OK—today’s problem. What was going on with Jean Sibelius?
He was born in 1865, he died in1957, he was definitely one of the major composers of the late 19th century and early 20th century. And his last major composition? That would be in 1926.
So why did he stop? Granted, he was in his sixties, but that’s hardly old age. Worse, instead of merely stopping, he actively destroyed his own work. Here’s his wife on the subject:
"In the 1940s there was a great auto da fé at Ainola. My husband collected a number of the manuscripts in a laundry basket and burned them on the open fire in the dining room. Parts of the Karelia Suite were destroyed – I later saw remains of the pages which had been torn out – and many other things. I did not have the strength to be present and left the room. I therefore do not know what he threw on to the fire. But after this my husband became calmer and gradually lighter in mood."[11]
Well, here he is in 1939—he doesn’t look too sad here.
Born in Finland, Sibelius’s father was a Swedish-speaking doctor, and Finnish was always a second language for Sibelius. After he graduated from high school, he initially studied law, but soon switched to music. And he must have been a fair violinist—he performed the last two movements of the Mendelssohn concerto in public. And he certainly could write for the instrument, as you can hear in the performance below of his violin concerto of 1905.
Not bad, hunh? Chang definitely earned whatever her fee was that night.
In addition to the concerto, Sibelius wrote 7 symphonies, of which the second and the fifth are probably the best known. Here’s the finale of the seventh symphony, which you may be singing for the rest of the week.
Right—then there are the songs, some of which were written for Marian Anderson, the preeminent singer of her day. And below, she sings one of the most famous, Im Feld ein Mädchen singt.
Right—two warnings. The first is that the recording quality is, by our standards, poor. Anderson sounds far away, the vibrato is too wide for modern tastes, but for me at least, all that adds to the essential spooky feeling of the song.
Which you will understand—here’s an English translation of the German.
In the field a maiden sings...
Perhaps her lover is dead;
Perhaps her happiness is ended,
For her song is a sad one.
The sunset fades,
The woods become silent,
But ever, from far away,
The sorrowing song still sounds.
The last note dies.
I would like to go to her.
We would console one another,
So sadly does she sing.
The sunset fades;
The woods become silent.
A great lover of nature, Sibelius lived in the country most of his life, and was known as the Silence of Ainola, his country home. It wasn’t true that he was a recluse; he received visitors but did not leave his home. And Wikipedia shares one of the anecdotes frequently told:
[He] was returning from his customary morning walk. Exhilarated, he told his wife Aino that he had seen a flock of cranes approaching. "There they come, the birds of my youth," he exclaimed. Suddenly, one of the birds broke away from the formation and circled once above Ainola. It then rejoined the flock to continue its journey. Two days afterwards Sibelius died of a brain hemorrhage, at age 91 (on 20 September 1957), in Ainola, where he is buried in the garden. Another well-known Finnish composer, Heino Kaski, died that same day. Aino lived there for the next twelve years until she died on 8 June 1969; she is buried with her husband.
Critical opinion has varied over the years, as tastes and fads in music have changed. Tim Page of the Washington Post may have said it best.
There are two things to be said straightaway about Sibelius. First, he is terribly uneven (much of his chamber music, a lot of his songs and most of his piano music might have been churned out by a second-rate salon composer from the 19th century on an off afternoon). Second, at his very best, he is often weird.
Ouch….
