On Thursday I went with my wife and a friend to hear the last of the BBC Phil's Sibelius concerts, with John Storsgard conducting Nos. 3, 6 and 7. Storsgard doesn't seem to be one of the glib grandstanding conductors; in fact he turned shyly to face the audience at the end, with all the diffidence of a Swedish yeoman farmer asking the local squire for his daughter's hand. There were some mannerisms in the 3rd Symphony, but the rest of it was solid and well done. It must be a knackering evening's work, getting through all that knotty music.
Afterwards my wife was underwhelmed. She likes some bits of Sibelius, particularly Night Ride and Sunrise, but she doesn't know the less popular symphonies. "There was just so much waiting around for something to happen", she said of the Sixth. "I mean, I liked the purple passages, obviously, but the hanging around inbetween was unbearable".
It's always hard to explain why you like something, all the more so when you've liked it for years and years and it's part of your having become who you are. When I was a kid my Dad used to take us to Wythenshawe library, and we were allowed to borrow one record per week. After a few months of Bach and Haydn, I thought, "Well perhaps I'd better try some of this modern stuff". I was only about ten, and as it happened Sibelius was only about ten years dead. The LP of Sibelius 2 had a nice landscape on it, so I took it home. I can truthfully say that within ten seconds of the music starting I knew two things; one, that this person was writing for me, and two, that I wanted to be a composer.
I'd like to think too that I immediately recognised that behind the wash of D Major strings there was an understated subtlety and complexity at work - were the rising string crotchets a tune or an accompaniment? Was it an accident that the chattering woodwind figures which follow are a severely compressed inversion of the rising pattern? This may be wishful thinking; but I know loved the invention straight away.
Brought up in post-industrial Manchester, surrounded by the bare Pennine moors, and spending parts of the year in the wilds of Scotland, Sibelius had written music for all my landscapes, internal and external. As a teenager I absorbed his music so thoroughly that today I almost never listen to it. I can imagine it whenever I like. Going to hear it is an occasional diversion, not an inner need.
If Sibelius had just carried on doing the kind of thing he did in the first two symphonies I would still have loved him; but something happened to him, as I found myself telling my wife on the way home, between about the Violin Concerto and the Third Symphony. In the Third we enter a new world, in which although much is superficially the same the outcome is profoundly different; and different in a way which I think has implications for Sibelius's successors.
In writing about the Third most commentators focus on the last of the three movements, in which Sibelius seems to construct the piece from a series of fragments as it goes along. It is rather like a flat-pack symphonic movement, except that unlike an IKEA wardrobe, it functions perfectly well as it's being assembled. But although this is a piece of technical wizardry unparallelled in the repertoire (can anyone imagine Mahler or Shostakovitch being able to accomplish the same thing? Britten could have done it perhaps, but few others) I think the true significance of the Third lies elsewhere. In particular it lies in the occlusion of the symphonic narrative idea which stems from Beethoven and, perhaps, reaches its apotheothis in Mahler.
I have been fortunate enough to conduct quite a lot of the great Germanic repertoire, from Haydn onwards. At the end of the 18th century music tends to be formalistic; it is in a major or minor key, and there is a ritualistic quality to its premises, processes and conclusion. But as the 19th century goes on, harmonic resources become more complex and expressive - you can see it starting to happen in late Mozart - and by the time we get to the Eroica and the 5th symphony, Beethoven is starting to construct narratives of great psychological depth and power.
The finale of Beethoven's 5th is seen (and felt) as a convincing riposte to the drama of the opening, the pathos of the slow movement and the uncertainties of the scherzo. This cumulative narrative power proved inspiring to generations of composers, who struggled to repeat and explore it with varying degrees of success. My own feeling is that Tchaikovsky managed it in the Pathetique but not elsewhere, and Rachmaninov only, courtesy of his great melodic gifts, by the skin of his teeth in the 2nd. But the point is that even in the hands of a great master like Brahms, there is a certain predictability of outcome. Of course, all is going to end well (or tragically as the case may be).
But triumph and tragedy are not the only outcomes in life, and in any event both rather depend on a solipsistic view of the world in which Romantic individualism is applied to the consciousness of the Enlightenment. And as Kipling said, triumph and disaster are imposters both. By the early 20th century the time was surely ripe for music with a different affect.
We all know that the serialists solved this problem in a way which became the dominant trope in the following hundred years. But, starting with the Third Symphony, Sibelius had his own ideas. The point of the Third, it seems to me, is not its technical brilliance, but the composer's refusal to adopt the narratives of Romanticism whilst nevertheless retaining much of its musical style. (You might argue that the serialists did the reverse; that they continued and heightened those narratives - Expressionism? - whilst junking much of the style. Much good it did them)
So the convenient and satisfying (if somewhat pat) conclusions of Sibelius's first two symphonies are gone, and in their place he leaves something altogether more disjointed and ambiguous. I don't have time, space or energy to demonstrate how he does this (and it is not all in the structure), but the Third has a terseness, a concision where ideas of great emotional potency (first movement second subject for example) are ruthlessly constrained (which can be annoying in Brahms but seems to work here); the music is always finding quiet corners to go into, disrupting its flow (Storgards and the BBC Phil did these really well); at what should be the emotional high points (end of the first movement) Sibelius clothes his ideas impersonally in woodwind and horns rather than the full tutti, saved for the last two dignified chords.
And this was just the start for Sibelius. The Fourth symphony, my favourite, takes understatement to new heights. If you want objective evidence, it is the only piece I can think of in the repertoire which ends mezzo-forte. That one dynamic speaks volumes (actually many conductors on record, including Von Karajan, cannot bear to follow the composer's instructions: they don't understand what he is trying to do). Sibelius experiments here with minimalism - the ostinati of the last movement of the 2nd were the means to create a great cumulative climax, whereas in the Fourth Sibelius is stopping the music almost for its own sake; surely John Adams had been listening to the Fourth when he wrote Shaker Loops. The Fifth is more conventional in affect, although its structure is one of great originality and looks forward to the Seventh. In the Sixth we are back in the territory of the Fourth, with its stop-go sense of motion and simple poignant endings, sometimes abrupt and unexpected.
Yes, said my wife, but it's all so disjointed! Well, to a degree, it may be. But the point about all these pieces, from the Third onwards, is that when you know them well you realise what a great sense of interconnectedness and unity they all have. And it is this unity that Sibelius is working towards with the one-movement Seventh symphony. The people who described the Third symphony as Neo-Classical meant it in the musical sense, but I think this is a truer term when one considers Sibelius's later works in the light of the Classical Greek ideas of beauty and unity. If he accomplishes these ideals anywhere it is in the Seventh. In a miraculous piece of skill rivalling the finale of the Third, this is music with many speeds yet only one. Don't ask me how he does it.
In 1994 my wife and I bought a small house in North London. She was six months pregnant. To have somewhere which was in some respects mine and which would do for the start of family life, after ten years precarious peregrination (Balham, Shepherd's Bush, Notting Hill, Holloway), was quite overwhelming. On the first evening I unpacked the stereo and played Sibelius 2. She found me sitting on the sofa in tears. In November I'll be conducting it again in Halifax.
As a mature composer Sibelius set his face against Romanticism, but the subtlety of this personal transformation and the means by which it is accomplished continue to fascinate and inspire.
PS Almost uniquely amongst major composers, some of Sibelius's best pieces are amongst his least well-known. Try Tapiola. And although the Violin Concerto is one of the greatest written for the instrument, the Six Humoreskes are better still - short pieces of immense pathos and charm, without a trace of sentimentality. Lastly, a plea for the Three Piano Sonatines Op.67, minatures by a twentieth century giant who still had time for small things.
PPS Sibelius is credited with the following quotes, all three amongst my favourites. "Ignore the critics. No statue was ever erected to a critic". "While the others serve cocktails of various hues, I have nothing to offer but pure spring water" (a bit pious that one, but you get the drift). And lastly, "All the doctors who told me to stop drinking are dead". Amen to that.
