Others have brought the North into houses, and there transmuted it to
music. And their art is dependent on the shelter, and removed from it,
dwindles. But Sibelius has written music innocent of roof and inclosure,
music proper indeed to the vasty open, the Finnish heaven under which it
grew. And could we but carry it out into the northern day, we would find
it undiminished, vivid with all its life. For it is blood-brother to the
wind and the silence, to the lowering cliffs and the spray, to the harsh
crying of sea-birds and the breath of the fog, and, set amid them, would
wax, and take new strength from the strengths of its kin.
Air blows through the music of Sibelius, quickens even the slightest of
his compositions. There are certain of his songs, certain of his
orchestral sketches, that would be virtueless enough were it not for the
windy freshness that pervades them. Out of all his works, even out of
the most commonplace, there proceeds a far and resonant space. Songs
like "To the Evening," "Call," "Autumn Sundown," whatever their ultimate
musical value, seem actually informed by the northern evening, seem to
include within their very substance the watery tints of the sky, the
naïve fragrance of forests and meadows, the tintinnabulation drifting
through the still air of sunset. It is as though Sibelius were so
sensible to the quality of his native earth that he knows precisely in
what black and massive chords of the piano, say, lie the silence of
rocks and clouds, precisely what manner of resistance between chant and
piano can make human song ring as in the open. But it is in his
orchestral works, for he is determined an orchestral writer, that he has
fixed it most successfully. There has been no composer, not Brahms in
his German forest, nor Rameau amid the poplars of his silver France, not
Borodin on his steppes, nor Moussorgsky in his snow-covered fields under
the threatening skies, whose music gives back the colors and forms and
odors of his native land more persistently. The orchestral compositions
of Sibelius seem to have passed over black torrents and desolate
moorlands, through pallid sunlight and grim primeval forests, and become
drenched with them. The instrumentation is all wet grays and blacks,
relieved only by bits of brightness wan and elusive as the northern
summer, frostily green as the polar lights. The works are full of the
gnawing of bassoons and the bleakness of the English horn, full of
shattering trombones and screaming violins, full of the sinister rolling
of drums, the menacing reverberation of cymbals, the icy glittering of
harps. The musical ideas of those of the compositions that are finely
realized recall the ruggedness and hardiness and starkness of things
that persist in the Finnish winter. The rhythms seem to approach the
wild, unnumbered rhythms of the forest and the wind and the nickering
sunlight. Music has forever been a movement "up to nature," and
Schoenberg's motto is but the precision of a motive that has governed
all composers. But Sibelius has written music that seems to come as the
very answer to the call, and to be the North indeed.
Such a discovery of nature was necessarily a part of his
self-revelation. For Sibelius is essentially the Norseman. For all his
personal accomplishment, his cultural position, he is still the Finnish
peasant, preserving intact within himself the racial inheritance. Other
musicians, having found life still a grim brief welter of bloody combats
and the straining of high, unyielding hearts and the falling of sure
inalienable doom, have fancied themselves the successors of the Skalds,
and dreamt themselves within the gray primeval North. But, in the
presence of Sibelius, they seem only too evidently men of a gentler,
later generation. Beside his, their music appears swathed in romantic
glamour. For there are times when he comes into the concert-room like
some man of a former age, like some spare, knotted barbarian from the
world of the sagas. There are times when he comes amongst us like one
who might quite conceivably have been comrade to pelted warriors who
fought with clubs and hammers, like one who might have beaten out a
rude music by black, smoking hearthsides quite as readily as made
tone-poems for the modern concert-room. And his music with its viking
blows and wild, crying accents, its harsh and uncouth speech, sets us
without circumstance in that sunken world, sets us in the very midst of
the stark men and grave, savage women for whom the sagas were made, so
that we can see them in all their hurtling strength and rank barbarity,
can well-nigh touch them with the fingers of our hands. And because
Sibelius is so fundamentally man as combat with the North has made him,
only vision of his native earth could bring him rich self-consciousness.
For his individuality is but the shape of soul given his race by its
century-long adjustment. It is the North that has given him his profound
experience. Its rhythms have distinguished him. Its color, and the color
of his spirit, are twin. And so he turns toward it as to a mirror. Like
that of the hero of his tone-poem, his life is a long journey toward
Finland. Contact with Finnish earth gives him back into his own hands.
It is the North, the wind and the moorland and the sea, that gathers the
fragments of his broken soul, and makes him whole again.
It was with the sanction of a people that Sibelius came to his task. For
centuries before his birth the race that bore him had lain prone upon
its inclement coasts. But now a new vigor was germinating within it.
Youth had overtaken it once more, and filled it with the desire of
independence. Chained to the Russian Empire, it was reaching out toward
all that could give it the strength to persist and endure, toward all
that could give it knowledge of its proper soul. And so Sibelius, in the
search for the expression of his own personality, so much at one with
that of his fellows, was traveling in the common way. The word that he
was seeking, the word that should bring fulfilment to his proper soul,
was deeply needed by his fellows. Inarticulate thousands, unaware though
they were of his existence, awaited his work, wanted the sustenance it
could give. And, certainly, the sense of the needfulness of his work,
the sense of the large value set upon his best and purest attainments by
life itself, must have been with Sibelius always, must have supplied him
with a powerful incentive and made enormously for his achievements. He
must have felt all the surge of the race driving him. He must have had
continually the marvelous stimulus of feeling about him, for all the
night and the cold, the forms of comrades straining toward a single
lofty goal, felt himself one of an army of marching men. This folk, far
in its past, had imagined the figure of a hero-poet, Vainemunden, and
placed in his hands an instrument "shaped out of very sorrow," and
attributed magical power to his song. And Sibelius, bowed over his
music-paper, must have felt the dream stir within him, must have felt
incarnate within himself, however incompletely, that mysterious image,
and so proceeded with his work everlastingly assured that all he
actually accomplished woke from out of the heart of the people, and
responded to its immemorial need.
Out of such an impulse his art has come. No doubt, some of it is not the
response entirely worthy of so high a stimulus. Few modern composers of
eminence are as singularly uneven as Sibelius. Moods like that which
mothered the amiable elegance of the "Valse Triste" and that which
produced the hard and naked essentiality of the Fourth Symphony are
almost foreign to each other. The creative power itself is
extraordinarily fitful in him. It is as if, for all his physical
robustness, he has not quite the spiritual indefatigability of the major
artist. He has not that inventive heat that permits the composer of
indisputably the first rank to realize himself unflaggingly in all his
independence and intensity. Too often Sibelius's individuality is
cluttered and muffled by that of other men. No doubt every creative
artist passes through a period of submission to alien faiths. But in
Sibelius there appear to exist two distinct personalities, the one
strong and independent, the other timid and uninventive, who dominate
him alternately. Even some of the music contemporaneous with the
magnificent Fourth Symphony is curiously ineffectual and pointless.
True, the color, the air and tone of the North are never entirely
absent from his work. His songs invariably recapture, sometimes almost
miraculously, the dark and mourning accents of the Scandinavian
folk-song. For all the modernity of medium they are simple and sober.
Moreover, in those of his compositions that approach banality most
closely, there is a certain saving hardness and virility and honesty.
Unlike his neighbor, Grieg, he is never mincing and meretricious. We
never find him languishing in a pretty boudoir. He is always out under
the sky. It is only that he is not always free and resourceful and
deeply self-critical. Even through the bold and rugged and splendid
Violin Concerto there flit at moments the shadows of Beethoven and
Wagner and Tchaikowsky. The first theme of the quartet "Voces intimæ"
resembles not a little a certain theme in "Boris." The close of
"Nightride and Sunrise" is watered Brahms and watered Strauss. And there
are phrases in his tone-poem that commence with all his proper rhythmic
ardor and then suddenly degenerate. There are moments when his harmonic
sense, generally keen and true, abandons him completely. And even works
like the "Finlandia" and "Karelia" overtures, for all their generosity
of intention, for all their suggestion of peasant voices lifted in song,
disappoint because of the substitution of a popular lyricism, a certain
easy sweetness, for the high poetry one might have anticipated.
And yet, one has but to turn to the symphonies of Sibelius to encounter
music of another intensity, and gauge the richness of response that, at
times, it is given him to make. It is as if the very dignity and
grandeur of the medium itself sets him free. Just as the form of the
concerto seems to have given his sense of the violin a play apparently
denied it by the smaller mediums, so these larger orchestral forms seem
to have liberated his imagination, his orchestral genius, and made him
poet of his folk indeed. His personal quality, spread more thinly in his
songs and tone-poems, is essentialized and developed in these other
works. The symphonies themselves are in a sense the stages of the
essentialization. In the first of them his language emerges, to an
extent imparting its unmistakable coloration to a matter perhaps not
entirely distinguished. There is a looseness and lushness, a romanticism
and balladry, in the work, that is not quite characteristic. Still, the
honesty, the grimness and savagery and lack of sensuality, are
Sibelius's own. The adagio is steeped in his proper pathos, the pathos
of brief, bland summers, of light that falls for a moment, gentle and
mellow, and then dies away. Something like a memory of a girl sitting
amid the simple flowers in the white northern sunshine haunts the last
few measures. The crying, bold finale is full of the tragedy of northern
nature. And in the Second Symphony the independence is complete. The
orchestra is handled individually, sparingly, and with perfect point.
Often the instruments sound singly, or by twos and threes. What had been
but half realized in the earlier work is distinct and important in this.
It is as if Sibelius had come upon himself, and so been able to rid his
work of all superfluity and indecision. And, curiously, through speaking
his own language in all its homeliness and peasant flavor, he seems to
have moved more closely to his land. The work, his "pastoral" symphony,
for all its absolute and formal character, reflects a landscape. It is
full of home sounds, of cattle and "saeters," of timbered houses and
sparse nature. And through it there glances a pale evanescent sunlight,
and through it there sounds the burden of a lowly tragedy.
But it is only with his Fourth Symphony, dubbed "futuristic" because of
the unusual boldness and pithiness of its style, the absence of a
general tonality, the independence of the orchestral voices, that
Sibelius's gift attains absolute expression. There are certain works
that are touchstones, and make apparent what is original and virtuous in
all the rest of the labors of their creator, and give his personality a
unique and irrefragable position. The Fourth Symphony of Sibelius is
such a composition. It is a very synthesis of all his work, the
reduction to its simplest and most positive terms of a thing that has
been in him since first he began to write, and that received heretofore
only fragmentary and indecisive expression. In its very form it is
essence. The structure is all bone. The style is sharpened to a biting
terseness. The coloring is the refinement of all his color; the rhythms
have a freedom toward which Sibelius's rhythms have always aspired; the
mournful melody of the adagio is well-nigh archetypical. All his life
Sibelius has been searching for the tone of this music, desiring to
speak with its authority, and concentrate the soul and tragedy of a
people into a single and eternal moment. All his life he had been
seeking the prophetic gestures of which this work is full. For the
symphony is like a summary and a conclusion. It carries us into some
high place before which the life of man is spread out and made apparent.
The four movements are the four planes that solidify a single concept.
The first sets us in a grim forest solitude, out in some great unlimited
loneliness, beneath a somber sky. There is movement, a climax, a single
cry of passion and despair, and then, only the soughing of wind through
hoary branches. The scherzo is the flickering of mad watery lights, a
fantastic whipping dance, a sudden sinister conclusion. In the adagio, a
bleak lament struggles upwards, seems to push through some vast inert
mass, to pierce to a momentary height and largeness, and then sinks,
broken. And through the finale there quivers an illusory light. The
movement is the march, the oncoming rush, of vast formless hordes, the
passage of unnamed millions that surge for an instant with their cries
and banners, and vanish into nothingness. It is possible that Sibelius
will create another work similarly naked and intense. More definitive,
it cannot be.