Sibelius Volume II: 1904-1914 (eBook)

Erik Tawaststjerna (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2013 | 1. Auflage
318 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
9780571309443 (ISBN)

Infos

Erik Tawaststjerna embarked on his monumental and acclaimed study of Jean Sibelius's life and music in 1960 and it occupied him for over a quarter of a century. His study differs from other work on the composer in one important respect: he had unrestricted access to the composer's papers, diaries and letters as well as the advantage of numerous conversations with the composer's widow and other members of the family. Thus his researches can justifiably claim to have thrown entirely fresh light on the great Finnish composer. Far from the remote personality of the Sibelius legend, Sibelius emerges as a highly colourful figure. This second volume covers the crucial period from 1904 and the beginning of the Third Symphony through to the outbreak of the First World War ten years later. During this period Sibelius began keeping a diary which, together with his letters to his wife, Aino, and to his friend, Axel Carpelan, helped the author give us a day-by-day, intimate account of the turbulent years that saw the gestation and completion of many of his finest works, culminating in the Fourth Symphony. Translated by Robert Layton, himself a Sibelius specialist, this is a compelling and insightful account of the music of one of the twentieth century's greatest composers.

Erik Tawaststjerna (1916-93) devoted a lifetime to the study of Sibelius, and came to know him personally. After Sibelius's death in l957 he was given unrestricted access to the composer's papers. Tawaststjerna's three-volume study of Sibelius was awarded the prestigious Finlandia Prize and has been hailed as definitive.

Textauszug

CHAPTER TWO

Pohjola’s Daughter

In August 1905 came news of the sudden death of the artist Albert Edelfelt. A figure of European vision and standing, he had made a coloured crayon sketch of Sibelius in profile, and it seems that he and the composer had drawn closer during the last year or so of his life. Edelfelt’s harmonious nature seems to have drawn out the serenity and balance in Sibelius’s features, and one can well think of his sketch as a contrast to the darker overtones of Axel Gallén-Kallela’s demonic watercolour made in 1893. Edelfelt had also given Sibelius’s features to one of the main figures in his large canvas depicting the inaugural procession of the Åbo Academy in 1640, a painting that was, alas, destroyed during the last war. In any event Edelfelt’s passing came as a blow to Sibelius, and a letter to Carpelan conveys his sense of loss. For the funeral he composed a setting of lines from Runeberg’s The Clouds’ Brother:

Ex 11 ‘Not with lamenting shall your memory be celebrated …’

Carpelan perhaps summed up a more general feeling when he wrote to Sibelius at the beginning of September: ‘Our great link with Europe has gone. Now our great hopes and pride reside in you.’ Although this was all very well, bearing a national mantle posed its problems: his work on the revision of the Violin Concerto had been interrupted not only by a concert in Viipuri but also by a commission for a Cortège for a festivity to honour two prominent figures in Finnish theatrical life, Kaarlo and Emilie Bergbom. He was also planning a work in a quasi-oratorio format to honour the centenary of J. V. Snellman’s birth, which was due in May 1906. However, his inspiration did not catch fire, and instead he turned to a new symphonic poem that he planned to call Luonnotar, this never assumed its final form in this purely orchestral guise. The Third Symphony in the meantime seems to have receded from the foreground: indeed, the Symphony as such seemed less close to him than the tone poem if one is to judge from a letter to Aino written in January 1905. ‘I’m no longer writing a symphony, rather [in Swedish] a symphonic fantasy for orchestra. [In Finnish] This is my genre!! Here I can move freely without feeling the weight of tradition.’

Money continued to trouble his long-term plans. In April, Carpelan had told him that he could no longer expect support from the private sources for whom he had acted as an intermediary over the past few years. Although the news was unwelcome, it seems to have depressed Carpelan rather more than it did Sibelius himself. The summer found Carpelan in the depths of despair: ‘For me, life is a nightmare at present,’ he wrote. No doubt he entertained fears that his role in Sibelius’s life was becoming played out.

You blush, you say, at not having written to me for the whole summer; I blush to receive any letters at all. Why should you concern yourself with someone who has not really been alive for the last twenty years. I have never chosen to weep on your shoulder as I remember how this cost me A. T.’s [Axel Tamm’s] friendship and help.1

Sibelius answered Carpelan’s letter by promptly inviting him to Ainola.

The political situation was also becoming a cause for greater anxiety. At first, Carpelan had rejoiced at the news of the Japanese victory at Tsushima and interpreted the subsequent unrest as evidence of the death throes of Tsarism. However, as events took their course, it became clear that there was scant chance of the collapse of the Tsarist tyranny, and he advised Sibelius not to allow himself to become side-tracked by what was going on but rather to concentrate on his work. Not that it was entirely possible for him to do so. In July he saw the devastation in the Senate Square in Helsinki after the attempt on the life of the Governor-General’s Deputy: ‘There was a powerful explosion, which broke the windows of three houses, among them the police station and the Town Hall,’ he reported in a letter to Aino, though he went on to express the suspicion that it was all the work of police agents provocateurs. For all Carpelan’s words, he clung to the hope that the Tsarist regime was on the point of collapse, and news reports of troubles at a Russian garrison bolstered his spirits: ‘These really are epic times.’

At the end of October, a general strike was called in Finland, a few days after its outbreak in Russia itself. It found the unfortunate Carpelan on a train bound for his home in Tampere; it never arrived. In recounting the event Carpelan tells of his fears of revolution and of ‘jumping out of the frying pan into the fire’. Certainly there were grounds for anxiety: tension between armed student groups and the workers’ Red Guards was growing and there were fears of civil war. The Finnish resistance movement was already splitting along class lines into a right-and left-wing phalanx, and Sibelius had an instinctive foreboding about this class division. A year later there was a bloody incident between Reds and Whites in Helsinki that had been triggered off after a mutiny in the Russian garrison at Sveaborg. Writing to Aino on 9 August 1906, he described the atmosphere thus: ‘Here it is – and has been – very calm on the surface, but it strikes me as being very much the “calm before the storm”. Feelings run so high that I have difficulty in recalling such strong class hatred. Eyes literally blaze.’ The storms he sensed ahead were to erupt twelve years later.

The strike achieved one of its aims: the February Manifesto of 1899 was substantially modified even if it remained on the statute book. Exiles were allowed to return home and a government reshuffle took place, which strengthened the hands of the moderates. For example, R. A. Wrede, whom Sibelius had met on the quay at Reval the previous summer closely watched by plain-clothes detectives, suddenly became Vice-Chairman in the Justice Department of the Senate.

In Liverpool, Sibelius’s cause had a strong advocate in Granville Bantock, and no doubt Ernest Newman’s excellent reviews strengthened his resolve to persuade the Finnish composer to come to England. Bantock even considered going on to Helsinki to see him, as he was spending part of the summer in Sweden. However, he had not appeared in the Finnish capital by 20 August, and the date for Sibelius’s concert appearance was finally agreed by letter (2 December). Bantock’s attitude, like that of Newman and Henry Wood, was symptomatic of the outgoing and welcoming attitude that the English had shown to foreign composers since the days of Handel, Haydn and J. C. Bach, Clementi and Mendelssohn. Admittedly, circumstances were beginning to change: in the past foreign creative talent had filled a vacuum; now the English musical renaissance had become a reality.

By 1905 there was what one could already call the older Establishment, whose most powerful luminaries were Hubert Parry and Charles Stanford; the younger generation, composers roughly contemporary with Sibelius, or, in the case of Elgar, slightly older, Delius, Hoist, Vaughan Williams, were at various stages of their careers and were to establish their names outside their native country in a way that their senior colleagues had failed to do. Even if England possessed a long and rich musical tradition, this younger generation still confronted problems similar to those faced by the nationalist composers from younger cultures. They had to overcome prejudice both at home and abroad, and in this they were often given German support. Richard Strauss’s famous toast to ‘Meister Edward Elgar’, occasioned by the success of The Dream of Gerontius at Düsseldorf in 1902, was an important step in winning Elgar wider recognition and success. German recognition had come to Sibelius at Heidelberg in the preceding year, and was an even greater factor in Delius’s case.

There are other points of contact between Sibelius and Delius: a highly developed feeling for nature, a youthful admiration for Grieg, and a subsequent predisposition towards impressionism, though Delius had some years still to wait until his Kajanus was to emerge on the scene in the form of Sir Thomas Beecham. Moreover, in England, Sibelius could count on some intuitive understanding of his musical objectives, and the way in which he had chosen to evolve the European tradition would not be condemned out of hand. Ernest Newman had accepted his individual approach to the symphony without arrogant eyebrow-raising such as had characterized the responses of so many of the German critics. Awareness of the achievements of their own rising generation of composers also sharpened English interest in a Scandinavian musician who faced similar – or nearly similar – isolation.

In November, Sibelius undertook his first visit to England. His journey took him first to Copenhagen and then Berlin, where Adolf Paul and Robert Lienau took care of him. His concert at Heidelberg was cancelled as he was not ready to present the new work he had promised, Luonnotar. Indeed he was beginning to doubt its feasibility in its present form and wrote to Aino to that effect. But the same letter, written while a storm was raging in the Baltic, recounts his shock at the thought of reaching 40, which brought him up with a jolt as well as a sudden realization of life’s seriousness and brevity.

Sibelius landed at Dover on 29 November and underwent a body search on the part of His Majesty’s Customs and Immigration who promptly fined him two pounds six shillings for trying to...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 19.12.2013
• Übersetzer: Robert Layton
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Klassik / Oper / Musical
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Freizeit / Hobby ► Singen / Musizieren
• Schlagworte: Composers • Diaries • Faber Finds • Letters • musicology • wwi
• ISBN-13: 9780571309443 / 9780571309443