7. 1927–57: The silence from Järvenpää.

Tapiola would prove to be the last of Sibelius's major works. 1927–32 were years of compositional crisis, frequent depression and waning self-confidence. They brought forth only a scattering of smaller compositions: a handful of occasional choral pieces, the draft of a suite for violin and orchestra ‘op.117’, a few curious miniatures for piano solo or violin and piano and the Surusoitto (‘Funeral Music’) for organ in memory of Akseli Gallen-Kallela. In the background were his plans for an Eighth Symphony. His initial work on it, however, probably in Berlin in 1928, appears to have run aground almost at once. This was a period when Sibelius was withdrawing even further by declining conducting engagements and avoiding public appearances. He seems to have returned to the Eighth in 1930 and 1931: as he reported in letters to Aino, it was occupying him during what proved to be his last trip outside Finland, a 1931 visit to Berlin. Within his own mind, at least, he still considered himself an active composer. In the same year he wrote to Olin Downes not only that the Eighth would soon be ‘ready for printing’ but also that he had several other ‘new works in my head’. By 1933 the multi-movement symphony was virtually completed: in the late summer he sent to his copyist what was probably the opening movement, a fascicle of 23 pages – the copyist Voigt's bill for the work survives – and indicated that seven more such fascicles would follow. They never did. The rest of the tale is tragic: Koussevitzky's and Downes's pressing of Sibelius for the long-awaited Eighth throughout the early 1930s; Sibelius's promises, hesitations and delays; the souring of the Eighth into a near-taboo topic of discussion. In the end Sibelius abandoned the project. Aino later reported to Erik Tawaststjerna that in the mid-1940s (perhaps in 1945) the composer destroyed a laundry basket of manuscripts – including what must have been the entire set of materials for the Eighth Symphony, probably in several substantially differing versions – by throwing them into the fire of the dining-room stove at Ainola.

Tapering off drastically in the late 1920s, new compositions from Sibelius came to a stop after 1931. The only exceptions are two small works for men's chorus from 1946 (Veljesvirsi and Ylistyshymni) and a few revisions of earlier, non-published pieces (most notably the 1938 orchestration of Andante festivo and the 1939 recasting of Lemminkäinen and the Island Maidens and Lemminkäinen in Tuonela, both eventually published in 1954). Anecdotal evidence suggests that he may have continued to compose intermittently, but in effect the ‘silence from Järvenpää’ was total. Sibelius retired as a grand personage of Finland, the musical symbol and most famous citizen of the nation. Within Finland official biographies (Ekman, G1935) and formal studies of the works (Roiha, J1941; Krohn, J1942) began to appear. Over the years he received numerous distinguished visitors, and his birthdays were occasions of state celebration and international recognition. The accolades for his much-noted 70th birthday in 1935 included the Germany Goethe Medal, awarded by Hitler, who doubtless (and quite apart from Sibelius's views) considered this gesture an advantageous affirmation of racial and Nordic solidarity. Important recordings of his works also emerged in the early 1930s, beginning with the officially-sponsored Kajanus recordings in 1930 and 1932 of Symphonies nos.1, 2, 3 and 5, two movements from the Karelia Suite, Pohjola's Daughter, Belshazzar's Feast and Tapiola. Koussevitzky recorded the Seventh Symphony in 1933, following it in 1935 with the Second; George Schnéevoigt's Fourth, Sixth and Luonnotar were produced in 1934. Sibelius himself was persuaded to record the Andante festivo in 1939, though as part of a short-wave broadcast, not as a commercial recording. (Decades later, a different recording was wrongly identified and released as Sibelius's; the confusion was clarified only in the mid-1990s.) The 1930s also saw the cresting of a wave of frequent Sibelius performances in England and the USA. Several British composers of the 1930s, in particular, seem to have been caught up in the Sibelius ‘cult’ and to have reflected it in their own music (Vaughan Williams's Fifth Symphony; Walton's First).

As Sibelius's popularity peaked in English-speaking countries – while Austria, Germany and France remained relatively uninterested – opinions about his work polarized along ideological lines, with disastrous results for his subsequent reputation in the critical and academic world in the second half of the century. Sibelius's traditionalist supporters – Cecil Gray, Constant Lambert, Olin Downes and others – claimed him as the last true successor to Beethoven and adduced the composer's works in their own campaigns against the dissonant new music. Pro-modernist factions responded with lacerating criticism and contempt for the taste shown by Sibelians. On the neo-classical side Virgil Thomson carried the charge forward: the Second Symphony was ‘vulgar, self-indulgent, and provincial beyond all description’. In the pro-Schoenberg camp Theodor W. Adorno, in the enormously influential ‘Glosse über Sibelius’ (I1938), derided the veneration for Sibelius as a shabbily deluded, market-driven false consciousness and denounced the composer's musical technique as reactionary and inept, the ‘originality of helplessness’. Nearly two decades later René Leibowitz issued a pamphlet (I1955) labelling Sibelius, on essentially the same grounds, ‘le plus mauvais compositeur du monde’.

The issues at stake were not only musical ones. Viewed from certain combative angles, especially among leftist or avant-garde critics, Sibelius's world-view could be interpreted as uncomfortably assimilable into the ‘blood-and-soil’ ideologies promoted by the Third Reich (this, in fact, was precisely one of Adorno's charges). Such criticism looked warily on Sibelius's lifelong attraction to the ‘truth’ supposedly embedded in ethnic identity, on his deadly serious aesthetic invocations of archaic folk gods, on his manifest discomfort with modern urbanism and on his anti-technological retreat back to ‘nature’. Additional factors, surely, were his well-known anti-socialist politics and the historical fact of Finland's ‘continuation-war’ alliance of convenience with Nazi Germany in 1941–4 against the much-hated Soviets – for which the composer made an Associated Press appeal for understanding on 12 July 1941. All these things doubtless had their roles to play as underlying, often tacit factors in mid-century Sibelius reception.

Obscured among the politicized charges and implications, it seems, was the complexity of the real man, who was by no means so readily classifiable. It should be added that in several diary entries from September 1943 a deeply troubled Sibelius denounced Nazi racial laws and theories as ‘petty’, ‘puerile’ and ‘humbug’: ‘This primitive way of thinking, anti-Semitism and the like, is something that at my age I cannot condone. My upbringing and breeding don't fit in with the times’. He went on to counsel himself as a ‘genius’ and ‘artist’: ‘You are a cultural aristocrat and can make a stand against stupid prejudice’; and he intermixed these remarks with characteristic despair about the reception of his own works: ‘Only very few understand what I have done and want to do in the world of the symphony. The majority have no idea of what it is about’.

By the 1950s, the decade of the flowering of the postwar avant-garde, Sibelius's reputation had plummeted among élite modernists, and it seemed to slump among concert audiences as well, notwithstanding the entrenched persistence of the Second Symphony and the Violin Concerto, the devoted support of several eminent conductors and a modest, ever-renewing faction of admirers. For the rest of the century, historians writing official accounts of what came to be called ‘modern music’ or ‘20th-century music’ would routinely blank him out of their histories or mention him briefly and patronizingly as a mere nationalist or faded holdover from the 19th century. Within the late 20th-century academy, itself conservatively wedded to one-sided conceptions of ‘modernism’, this inadequate picture has proved difficult to move beyond, even as audiences in recent years have once again shown signs of renewed interest, and even as his technique of slow textural transformation found a new following in the 1970s and 80s among some of the minimalist and post-minimalist composers.

Sibelius died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 20 September 1957: he was buried at Ainola. Over the next few decades Sibelius research – archival, biographical, analytical – began to gather steam, centring primarily around the Sibelius Museum in Turku (Otto Andersson, more recently Fabian Dahlström) and Helsinki University (Erik Tawaststjerna, more recently Kari Kilpeläinen). Grounded in basic research documents, many of which had never before been made public, and in conversations with the family, Tawaststjerna's five-volume biography (1965–88) put Sibelius studies on a new plane. Other factors, too, have given a new push to Sibelius research: the availability of the composer's sketches, drafts and autograph manuscripts, an enormous collection housed primarily, since 1982, in the Helsinki University Library; Dahlström's clarifications in the 1980s and 90s of many elusive issues regarding the chronology of the works and their complicated publication history; the Swedish recording company BIS's project, complemented by releases on the Finnish labels Ondine and Finlandia, of recording the bulk of Sibelius's output, including early works, unpublished works and long-suppressed early versions of known pieces (En saga, the Violin Concerto, the Fifth Symphony); the bibliographical, biographical and reception studies of Glenda Dawn Goss; and the launching in Finland of plans for a complete, scholarly edition of the works, the first volumes of which began to appear in 1999. A substantial and long overdue reassessment of Sibelius seems to have begun.