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PROGRAM NOTES by Klay and Karen Woodworth Jean Sibelius When Jean Sibelius was born, Finland was just emerging as an independent nation. Finland had become a Swedish Duchy in 1556 and was annexed by Russia in 1808. After annexation, the country slowly began to find a distinctive literary and artistic voice based on a reclaimed past. The Kalevala, Finland’s national epic, was published by the influential Finnish philologist Elias Lönnrott in 1835, and Finnish became an official government language in 1863 (even if many of the middle and upper class households continued to speak Swedish). It was only as an adult, and largely through the influence of his in-laws, that Jean Sibelius rose to become the musical hero of his nation. As a child, young “Janne” loved to improvise music. At the age of fifteen he set his sights on becoming a violin virtuoso. He progressed quickly on the instrument, and formed a trio with his older sister on piano and his younger brother on cello. When he entered the University at Helsinki, his violin teacher labeled him a genius. Sibelius found, however, that he could not overcome debilitating stage fright. He did not finish the violin course, switching instead to composition. His compositions were well-received while he was at the university and after graduation he went on to study in Berlin and Vienna. There he discovered a great wealth of musical repertoire that Helsinki had simply been unable to provide. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, in particular, coupled with the traditional sounds of a prominent Finnish folk singer, spurred him to create his first great success. The symphony (or tone poem) Kullervo, 1892, drew on the Kalevala for inspiration and text and struck a nerve with the nationalist leanings of many Finns. Sibelius turned to additional Kalevala legends in 1893 for The Swan of Tuonela and the other three pieces that would join The Swan as the Four Legends (completed in 1895). The composer’s travels in 1893–94 are just as important as his embrace of Finnish nationalism. These years found Sibelius attending performances of many of Wagner’s operas at Bayreuth. Absorbing that master’s music turned him away from the operatic stage but also completely suffused his orchestral palette and formal ideals. This influence can be heard in the languidly beautiful Swan. The composer’s note to the score identifies the setting as “Tuonela, the Kingdom of Death … surrounded by a broad river of black water and rapid current, in which the Swan of Tuonela glides in majestic fashion and sings.” The swan’s voice sounds in the English horn gliding above the shimmering orchestration. Daniel M. Grimley (The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius) cites a direct influence from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, but The Swan more generally reflects the depth and warmth of all of Wagner’s water music. Sibelius wrote Finlandia in 1899. The turn of the century saw him touring Europe with the Helsinki Philharmonic. He gave up teaching in 1901 and began sketching the widely popular second symphony, which had its premiere in 1902. Sibelius gained a firm place in today’s orchestral repertoire with these two works, but he owes a certain amount of his international fame to a miniature—the Valse triste. The sadness of this lush, minor-key waltz can be attributed to nostalgia. Written in 1903 as part of the incidental music for a play called Kuolema (Death), the waltz accompanied a scene in which a woman recalls a ball from her youth. Like Dvořák’s Humoresque, Valse triste was played in parlors, tea rooms, and saloons around the world in many different arrangements. Sibelius reportedly came to loath the music, principally because he had signed over the publishing rights in an extremely adverse arrangement and saw no financial gain from its popularity. The other miniature on today’s program was completed in 1904. The Romance in C major seems to show a Russian influence in its flowing chordal sonorities and plucked bass lines. Sibelius wanders regularly in the piece from the given key center to E minor, a trip that again seems to evoke nostalgia. Thirteen years separate the original and the orchestral versions of Rakastava (The Lover). Sibelius first wrote Rakastava in 1893 for male chorus using texts taken from a collection of lyrics called Kanteletar which was, like the Kalevala, brought to modern audiences by Lönnrot. Two subsequent arrangements before 1900 saw the addition of strings and women’s voices. In 1911 Sibelius revisited Rakastava and rewrote it for strings and percussion. 1911 was also the year Sibelius composed his Fourth Symphony—a work that was perplexing to both performers and audiences when released and that remains quite striking in its introversion. The very accessible suite Rakastava engages the emotions as much as the fourth symphony does the intellect. Through three movements (“The Lover,” “The Way of the Lover,” and “Goodnight – Farewell”), Sibelius weaves a musical narrative without the drama of his tone poems. He calls on his idiomatic symphonic style to provide contrast to folk-melody material as we follow the lover from the throes of infatuation to the grief of loss. The incidental music to Pelléas et Mélisande was composed in 1905. Over the years, Maurice Maeterlinck’s Symbolist masterpiece also inspired incidental music by Gabriel Fauré, an opera by Claude Debussy, and a tone poem by Arnold Schoenberg, but Sibelius’s treatment is very much his own. Sibelius composed the music to accompany a production of the play’s Swedish translation (by Bertel Gripenberg) staged at the Swedish Theater in Helsinki. The composer led the pit orchestra for most of the play’s fifteen performances. As it was written for theater orchestra, the scoring is relatively simple: strings, three percussionists, and woodwinds (with the flute player doubling on piccolo and the oboist doubling on English horn). He wrote seven musical interludes, background music for two scenes with little dialogue, and a song (presented without vocalist in the standard orchestral suite) that, stylistically, fit well with the first and second symphonies. Sibelius seems to have read Pelléas primarily as a legend, but he also clearly understood that atmospherics far outweigh plot in Maeterlinck. The play is set in the mythical country of Allemonde, a standard fairytale realm with a castle and gardens, pastures with babbling brooks, and access to the sea. The characters interact without creating a story line and the audience is left to reflect on the allegory the drama presents. Sibelius focused most of his musical attention on the female lead, Mélisande. Her character is defined by a slow waltz featuring the English horn, she is portrayed at the spinning wheel in a section featuring the violas, the song “The three blind sisters” is for her, and the musical score ends with her death. Otherwise, Sibelius provides the sounds of fairytale nature: a sunrise, the sea, a lovely waltzing interlude by a brook, and a pastorale following the words, “What admirable harvest weather!” The concert suite Sibelius created out of the incidental music has remained as popular as his tone poems and shows that he could gain useful inspiration beyond his nationalist sources. As it happened, Sibelius wrote almost all of the music for which he is famous before 1915 (the five pieces on this afternoon’s concert all fall comfortably within two decades of work). His final great tone poem, Tapiola, was completed in 1925; he composed incidental music for a Copenhagen production of The Tempest in 1926; and he officially retired in 1929. The two world wars were hard on Finland and Sibelius felt the deprivations personally. It is completely possible that he found the world he once knew had gone and he had nothing to say to the new one. Sibelius continued to entertain friends and professional acquaintances at his home in the woods of Järvenpää just outside of Helsinki. He strung them all along with hints of an eighth symphony, generally deflecting requests for a look at the score with the proverb, “One doesn’t sell the bearskin until one has shot the bear.” Ultimately, Jean Sibelius was felled by a cerebral hemorrhage and his family had to announce with regret that there were no unpublished pieces waiting to be discovered. 2007 Klayton Woodworth and Karen M. Woodworth
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