Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daniel M. Grimley is university lecturer in music at the University of Oxford, tutorial fellow of Merton College, and senior lecturer in music at University College. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius and the author of Grieg and Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism.

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JEAN SIBELIUS AND HIS WORLD

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments and Permissions..................................................................................................................................................................viiSibelius, Finland, and the Idea of Landscape.....................................................................................................................................................ixSibelius and the Russian Traditions PHILIP ROSS BULLOCK.........................................................................................................................................3From Heaven's Floor to the Composer's Desk: Sibelius's Musical Manuscripts and Compositional Process TIMO VIRTANEN..............................................................................58Theatrical Sibelius: The Melodramatic Lizard JEFFREY KALLBERG...................................................................................................................................74The Wings of a Butterfly: Sibelius and the Problems of Musical Modernity TOMI MÄKELÄ..................................................................................................89"Thor's Hammer": Sibelius and British Music Critics, 1905–1957 BYRON ADAMS................................................................................................................125Jean Sibelius and His American Connections GLENDA DAWN GOSS.....................................................................................................................................158Art and the Ideology of Nature: Sibelius, Hamsun, Adorno MAX PADDISON...........................................................................................................................173Storms, Symphonies, Silence: Sibelius's Tempest Music and the Invention of Late Style DANIEL M. GRIMLEY........................................................................................186Waving from the Periphery: Sibelius, Aalto, and the Finnish Pavilions SARAH MENIN...............................................................................................................227Old Masters: Jean Sibelius and Richard Strauss in the Twentieth Century LEON BOTSTEIN...........................................................................................................256Selections from Adolf Paul's A Book About a Human Being TRANSLATED BY ANNIKA LINDSKOG INTRODUCED BY DANIEL M. GRIMLEY..........................................................................307Some Viewpoints Concerning Folk Music and Its Influence on the Musical Arts JEAN SIBELIUS TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH BY MARGARETA MARTIN INTRODUCED BY DANIEL M. GRIMLEY.....................315Selection from Erik Furuhjelm's Jean Sibelius: A Survey of His Life and Music TRANSLATED BY MARGARETA MARTIN INTRODUCED BY DANIEL M. GRIMLEY...................................................326Adorno on Sibelius TRANSLATED BY SUSAN H. GILLESPIE INTRODUCED BY DANIEL M. GRIMLEY............................................................................................................331Monumentalizing Sibelius: Eila Hiltunen and the Sibelius Memorial Controversy INTRODUCED AND TRANSLATED BY DANIEL M. GRIMLEY....................................................................338Index............................................................................................................................................................................................355Notes on the Contributors........................................................................................................................................................................368

Chapter One

PHILIP ROSS BULLOCK

To discuss the music of Jean Sibelius in the context of Russian culture and history is to broach complex questions of national identity and musical influence. Although Finland's status between 1809 and 1917 as a Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire has been the subject of considerable recent work by revisionist historians, the policies of extreme Russification that were in place between 1899 and Finland's eventual independence eighteen years later have tended to cast the debate in terms of how a small nation bravely won self-determination despite the predations of a vast and arrogant imperial power. This historiographical discourse has implications for our understanding of Sibelius's music and personality too, since, as Glenda Dawn Goss suggests, the composer has long served as an icon of Finnish national consciousness: "The real Sibelius has been obscured ... by the tendency to see him solely through a nationalistic lens. This view received powerful impetus in connection with Finland's valiant and prolonged resistance to Russian domination, a resistance that Sibelius's music came to symbolize in the world." The consequences of this tendency can be seen in a Finnish review of one of the major Soviet-era publications on Sibelius. Although little about the 1963 biography by Alexander Stupel seems immoderate or controversial today, and indeed, many of its suggestions about Sibelius's connections to Russian music have since been independently corroborated and further developed, Dmitry Hintze's negative assessment of Sibelius's influence on Russian composers from Rimsky-Korsakov to Rachmaninoff is symptomatic of an era when political factors affected attitudes in the writing of national history.

Notwithstanding such political considerations, many of the clichés that have come to be associated with Russian music as Europe's perpetual "Other"—Oriental exoticism, emotional intensity, technical insufficiency, even, as in the case of the reputation of Pyotr Tchaikovsky, sexual deviance and effeminacy—have meant that commentators have tended to downplay comparisons between Sibelius and Russian composers, preferring instead to incorporate Sibelius into the European mainstream. The posture adopted in Walter Niemann's early writings—interpreted by James Hepokoski as "a priestlike gesture within the cultic institution intended to keep pure the sacred space of Germanic symphonism"—is a case in point. Although dismissive of Sibelius's handling of the symphony, which he saw as nothing more than "an imitation of Tchaikovsky's Pathétique in a Finnish dialect," Niemann was nonetheless keen to emphasize Sibelius's status as a composer with organic, Western-oriented links to Scandinavia rather than Finland's occupying neighbor to the east. Crucially, for Niemann, Sibelius's works were free from the emotional and structural short comings that were supposedly so characteristic of Tchaikovsky:

Sibelius's broad and expressive approach to melody frequently has an unmistakable affinity with that of Tchaikovsky, and as a symphonist, Sibelius has without question borrowed many ideas from the symphonies of the Russian master, above all the E-minor symphony and the Pathétique. Except that Sibelius is more reserved in his expression, less decorative, less contrived and sentimental, less differentiated than the Russian master, despite all of his striking intensity of emotion and Slavic fatalism. Against our will and as if hypnotized, we are at the mercy of the weak and sensual Russian. The stern and steely Finn appeals to heart and mind. You will search in vain in Sibelius for movements such as the...