Sibelius’s Fifth: Romantic musical language condensed into new forms

Here is a fine performance of the finale of Sibelius’s 5th. Esa-Pekka Salomen conducts the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra:

Interesting how in this performance a large painting is unveiled (Turner?) at the point where the calm background theme that begins in the horns reaches a climax at around 2:10.

Also interesting is how the beginning of this movement is reminiscent of certain contrapuntal sequences in the Prelude to Die Meistersinger-a whirlwind of strings that fades to reveal a “nostalgic”, calm theme on horns. This horn theme doesn’t function as a contrasting second subject as in the Classical and Romantic symphonies. It is more like discovering the source of the entire symphony or at least the basis for what the strings were doing at the start.

I believe that Sibelius used the most expressive elements of his favorite Romantic Composers to create new forms that reflected the soul of a human being in the midst of the impending European doom. Like Schoenberg, Sibelius’s music is a logical development from Romanticism which involved taking the most extreme expressive “cells” of Romanticism and fusing these extremes into new concentrated forms. What was once a climax of a musical phrase or section in the older works, is now a building block or basic unit in the 20th century and leads to more extreme climatic cells.

Unlike the later works of Schoenberg, Sibelius was able to achieve this concentration of forces without abandoning tonality; however, Sibelius’s tonality serves to make his cells more immediately recognizable to the ear. His break-through, characteristic tonality doesn’t serve to create linear dramatic forms like the almost rhetorical argument ofBeethoven, rather Sibelius “traditional” harmony serves to link his evolving cells together in a way that is more audible than Schoenberg’s tone-row which is very difficult to follow. 12 tone music both reduces the “expressive cell” to its smallest size (one note or one chord) and isolates that cell so it’s existence has no relation to any other sound in the sound space except by the ghostly, shadowy “row” which is extremely difficult to perceive.

So Sibelius gains comprehensibility but still allows the listener the small luxury of using intellect based on musical memory to understand his works while Schoenberg removes all the helpful remnants of the past and leaves the listener totally self reliant in the present. So Schoenberg is the composer of interior, existensial darkness while Sibelius technique could look outward and see the world’s darkness. In Tapiola, the dark, cancerous Schoenbergian self is reflected into nature. Tapiola proves that Sibelius’s music can explore the absolute extremes of 20th century angst. The miracle is that this music achieves a higher level of self knowledge and may be the basis for human regeneration as the ego begins to recognize that its perceptions and conceptions of nature are actually part of nature itself. It is this uniting of the self with nature that contains the seeds of true planetary healing. Tapiola heralds a new way of human thinking that incorporates and transcends the dessicated rationalism of abstract science.

Thanks to “Counter Critic” for the heads-up on a long article on Sibelius by Alex Ross published in the New Yorker.