07 December 2015
Surrounded by Nimbus gnarled Eigenbrötlerei and also of his wings: Jean Sibelius, 1930. Photo: EPD
Musical World Heritage: to 150 . birthday of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius United on 8 December. Jean Sibelius is one forth to those in 1900 as numerous major composers who stood between tradition and modernity and can be assigned to any direction clearly.
From his Nimbus He is a loner and gnarled wood sprite. Jean Sibelius enjoys the fame of “national composer”, a music-ethnic founding figure, quite undivided. Nevertheless, cultural situation and position is very similar to the position that embodies Bedrich Smetana in Czech music. Both small but enormously music-savvy folks who were for centuries outvoted by larger neighbors (the Czechs from Austria, the Finns from Sweden and Russia), found mainly in the music a powerful symbol of their ethnic identity – not to say that they (the operas of Smetana, Finland Sibelius symphonies Bohemia) instrumentalized the music to their development.
understood that both artists hardly pursued by itself, and from the very beginning a confident-national program, but rather could be pushing to go in interaction with their reception. Early concise tone poem “Finlandia” (still from the period of Czarist occupation) paints with her combative-spirited attack part and the hymn-solemn closing turn the course of a relatively happy statehood as it “prophetic” from. As it stands today, Finland has to like a more relaxed attitude than its counterpart the Czech Republic.
Smetana and Sibelius have in common that they, at first German and Swedish speaking, the vernacular of their countries learned only as adults. The support of the typical Swedish name Sibelius still got also the name Johan Julius Christian – Swedish goes Nimmer’s. The awkward first name Troika was contracted in the nom de plume “Jean” what might yet light raises the latent cosmopolitan and urban orientation of the artist from the southern Finnish town of Hämeenlinna, which is not too early to studies in Berlin and Vienna opened (at the then very famous addresses Robert Fuchs and Karl Goldmark). After his return to him a lifelong state pension was soon awarded, which opened him a carefree existence as a composer (ie a diametrically different career, as she is portrayed in Knut Hamsun’s novel “Hunger”).
To have to turn of the century Sibelius have made the impression of an over sensitive, prone to depression metropolitan artist to his surroundings. Less national hero as mentally funky Decadent à la Rachmaninoff. The 1904 retreat took place in the Waldidyll Järvenpää (the very name suggests lakes wealth) had somewhat Stylized – Sibelius’s international reputation shot straight as an arrow into the air, especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries. But he signaled perhaps by far an almost tragic early resignation. Although Sibelius reached a ripe old age – he died in 1957 with almost 92 years – but in the last third of his life he has virtually nothing more composed.
It came to the legend that he tirelessly working on his 8th Symphony, the ultimate after reverent expectation masterpiece – which also bare torso-like epiphany came. The inflated by the Fama total Schreibblockade reaped many also Hohn (Adorno); in the Central European musical life Sibelius had without this severe. Even filled with German-Austrian tradition nonconformists among conductors such as René Leibowitz and Michael Gielen could not do anything with him.
Who dignity form the “Symphonie” anyway a “wholly German subject” is that experienced it perhaps as a narcissistic injury that then on the European periphery (Adorno talks indelicate of “backwater”) a symphonic oeuvre of unprecedented nature and hardly ausschöpfbarem spiritual wealth created. In exactly one quarter of a century (1899-1924), a cycle of seven symphonies, each of which reveals strikingly, other facets emerged with elements of modernity are reflected personal and original.
It starts with a first, the late Romantic tone seems more “Russian” inspired “German” as. The Second (1901) undertakes, bucolic and folk tones to convert it into a somewhat strained apotheosis – so to speak, a Finnish Beethoveniade according to the principle “per aspera ad astra”, what would be here about to translate “from the countryside-morally the collective triumph” , In the third and sixth Sibelius realized his specific type of anti-romantic classicism, a “white” music away from subjective expression compulsory. In the fifth the apotheotic final intention affects far more broken than in the second: the separated by pauses final chords suggest that Sibelius could proceed very äquilibristisch. The hymnists as eccentrics.
Formal acted consistently unacademically Sibelius. The symphonies were not, as in Bruckner and Mahler, monumentalizes; characterizing charging occurs rather inside the motivic instinctual life. The seventh such acts in their cyclopean-movement pressed together as the late opera scores Janácek. The highlight of the complex symphonic work undoubtedly constitutes the Fourth (1910-11), in which auratischem beginning (swinging Tritonusspannung) a characteristic interval of Finnish folk melody formation, the augmented fourth, is collected at the decisive constructive element. The disturbing two-part of the Scherzo has already ahead on an embossed by decay final, which raises seemingly nuptial with festive glockenspiel accompaniment, but then ends in a dilapidated A Minor.
From his Nimbus ago he’s a loner and gnarled wood sprite. Jean Sibelius. Photo: EPD
Like Dvorák presented Sibelius the corpus of his symphonies a nearly equivalent to symphonic poems or program symphonies to the side – an indication that the mainly “German “factional dispute Brahms / Liszt not impacted any longer. While Sibelius decidedly as “absolute” music conceived his symphonies, he moved for Programmsymphonik especially the undeveloped since the second half of the 19th century (and of the Swedish-speaking Elias Lönnrot newly sealed) “Kalevala” -Epos zoom: With its Gestalten- and Episode wealth it covers a whole Finnish mythology. The late “Tapiola” -Tondichtung is also compositional technique in this context particularly noteworthy as an example of an almost unsurpassable motive economy that builds a wide set architecture from a tiny cell.
A different kind of fascination exudes the Violin Concerto (1903) from one of the most popular of its kind and the most played Sibelius counting – thanks to a schmerzsüß burning melody and an intoxicating designed, also unglatt- shaggy sides pointing virtuoso solo part. Chamber music, piano pieces, songs not lacking in Sibelius’s oeuvre, but are of lesser brilliance. Significant stage works (apart from some incidental music, among other things, to Maeterlinck’s “Pelleas and Melisande”) he did not write though. But in his programmsymphonischen “Kalevala” -Vertonungen he treated the Finnish idioms – emphasis is always on the first syllable – so that one can also grant him a pioneer for the later Olle Finnish opera composing.
Jean Sibelius is one of those in 1900 as numerous major composers who stood between tradition and modernity and no direction could be assigned clearly. This made them fluctuate strangely in the validity of the following. Today you could see it the other way round. The ambiguous Resolute, in Yesterday rooted and yet today and tomorrow in itself Absorbing, are perhaps the most interesting, containing the fundus equal several times. By some strangeness and fashioned (about a sometimes stretching pathos) you should at Sibelius be deterred. It has long been the monument-like “national composer” became the musical World Heritage
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