovich's eighth and fifteenth Symphonies, or his quartets. In the fourth Symphony Sibelius, as it were, passes through the contemporary scene on his way from calling up the archetypes of the remote past (Kalevald) to a symphonic classicism looking into the future (quite a long way into it, into the Aquarian Age). The fifth Symphony has elements of each, the Sixth and Seventh refer only to the language and means of expression of classical European (Piscean) music (modes, classical polyphony, diatonic scale), as though in recapitulation. The Sixth was explicitly associated by Sibelius with Palestrina. The Seventh returns to the ocean (Pisces), which is also a symbol of the last stage of a cycle, preceding rebirth.
All the biographers of Sibelius have mentioned a period of crisis represented by the fourth Symphony, but none has indicated what this crisis was. Whatever its nature, there is an inner transformation of some sort, the outcome of which is the extraordinary following three symphonies, of an incomprehensible classicism quite out of period. Sibelius has stepped outside of historical time. Not only has the spiritual content of these works not been understood, but it has scarcely even been discussed. In fact, almost as little is known about Sibelius's thought and inner life generally during his productive years as about his creative activities during the thirty years of silence. His extreme reticence on this subject makes him as remote as though he were removed in time by several centuries. His biographers and commentators consequently fill in this unknown part of their subject out of their own heads. We do know that he was a man of very wide culture and awareness, with a very active mind, intensely alive to and interested in all that was going on. We know enough of him to form a conception that does not belie the intellectual stature that is witnessed in his music. We have enough scraps of information to come to the conclusion that he was a philosopher, and we know that he was a student of history; on one occasion, while still a student, he was found engrossed in the history of civilization, in company with his teacher, Wegelius. In trying to define Sibelius's relation to the period, in certain respects we think again of Bach. He, too, was isolated in his own time, was overtaken by "modern" experiments and innovations, was "out of date", to the extent that he was relegated to oblivion for a hundred years. He was not a prophet of the future, like his sons, but a monument of European art, from which the future receded. He speaks for the principles of musical aesthetic itself and, through it, of a philosophy of life that is. independent of time and place. If there were to be a future for our art and music, Sibelius would be its prophet. If not, to whom is one addressing oneself, and what remains to be said? The voice of the bard is that of the old harper in Sibelius's tone-poem. His own intimations on this question may perhaps be represented by the full close of the seventh Symphony.

The first movement of the fifth Symphony
The Symphony opens with the basic theme or motif of the whole work, in the horns. I have called it the symphonic theme, or, later, the trumpet theme, and in this form it is given out only on brass instruments, characteristically trumpets, and occurs four times in the first movement. I have marked this theme I, and it consists of two distinct phrases, a and b (i), from which is evolved all the melodic material in the Symphony.
For 18 bars the theme is taken up in fragments in the woodwind, during which the second phrase is developed into a semiquaver figure that I have designated b(u). This is further developed into a semiquaver motif marked (II), because it could be taken for a second subject, though it plays no further role as such in the usual sense. It can be derived from b(u), especially a four-note phrase in which it ends, leading into C sharp. It does represent, however, a different subject in another sense, a different aspect—that of extension of the theme over the landscape as a whole, in its spatial or, one could say, fatalistic aspect. It leads to G major and to the entry of the strings in slowly rising tremolo, the background, or the forests themselves.; Against this background the woodwind in octaves gives out the first transformation of die theme. A, as though heard as a motif over the forests and the vastness of nature. This leads to sl crescendo and tutti, after which a second transformation, B, of the theme is takes up in the strings, or in the forests themselves, against a surging tremolo figure in the cellos and violas, suggestive of an ocean swell.
The whole section comprising A and B can be taken as a development of the background. There is a new entry of I, in solo trumpet, against the same tremolo swell in the bass. This leads to a development of tremolo figures on (II) and to a reprise of the whole exposition up to now, including A and B. This is, however, not just a repeat but a developed, fuller and enriched version, an explosion of theme and background.
B now leads into C, the third, chromatic, thematic transformation, which becomes a typically Sibeuan fatalistic and spatial extension motif in solo bassoon, played out against rapidly surging and rustling figures in the strings. An ullargando leads to the Largamente transformation, D, in the strings, closely related to C. Trills and sforzandi in woodwind lead up to an accelerating tempo and a brass tutti, with I in the trumpets.
In the succeeding section, Allegro moderate, two further transformations follow, E in the whole orchestra, in B major, the strings tremolo, and over a tremolo ostinato in cellos and violas. Over the same ostinato, but back in E flat, there follows a march-like, or martial, transformation in solo trumpet, Fi, followed by a development of this, F2. This is taken up in the strings (tremolo) and develops into Molto vivace. The strings build up a rapid figure out of F1 (a plus b (i)), against scale passages in woodwind, leading into Presto and a grand tutti, or peroration on I in the trombones.











(The foregoing quotations from Sibelius’s fifth Symphony are made by kind permission of Messrs. Wilhelm Hansen A/S, Copenhagen.)