2. 1889–91: The transformation (Berlin, Vienna).

Following Sibelius's graduation from the Helsinki Music Institute at the age of 23, he secured, through Wegelius's recommendation, a state stipend of 2000 Finnish marks for a year's study of composition in Germany. The eager young composer, bursting with local promise, was packed off to Berlin – his first visit to a leading European capital – from September 1889 to late June 1890 to study privately with Albert Becker. Sibelius's self-image was dashed at once. At his first lesson the pedantic Becker (‘an old fogey from head to foot’, growled Sibelius in a letter to Wegelius) put his finger on the weaknesses of the student's recent quartet and promptly placed him on a regimen of Bach counterpoint (chorales, motets and fugues) that would last most of the year. Experiencing the big city, however, had its own rewards: concerts, recitals, Wagner operas and fervent aesthetic debates. At the same time, Sibelius's wildly impractical personality succumbed to the enticements of Berlin. Throughout the year he spent with abandon, drank excessively and ran into financial and medical difficulties.

In Berlin, his own composition ground to a near halt. It was only in early 1890, after travelling to Leipzig with Adolf Paul and Busoni, who was performing Sinding's Piano Quintet, that Sibelius was roused to compose something new. This was his own five-movement Piano Quintet in G minor, written in Berlin in March and April 1890 and sent off directly to Wegelius in Finland. The first and third movements were performed immediately in Helsinki (with a sympathetic Busoni at the piano), but Wegelius criticized its underdeveloped piano writing, its impulsive indulgences here and there, and its occasionally awkward formal layout. Wegelius's remarks were not unfounded: notwithstanding its compelling seriousness, the Quintet displays a selfconscious obsession with the opening motto (which dimly foreshadows that of the First Symphony some nine years later) and a striving for grand effects in the absence of a convincing inner-voice polyphony. Still, Sibelius's insistence on sonority itself – pure sound – may also be heard as an emerging promise foreshadowing features of the later composer (for example, the poetically static open 5ths in the piano that precede the opening motto, the dramatic pauses throughout and the heterophonic enhancement of texture through inner-voice arpeggiation).

Dissatisfied with Berlin, Sibelius returned to Finland for the later summer and completed another string quartet, in B , along with a lengthy, somewhat discursive Adagio in D minor for the same instruments. He then moved to Vienna from October 1890 to early June 1891 – again supported by Finnish state funds – where he studied composition and orchestration with Karl Goldmark and, at the conservatory, Robert Fuchs.

Vienna proved to be the turning-point of his musical life because of the convergence of four factors. First, his letters reveal an intense Sibelius brooding on his own potential: he was becoming more self-critical, embracing hard work (although continuing to indulge his penchant for drink and profligacy) and seeking to fashion a unique style. Secondly, it was here that he turned away from academic-classical chamber composition – the hallmark of the Brahmsians and Viennese Liberals – and towards the orchestra. After some preliminary, discarded attempts for Goldmark, he produced in February and March 1891 an Overture in E and a waltz-like Scène de ballet (originally planned as two movements of ‘a kind of suite or rather symphony’), his earliest pieces for orchestra. Thirdly, Sibelius's aesthetic was wrenched in the direction of the progressive, in part as a result of coming into contact with certain key works. One was Bruckner's Third Symphony (the 1888–9 version, which he heard in December), with its monumental scale and throbbing ostinato sound-sheets. At the time Sibelius declared Bruckner ‘the greatest of all living composers’, thus taking sides in the divisive Brahms–Bruckner controversy and growing more dismissive of the academic classicism advocated at the conservatory. Towards the beginning of April he attended a performance of Siegfried; shortly thereafter he joined the Wagner Society.

Fourthly, and most significantly, in Vienna the Swedish-speaking Sibelius began to steep himself in Finnish-language culture, clearly taking steps to redefine himself more emphatically along those lines. Much of this must have been occasioned by his secret engagement to the pro-Finnish Aino Järnefelt the previous summer: her letters to him are consistently in Finnish, his to her in Swedish (‘so that it does not take five minutes to write out each word’, he explained in October). By 26 December he reported to Aino that he was enthralled with the Kalevala, the national folk epic, whose archaic, trochaic-tetrameter ‘runes’ (poems) of creation, nature, gods, and heroes (Väinämöinen, Lemminkäinen, Kullervo and others) embodied elemental Finnish culture. Above all, he was captivated by the unyielding sameness of the incantatory Kalevala poetry and reported to Aino that he was experiencing it as ‘extraordinarily modern’. Its repetitive recastings of similar rhythms, images and general moods impressed him as ‘pure music’, as ‘themes and variations’.

At the same time he pondered the cultural implications of folk music, especially the reiterative Kalevala recitation formulas, the most Finnish of musical patterns. These formulas constitute a family of brief, constricted melodies, each a pattern for the delivery of complementary pairs of poetic lines, spun out in an endless line-by-line alternation and sometimes performed back-and-forth between two male reciters. Each variant is typically bounded by a minor pentachord and unfolds in an implied 5/4 metre with two longer stresses on the final two beats (ex.1a–c shows three such repetitive formulae of hundreds that have been transcribed). On 8 January 1891 Sibelius wrote to Aino, ‘I certainly do believe in Finnish music, regardless of the smirks of the self-appointed authorities. That sonorous, remarkably melancholy monotony in all Finnish melodies, although it is a defect, properly speaking, is nevertheless characteristic’. The occasion for this declaration was his composition of the (Swedish-language!) song Drömmen (‘The Dream’), whose vocal line's first phrase, although in 3/4 metre, manifestly alludes to the 5/4 Kalevalaic pattern (ex.2a). Similarly, with his Overture in E he hit upon the practice of writing minor-mode, ‘runic’ second themes as characteristic nationalist moments within sonata forms. Such circular, often-reiterative theme-whirlpools – typically preoccupied with ‘fatalistically’ fixed intervallic patterns within the minor pentachord (with occasional decorative extensions above and below) – became characteristic features of the composer's ‘Finnish’ style in the 1890s and beyond (ex.3a–f).

By spring 1891 – he was still in Vienna – Sibelius's plans swerved towards the monumental. Doubtless recalling the Finnish conductor and composer Robert Kajanus's brief (and stylistically unremarkable) Aino Symphony (which he had heard in Berlin), based on a story from the Kalevala, he began to plan the massive Kullervo, a five-movement ‘symphonic poem for soloists, chorus and orchestra’, precipitating his new, ‘modern’ Finnish style. ‘All my moods derive from the Kalevala’, he wrote to his own Aino on 20 April 1891, jotting down a major-mode version of what would become the minor-mode opening theme of Kullervo. Fuchs himself, he reported, had praised what he had seen of the newly imagined composition of his ‘Finnish barbarian’: ‘Everyone thinks I am so strange and original, unnatural and highly strung’. Sibelius's life's work begins in earnest from this moment.

Sibelius, Jean