Phonograph Monthly Review, Vol. 5, No. 4 (1931-01)

January, 1931, Vol. V. No. 4 115 But to the music. The first symphony dates from 1899, the composer’s thirty-fourth year; the second from 1902. The E minor work is composed in the older manner, a summing up of the symphonic chain of development of Brahms and Tchaikowsky. While he has not yet found his own inimitable voice and style, their foreshadowings stamp the symphony with an unmistakable personality and individual force. Si- belius is more obviously the nationalist here than in his later works where he attains universality through the perfect ex- pression of himself. The fact that he is a Finn colors his music because it has colored him, but to look for literal or even quasi-folk material, to paint idyllic pictures of blonde girls “sitting amid the simple flowers in the white northern sunshine,” to evoke rustic scenes of the land of a Thousand Lakes, is to put limitations to the music that restrict its far larger and more important implications. Such pretty pictures are to be found in the music if one looks for them. Sibelius may possibly have had some of them in mind when he com- posed (Schneevoight, the conductor, gravely states the com- poser’s intention in the second symphony of depicting the quiet pastoral life of the Finns, the awakening of national feeling, etc.), but that is merely the soil, the fancies, from which the music has grown. The completed artistic creation is greater than any of its parts. It must be considered in its entirety, as an entity, tinted perhaps but not shaped by petty programmatic intentions and local color. Sibelius is an unsurpassed thinker in orchestral terms. No talented orchestrator could achieve the effects attained even in the first symphony, for as the composer is quoted above, the music does not exist abstractly, but only in the particular timbres of which it is part and parcel. He has mastered ar- chitectural problems with a firm grasp of permanent aesthetic principles expressed always in a distinctively original man- ner. In the first symphony we have the broader flights of the classical school. In the second he begins to eschew the grand manner, worn so convincingly and genuinely, yet always of potential artistic danger. He gets to closer grips with the soil, is not afraid to speak in the homely terse elliptic dia- lect of his own language. In the third he has eliminated everything uncharacteristic and redundant. If he is often epigrammatic, puzzling, there is always meat to be found if one puts thought to follow indefatigably the thread of his discourse. But the broader, more tragic and legendary mood of the first symphony presents the best first approach to the man. The nobility and passion of the work, the long swell of its sonorous melodies, the savage propulsive power of its rhythms, are as exciting and arousing as any pages in symphonic litera- ture. The beginning is commanding: a melancholy rhapsodic clarinet solo above a mysterious palpitation on the timpani. The bold declamatory principal theme bursts out on the violins and one is carried away on a surge of sound that sweeps with mounting force to the very end of the movement, and in a larger rise and fall, to the end of symphony itself. The episodic material never relaxes the music’s tension, nor interrups its torrential flow. The contrasts are ever so deftly pointed: the energetic first theme seems to be suspended, hinted at occasionally in the accompanying rhythms, as the piquant second theme (part 2) sparkles above the surging tonal background, which in its turn gradually assumes inde- pendent significance. Its plunging rhythms gain greater mom- entum. There are fierce wild cries from acrid wood winds and brass. Chromatic scales cross and clash. Part 3 opens with this stormy cross fire of figures and timbres, above which the heartful song of the main theme suddenly soars, and is obscured fitfully. The savage accents and resonant tone quali- ties are admirably caught (as indeed they are throughout both symphonies) in the recording. A return of the plung- ing rhythms and a rude proclamation from the brass sub- side into a groaning passage in the basses, and the sudden, dramatic ending. The slow movement begins serenely with a bardic theme that gives over to a grave fugato begun by the bassoons, and in turn merges into more passionate passages. There is one of the sudden changes that appear so often in Sibelius’ music, and a quiet pastoral theme on the horn (dolce far niente) with a chirping wood wind and harp accompaniment, breaks the stormy mood for a moment (near the end of part 4), only to make way again for snatches of the first theme, now greatly changed and envigored, over wild chromatics. A cli- max is approached, but with a characteristic elision, Sibelius breaks off and returns directly to the first theme in its origin- al form, poignantly restated. The scherzo (part 6) rough-humored and gusty, with an energetic motto theme announced directly on the kettle drums with tremendous gusto, and tossed about spiritedly by the rest of the orchestra, until a sudden long-drawn chord on the horns, brings in the tranquil trio, purest Sibelius, with inef- fable masculine sweetness in its rising flute phrases above the softly chanted horn theme, and the telling use of pauses. The scherzo returns with the motto theme first taken up by various wood winds and then thundered out by the drums. The finale (quasi una fantasia) begins andante, with an in- tense version of the clarinet theme at the beginning of the symphony. There is some fine acidulous commentary in the wood winds. Then after hints in the strings an agitated theme begins in the clarinets and bassoons, becoming more and more ejaculatory and sharply rhythmed, until it reached a climactic passages in the violins alone (end of part 7). The next side begins with the quiet introduction to the broadly flowing songful second theme, sonorously played by the strings in their lower registers. Inevitably the yeasty fermentation of wisps of melody and rhythms break up the smooth flow into a strenuous torrent of sound, interrupted occasionally by a very sharply rhythmed declamatory passage in the brass. Again the second theme appears (beginning of part 10) now tenderly sung by the wood winds, and soon restated son- orously by the strings now in an upper register. (The falling inflections at the ends of phrases are very characteristic of Sibelius’ melodies as a whole.) The agitato passages are en- tered into more reluctantly this time; the declamatory theme in the brass makes its last exhortation, and the ending is again swift and dramatic. Sibelius, like Bach and Mozart, has the golden knowledge of exactly when to stop. Just as the first notes of the E minor symphony evoke the tragic grandeur that pervades the work as a whole, so the opening measures of the second symphony,—with their rustl- ing hesitant strings, and the cheerful chirp of oboes and clarinets, caught up and carried over into the long drawn echo- ing of the horns,—limn the simpler but more personal back- ground for the drama of country folk and country feelings. It is convenient to term the work a pastoral symphony, but the “home sounds, of cattle, and ‘saeters’ ”, the “lake in Fin- land surrounded by hills,” that some critics find in this work are like the Finnish maidens in the andante of the first sym- phony: pleasant musings of the listener who drenches his half-consciousness with the music, rather than sternly grasp- ing and absorbing it. The drama here is less obvious than in the earlier work and more restricted, yet for those very rea- sons more intense. Here we are not carried away so much as we are turned inward. Through the music our feelings are incredibly sharpened to discern the touching insight and capacity for tenderness of country people (like Isak of Growth of the Soil ) whose apparently stolid and unseeing lives have stored up the poignant consciousness of their farm lands and rivers and hills which only a profound genius like that of Sibelius or Knut Hamsun can make articulate. The music starts and stops, expressive phrases in the strings are answered by brief improvisatory songs in the wood winds. A characteristic swirling string passage quickens the music’s pulse, until the strumming figure of the begin- ning returns, and above it the second theme forcefully stated by flutes, clarinets, and oboes. This theme, with its typical agitated figure in eighths and a sudden descent on the inter- val of the fifth, does not assume independent significance un- til about an inch in on part 2, where it is stated broadly and dramatically on the strings. Both themes, but principally