5. 1905–11: Modern classicism.

By 1905, Sibelius's impact in Germany had been brought to a promising yet precarious position. On the one hand, such successes as his conducting of the Second Symphony in Berlin in January of that year confirmed his growing reputation as a controversial Northern modernist. On the other hand, the ‘exotic’ factors that had gained him attention in the first place (along with the ominous popularity of a few lighter pieces) were encouraging European musical circles to overlook the depth of his musical thought in favour of a reductive stereotype. By considering him only under the peripheral category of ‘nationalist’ – outsider status – and by noting that his unusual musical language failed to satisfy the academic-classical expectations of standard symphonic or linear-contrapuntal practice, even modestly sympathetic commentators, such as Walter Niemann, were setting up limits of acceptance that would be difficult to exceed.

‘This is the crucial hour, the last chance to make something of myself and achieve great things’, he wrote to Aino on 19 January 1905; ‘Now the important thing is not to let up but to sustain the momentum’. The next month he broke with the Finnish publishers to sign a four-year contract with the Berlin publisher Robert Lienau (Schlesinger), pledging – too optimistically, as it turned out – the delivery of four new works per year (the first two, from 1905, were the incidental music to Pelléas och Mélisande and the revised Violin Concerto). Expanding outward, in November 1905 Sibelius made his first trip to England, where he made a remarkable impression in Liverpool conducting the First Symphony and Finlandia. In England he was greeted by a circle of enthusiastic admirers: Granville Bantock, Henry Wood, Ernest Newman and Rosa Newmarch. This trip was pivotal for his historical reception: ultimately his ties with English – and later, American – audiences would strengthen; within a few years, those with Germanic listeners would deteriorate.

By 1905, sparked by the Lienau contract and sensing himself ‘in the grip of change’ (as he had remarked the previous summer), Sibelius felt that his European reputation was now on the line. His first response was to return to the formal freedom of the tone poem. In January 1905 in Berlin he had heard Strauss – still the foremost of the musical modernists – conduct Ein Heldenleben and Symphonia Domestica. ‘I was very fascinated’, he wrote to Aino on 8 January; ‘I learnt a lot’. On 23–4 January he added, ‘I'm no longer writing a symphony, rather a symphonic fantasy for orchestra. This is my genre!! Here I can move without feeling the weight of tradition’. Throughout late 1905 and early 1906 the projected symphonic fantasy was Luonnotar, to be based on the creation story from the Kalevala. Around June 1906, however, the Luonnotar draft seems to have been refashioned into a different tale from another portion of the Kalevala, Pohjolan tytär (‘Pohjola's Daughter’), recounting ‘steadfast, old’, white-bearded Väinämöinen's sleigh-ride and futile wooing of the beautiful ‘daughter of the North’. The most narratively detailed of Sibelius's tone poems, Pohjola's Daughter unfolds as a sonata deformation (a non-traditional structure in dialogue with sonata norms) centred on B major as a referential tonal colour rather than as a key in the usual sense. It is preceded by a brooding, G minor-grounded ‘Kalevalaic’ introduction, evoking the ancient traditions from which the story springs, and the work's tonally shattered, morendo ending represents the wreckage of Väinämöinen's hopes: a lonely aftermath of ‘lost’, chromatic fragments – a characteristic mood in mature Sibelius – coming eventually to rest on the referential B .

If Pohjola's Daughter was crafted as an enthusiastic response to the later tone poems of Strauss, that response also contained an element of critique. Increasingly suspicious of what he perceived as the episodic looseness and self-indulgent monumentalism of the most hypertechnically advanced modernists, especially Strauss and Mahler, Sibelius was now seeking a redoubled compression and motivic density: the performance time of Heldenleben is about 40 minutes; that of Pohjola about 12. In 1905–6 the composer was on the cusp of a crucial development. Was it possible to remain regarded as unequivocally modern – in uniqueness of language and uncompromising attitude, in radical orchestral colour, in boldness and depth of idea – but simultaneously to react against the more sensationalist currents of modernism by recovering the economy and formal logic of the abandoned classical ideal? Though a risky strategy within an unpredictable musical marketplace (these were the Salome and Elektra years), this ‘modern classicism’ now became Sibelius's aim. A stylistic ideal at once referentially traditional yet almost compulsively dismissive of overtly popular appeal, it may be regarded as Sibelius's middle-period proposal to accommodate the assimilationist–separatist dialectic that kept pulling him in opposite creative directions.

The leaner, less Kalevalaic Third Symphony in C (1907) was the manifesto of this merging into modern classicism. Less spectacular than his first two symphonies, the anti-monumental Third compensates through a further gain in compositional discipline. In part the work was a counter-response to Mahler's expansive Fifth Symphony, which he had studied in 1905. In October 1907, shortly after Sibelius's completion of the Third, Mahler visited Helsinki, although he knew nothing of Sibelius's major works and thought little of the composer. At that time Sibelius remarked to Mahler that he considered the essence of the genre of the symphony to be its ‘severity and style and the profound logic that created an inner connection between all the motifs’. Mahler's reply is equally famous: ‘No! The symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything’.

With the Third Symphony, Sibelius grasped more clearly the artistic project that would dominate his later compositions: to give the impression that his reiterative, uncommonly concentrated language sought to draw out the hidden secrets of sound itself, to free an ontological truth from sound's acoustic materiality. To this end the Third Symphony strives to recover both the diatonic melodic fragment and the pure triad as meaningful modern utterances by presenting them in non-normative ways. Such an unusual aim – the defamiliarization of the diatonic and the consonant within a surrounding European context of multiplying dissonance, ironic detachment and high modernism – was easy for audiences and critics to misconstrue. This dogged, non-ironized retention of the triadic would lead to much misunderstanding and bitterly partisan debate for the rest of the century.

The perceptual effect created throughout the Third Symphony is that of an elemental, C-major-triad sonority gaining cumulative heft and weight, maximizing in presence and insistent self-assuredness, pulling itself free from distracting obstacles, until at the end one is confronted with something extraordinary: the reality of a heavier, more revelatory ‘C major’. The remarkable finale is laid out in two distinct parts, welding together aspects of traditional third and fourth movements: a motivically scattered, scherzo-like block, unfolding in repetitive cycles, eventually produces a circular, melodic juggernaut that steamrollers its way to the end, accruing ‘surplus’ C-triad intensity with every reiteration (ex.5). From one perspective, the finale can be understood as a radicalized sonata deformation, in which the double-theme scherzo cycles furnish two varied expositions and a development and the juggernaut conclusion serves as a reconceived recapitulation. From another, the scherzo cycles can also appear as a paradigm of what may be called ‘rotational form’ – broad, varied recyclings of a thematic pattern – within which a separate idea (in this case, the juggernaut theme) is engendered, nurtured and finally brought to flower as a revelatory telos or goal. Sibelius himself described the finale's process as ‘the crystallization of ideas from chaos’. Foreshadowed most notably in Lemminkäinen's Return, this combination of quasi-ritualistic rotations and ‘teleological genesis’ would take on increased importance in the following years. It eventually became the grounding formal principle of his works after 1912.

The years 1907–12 brought alternating periods of buoyant confidence and corrosive despair, much of which he registered in a diary beginning in February 1909. Both Sibelius's finances and health had reached a crisis point, even as his family continued to expand with the births of his last two daughters, Margareta in 1908 and Heidi in 1911. By 1908 he was awash in debts, he was experiencing the negative effects of prolonged alcoholism – in his own mind intoxication had been a necessary spur to his artistry – and he had developed a menacing throat tumour. Fearing cancer, he consulted specialists in Helsinki and Berlin and suffered through several operations. On doctor's orders he was forced to swear off drinking and smoking. Although such abstinence had been previously unthinkable, this resolution lasted until 1915. For several years after 1908, Sibelius was haunted by the shadow of death, and much in his music and thought at this time turned towards the darker and the more introspective.

Nor were affairs entirely encouraging on the professional level. His monetary problems, compounded by growing self-criticism whenever he undertook large-scale projects, strained his relations with Lienau and made it difficult to fulfil the conditions in his 1905–9 contract. After the Third Symphony, he produced only two other major works for Lienau, neither of which invited public success. One was the proto-minimalist (and non-Kalevalaic) tone poem, Öinen ratsastus ja auringonnousu (‘Night Ride and Sunrise’, 1908). Breaking more decisively away from the sonata principle through multiple, cumulative rotations, it foreshadows much of the sound-world of Sibelius's later works. The second was his return to chamber composition with the sombre String Quartet in D minor, subtitled ‘Voces intimae’ (1909). As Sibelius himself recognized, this quartet was a milestone in his compositional development. Yet it did not come without a steep price. Anticipating certain features of the Fourth Symphony, the brooding language of the five-movement quartet seems to turn its back on audiences altogether in its entrenched isolation, depression and invasive despair. It reveals its chilling, deeper currents only to initiates into Sibelius's manner of thinking.

Most of what he offered to Lienau, however, proved to be compendia of short pieces of varying quality: fleeting sound-ideas, experimental miniatures or songs. These included the six German-language songs of op.50 (1906), the curiously exotic incidental music to Belsazars gästabud (‘Belshazzar's Feast’, 1906–7), the more significant incidental music to Strindberg's fairy-tale play Svanevit (‘Swanwhite’, 1908), certain features of which would be recalled in the Fifth Symphony, and the eight songs op.57 on Swedish texts by Ernst Josephson (1909–10). In 1910, after Lienau turned down Sibelius's terms for the Ten Pieces for Piano op.58, the composer was lured to Breitkopf, whom he also offered two songs from 1908, published in 1910 as op.35 (and much praised by later commentators): the broadly static Jubal and the proto-expressionistic, hauntingly decadent Teodora – a rare encounter in Sibelius's music with aestheticist eroticism. Towards the end of 1909, meanwhile, he had been momentarily rescued from his appalling financial situation through discreet contributions from a few wealthy Finnish patrons. This relief effort was organized by his friend Axel Carpelan, who characteristically pressed Sibelius to steer clear of potentially lucrative miniatures in favour of major orchestral statements.

His several trips abroad in 1909–12 kept him abreast of new developments in music and permitted him to reflect on his own position – or lack of it – in the larger European markets. The most encouraging successes occurred in England, where a few influential voices – Bantock, Newman, Wood, Newmarch – continued to champion his cause. Sibelius was fêted in England in February–March 1909 (when he also briefly met Debussy) and September–October 1912. But his experiences in Berlin and Paris during these years were at best mixed, at worst deeply discouraging. There, for the most part, he had been consigned to the position of a second-tier ‘nationalist’, no longer regarded as a key player in the world of the new music personified by such figures as Debussy, Stravinsky, Varèse (whom Sibelius met, through Busoni, in 1910) or Schoenberg (whose musical principles challenged him to the point of crisis in 1912). Apart from his English connection, Sibelius's career now seemed on the wane. His newer works proved especially difficult to market in the rest of Europe. These included the funeral march In memoriam (1909, revised 1910) and a revision of his choral and orchestral setting from the Kalevala, Tulen synty (‘The Origin of Fire’, 1902). His modern-classical gambit and increasingly dark, enigmatic musical utterances were not leading to the success for which he had hoped.

The unresolvable obstacle was his puzzlingly unusual style. As his biographer Erik Tawaststjerna pointed out, ‘Sibelius's musical ideas were alien to the Central European mentality’. Traceable in letters and diary entries, the composer's response was to refashion his self-image into that of a man of profound isolation, groping his way along a little understood compositional ‘path’ that he ‘must take’, one that would ensure his irremediable alienation from the currents that governed the prestige institutions of his time. This self-assessment crossed a crucial line with the widespread reconstruction of the concept of musical modernism that attended the European compositional revolutions in the years around 1910 – Stravinsky, Schoenberg and others. It was now clear that Sibelius's early modernism, along with that of others of his generation, was being outflanked (and placed under suspicion as traditionalism or ‘late Romanticism’) by a younger group of high modernists whose new-music posture and practices he came to view as sensationalist, a betrayal of the tradition.

Sibelius's Fourth Symphony in A minor (1910–11) was the climactic utterance of his modern-classical style – broken, despairingly contemplative, irretrievably lonely in tone, the product of much compositional struggle and, above all, a resolute statement of the separatist side of his conflicted artistic persona. It is a piece of enormous depth and implication, very much a work of its time, harbouring at its core a brilliantly staged contradiction. On the one hand, the standard 20th-century verdict, especially among historians, has been that this is Sibelius's most modern, most harmonically and technically advanced composition. Many factors point in this direction: the Fourth's emphasis on the tritone as a generative interval; its arrestingly acerbic dissonances; the strangeness of its moment-to-moment syntax, including stubborn rhetorical discontinuities and truncations; its unparalleled motivic compression and density of thought; its structurally deformational movement layouts; its uncompromising bleakness and disdain of popular appeal. On the other hand, its selfconsciously anti-sensational tone was intended as a rebuke to the new, post-1910 reconception of modernism. This was the initial view of the symphony put forth by Sibelius's confidant Axel Carpelan in April 1911, shortly after the Helsinki première. It was reinforced the following month by Sibelius himself in a much-quoted letter to Rosa Newmarch: ‘[My symphony] stands as a protest against present-day music. It has nothing, absolutely nothing of the circus about it’. The modernist/anti-modernist contradiction driving the Fourth Symphony is irreconcilable. In that irreconcilability it exposes, albeit from the sidelines, the conflicts tearing through the fabric of the European musical politics of the period.

Sibelius, Jean