4. 1898–1904: First international successes and local politics.

By 1898, several of Sibelius's major orchestral works had been performed in Finland. Apparently uncertain of his command over certain formal or textural aspects of his still-developing Kalevalaic style, he had withheld these pieces from publication in order to revise them further. Nevertheless his local reputation had been secured. As the century drew to an end, Sibelius sought to realize three related aims: to tighten his rough-cut, primitivist textures to a more impressive level of motivic concentration and formal purpose; to have new works and revised versions of the strongest of his earlier pieces published, thereby entering the larger marketplace of music; and to seek wider international recognition, especially by establishing a foothold in Germany, the most prestigious arbiter within the cultural institution of art music.

The success of the ‘lighter’ incidental music for Adolf Paul's Kung Kristian II (‘King Christian II’), first performed in February 1898 (Helsinki), played a pivotal role in all of this. In the first place, it was promptly published locally, by K.F. Wasenius. More importantly, this work established Sibelius's crucial connection with the Leipzig publisher, Breitkopf & Härtel, who agreed to acquire the rights to it during Sibelius's prolonged trip to Germany from late February to June 1898. A year later, in February 1899, his music received its first public hearing in Germany: a Leipzig performance of four of the seven movements from King Christian II. After reading the largely negative reviews, Sibelius complained to Busoni that he was embarrassed to have been introduced to Germany as a composer of ‘salon music’: ‘I have the greatest ambition [instead] to stand before you as a composer for whom you can have some regard’.

But grander things were afoot. In 1898 Breitkopf had apparently promised to support ‘something from [the] Lemminkäinen [Suite]’, yet to be revised. This would spur Sibelius to final work on The Swan of Tuonela and Lemminkäinen’s Return, published in 1901 by Wasenius, with a direct Breitkopf connection. The composer may have mentioned even broader plans to the German publisher, for in April 1898, in Berlin, he began sketches for a First Symphony. This was to receive its Helsinki première in April 1899, undergo revisions and a second ‘première’ in the following year, and be published in 1902 by Fazer & Westerlund – again with links to Breitkopf (who acquired the rights to this music in 1905). These pieces, along with King Christian II and Finlandia (1899), whose revised version (1900) was published in 1901, again by Fazer & Westerlund, formed the nucleus of the orchestral works that introduced Sibelius to larger Europe in the early 1900s.

This introduction began in earnest in July 1900 – only a few months after the death of his youngest daughter, Kirsti – when Sibelius, Kajanus and the Helsinki Philharmonic went on tour throughout northern Europe: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany (Lübeck, Hamburg and Berlin), the Netherlands and France (Paris, concluding with concerts at the Finnish pavilion at the World Exhibition). Apart from presenting Sibelius to these countries, the concerts' subtext was Finland's current political struggle against an ever more oppressive Russia, and political metaphors could effortlessly be read into such works as Finlandia and the First Symphony. All in all, the tour was successful; Sibelius was gratified by the attention he was beginning to receive in Germany. After Hamburg, he summarized his hopes in a letter to Aino (16 July 1900): ‘I can win a place, I believe, with my music. No, I don't believe; I know I can’.

In the next few years Sibelius, still indulging in bouts of immoderate drinking, smoking and spending, was consumed with the process of career building. Performances of his works outside Finland, with or without the composer conducting, became more frequent. He experienced an important success in Heidelberg in June 1901 with The Swan of Tuonela and Lemminkäinen's Return. The Berlin press praised the works, and Richard Strauss himself attended one of the rehearsals: Sibelius wrote home that the famous composer had been ‘complimentary’. At about the same time the Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung published one of Sibelius's songs from 1901 (with text by Runeberg), Flickan kom ifrån sin älsklings möte (‘The girl returned from meeting her lover’): a piercingly effective representation of old-world sexual shame, with only slightly concealed metaphorical extensions to the world of modernity and lost innocence. The song was destined, deservedly, to become among his most celebrated.

Sibelius composed his most frequently performed songs during this period (published as opp.36, 37 and 38). Some were introduced to a wider Europe by the soprano Ida Ekman; a few were recorded, by various artists, in Helsinki, Berlin and Stockholm in 1904 and 1906. The most characteristic songs are deeply melancholy, soberly chilling, an atmosphere enhanced by the resonances of the Swedish language. They include, from 1899, Svarta rosor (‘Black Roses’) and Men min fågel märks dock icke (‘But my bird is nowhere to be seen’); from 1900, Säv, säv, susa (‘Reed, reed, rustle’), Demanten på marssnön (‘The Diamond on the March Snow’) and Den första kyssen (‘The First Kiss’); and from 1902, Var det en dröm? (‘Was it a dream?’). There were also two masterpieces from 1903: the reflective, chromatically ambitious På verandan vid havet (‘On a balcony by the sea’) and the dramatic, declamatory scena, Höstkväll (‘Autumn Evening’).

Within Finland, the turn-of-the-century years were also Sibelius's most overtly political. In the late 1890s Russian policy in Finland turned towards harsh repression. Tsar Nicholas II appointed Nikolay Bobrikov Governor-General in 1898 to carry out a programme of ‘Russification’, and in 1899, with the much-despised February Manifesto, Bobrikov began the process of stripping Finland of its political autonomy, limiting free speech and assembly, shutting down newspapers, arranging deportations and the like. Such policies drew fierce resistance from the Finns, and Sibelius composed a number of frankly patriotic, protest pieces, in a simpler, more populist (even incendiary) style. Some had electrifying results in Finland but proved to be crafted for local consumption only. The most politically charged of these was the resistance-march for accompanied chorus, Atenarnes sång (‘Song of the Athenians’, 1899). Others included Islossningen i Uleå älv (‘The Breaking of the Ice on the Oulu River’, 1899), Isänmaalle (‘To the Fatherland’, 1900, which in 1901 became the first piece of Sibelius to be recorded) and Har du mod? (‘Do you have courage?’, 1904, first performed in the same year, only a few months before Bobrikov was assassinated in Senate Square in Helsinki).

One of his resistance pieces proved more exportable. Although by the time of the 1900 tour it had been revised and rechristened as Finlandia, this brief, call-to-action tone poem began life in 1899 as Suomi herää (‘Finland Awakens’), the finale of a set of incidental music accompanying staged, historical tableaux depicting Finland's history. It was destined to become Sibelius's best-known work, an inextinguishable symbol for Finland itself. In terms of its political content, the tone poem's sequence of events could hardly be easier to grasp: political subjugation, sudden awakening and conflict, and a nationally centred hymnic liberation into the future. Yet its musical form is non-traditional, not sharing the sonata form with expanded ‘introduction-coda frame’ of some of its obvious predecessors, Beethoven's Egmont and Tchaikovsky's 1812 overtures. Similarly notable is Sibelius's use of allusion in the famous ‘Finlandia Hymn’ section, whose incipit apparently paraphrases and reconfigures rhythmically an inner section of a similarly titled, patriotic choral work from the early 1880s by the Finnish composer Emil Genetz, Herää, Suomi! (‘Awaken, Finland!’), as would probably have been evident to its first listeners (see ex.4 a–b; note the curiously similar opening of Schumann's Piano Quartet).

Sibelius doubtless regarded his First Symphony, in E minor (1899, revised 1900), as a watershed work. About to enter larger European markets, he now tackled head-on the central problem facing his compositional career: the harnessing of a stubbornly separatist, regionally resonant musical idiom according to the assimilationist demands of pan-European musical expectation – the forging of a potentially uneasy rapprochement of the refractory neo-primitivist style with the well-worn conventions of the post-Brahmsian, post-Tchaikovskian symphony. From one perspective, the First Symphony represented a calculated move towards a more international abstraction: the work was nominally non-programmatic and treated the issues of traditional form and the unfolding of motivic ‘logic’ with high seriousness and remarkable concentration. Yet its impact also resulted from its explosive combination of ethnically charged, latently political factors that were even more direct and would soon be identified throughout Europe as characteristically Sibelian. One might point, for example, to its sweeping, ‘nationalistic’ melodies of enormous determination and cumulative force (sometimes held fast with lengthy, support-beam pedal points, as in the second theme of the finale). Or to its stubbornly personal harmonic practice, featuring recyclings of a restricted set of chordal objects – an attraction to harmonic stasis, frequent substitutions of traditional 5th-orientated progressions with chromatic chord transformations (dominated especially by the harmonic mannerism, borrowed from Russian composers, of the smooth shifting of a 5–3 to a 6–3 sonority or vice-versa by means of a passing 5 or 6) and occasional modal effects. Or to its manifest rhetoric of Finnish commitment: its impassioned articulation, especially in the outer movements, of heroic, though in this case futile, national struggle against overwhelmingly negative forces. Sibelius's First Symphony may be regarded as his ‘Karelianist’ symphony, the masterly summary-statement towards which his work of the 1890s had been tending (see also ex.3e above).

Sibelius followed up the First Symphony with a perhaps even more motivically concentrated, more aggressively modern Second, in D (1901–2). Where the First had ended in smouldering, minor-mode ‘injustice’, the more radiant Second sang of eventual victory. It opens with pristine Nordic pastoralisms juxtaposed with expressions of swelling self-pride, forceful determination and premonitions of conflict; tracks subsequently through dark struggles and chiaroscuro upheavals (especially in the harrowing, prison-house effect of the tonic-minor second movement); and concludes with a sure-fire, folk-triumphalist finale. Its first-movement exposition is arrestingly original – a succession of abruptly discontinuous fragments and raw elements in which chunks of unprocessed sound intercut and interrupt each other, as though one were confronting single-minded facets of the cultural world that will be icily chilled, put at risk, in the second movement. Similarly striking is the finale's hypnotically reiterative, Kalevalaic second theme, the insistent, ritualized process of returning to the folk-self, through whose presumed claim to cultural legitimacy the minor mode is to be liberated into the major.

Sibelius's denials that the Second was underpinned by a specific programme of Finnish protest (as claimed by Kajanus in a convincing printed commentary of 1902) have never seemed fully credible. Such disavowals of the obvious probably indicated his desire to multiply the work's significance beyond its self-evident local implications into a more pan-European, humanist utterance. And in fact there is historical evidence to help persuade us to consider this broader interpretation as well: some of its ideas originated either as independent musical thoughts or as sketches planned for quite different compositions. In June 1899 Sibelius hit upon the separate idea that, reworked, became the finale's capstone coda-theme: it emerged as a sudden ‘impression’, improvised at 2 a.m., of the ‘basic mood’ of an exotically furnished room in Gallen-Kallela's villa in Ruovesi. Much of the material included in the symphony was sketched during a compositional trip to Italy – Rapallo and Florence (funded by a wealthy Swedish supporter, Axel Tamm) – in February–April 1901. This is particularly true of the second movement, whose spectral, D minor pizzicato opening (explicitly recalling the slow movement of Bruckner's Fifth Symphony?) and lugubre bassoon melody he devised for a fleetingly projected tone poem on the legend of Don Juan (a response to Strauss?): the ominous twilight steps of the ‘stone guest’ and his song of death. The second movement's major-mode consolation theme, first heard in F major, appears in the same sketch with the label ‘Christus’. Its proximity with the first idea suggests a similar Don Juan connection, but Sibelius may also have had another image in mind: certainly by early summer 1901 – back in Finland – Sibelius had jettisoned the Don Juan idea in favour of a tone poem based on Dante (a response to Liszt?). By August the tone poems were being transformed into the new symphony, essentially crafted in Finland in the last half of 1901. Even though the Second Symphony is unmistakably Finnish in tone and carries an undeniable political charge, it marks a decided move beyond the purer Karelianism of the First.

Nor was Sibelius alone in this emerging aesthetic shift. While Kalevalaic nationalism and myth-centred symbolism had stabilized the fledgling Finnish arts in the late 19th century, in the 20th several Finnish intellectuals were seeking to break through the confines of the merely local into more cosmopolitan, internationally modernist concerns. One prominent circle was Helsinki's Swedish-speaking ‘Euterpists’ (including the writer Bertel Gripenberg and the literary historian Gunnar Castrén), whose members and broader, post-Kalevala aims began to attract Sibelius in late 1902. The same year had seen Sibelius's brilliant recasting of his earlier tone poem from 1892, En saga. Its Berlin performance in November 1902 generated stormy controversy – to the composer's delight – and it was published by Breitkopf in 1903, along with the Second Symphony.

By this point his broader European career seemed all promise. In 1903 he composed incidental music for Arvid Järnefelt's psychological play, Kuolema (‘Death’). Its most haunting movement, ‘Valse triste’, was a valedictory, dreamscape evocation of the faded salon style. Irresistible in late-Romantic appeal, though leagues away from the complexities of the symphonies and tone poems, it was published separately in 1904. With Finlandia, it was soon widely regarded as one of Sibelius's signature pieces.

Far more substantial was the Violin Concerto in D minor, whose first version occupied him in 1903 and early 1904: it was first performed in Helsinki in February 1904. Here he took up what would seem an impossible challenge – the fusing of his stern, compromise-resistant neo-primitivism (Sibelius as ‘deep and sober thinker’) with the tradition of the flashy, exhibitionistic virtuoso concerto, a tradition filled with displays of dazzling technique that sometimes bordered on emptiness. Did the concerto not exist, it would be difficult to imagine such a merger, and at times the strain of the attempt shows through in some of the virtuoso figuration – an occasional tilt toward ostentation that would be out of place in the world of Sibelius's symphonies and tone poems. From a different perspective, though, one could also regard the work as a deepening of the tradition – a virtuoso concerto simultaneously affirmed and transcended by a thoroughgoing seriousness of purpose and ‘surplus’ density of compositional pondering. Above all, its brooding Nordic atmosphere and motivic sound-world are unmistakably Sibelian. One of its unusual features was an expanded first-movement cadenza that serves as the development section (building, surely, on the Mendelssohnian precedent of placing the cadenza at the end of the development); another was its spine-stiffening enhancement of the display-concerto aesthetic through suddenly eruptive, powerfully resolute orchestral upheavals. Dissatisfied with portions of the 1904 version, which had disappointed the much-respected Helsinki critic Karl Flodin, Sibelius withheld the work from publication (this version was recovered in 1990). Its more dramatically taut revision – now ranked among the world's leading concertos – received its première in Berlin in October 1905, with Karel Halíř as soloist and Richard Strauss conducting.

In these years Sibelius's family and several of his associates became gravely concerned about the effects of his continued heavy drinking. In 1903 his wife, Aino, and his close friend, Axel Carpelan – a fervent supporter who had sought out the composer three years earlier – devised a plan to save him from self-destruction: the family, now expanded with the birth of Katarina in 1903, was to move permanently out of Helsinki, away from city life and its temptations. A rustic, beautifully conceived villa, dubbed ‘Ainola’ (‘Aino's dwelling-place’), was designed and constructed for them in the midst of the rugged Finnish forest at Järvenpää, close to Lake Tuusula – near enough to Helsinki to provide professional access, but far enough to discourage casual visits (fig.3). Here the sense of isolation – of communion with the vast pine forests throughout the cycle of seasons – was palpable. Sibelius and his family moved into Ainola in September 1904. It was his home for the rest of his life.

Sibelius, Jean