Sun Forest Lake: The Symphonies & Tone Poems of Jean Sibelius
by David Vernon
Published 2024
505 pages including appendices
ISBN: 978-1-7396599-4-3 (paperback); 978-1-7396599-5-0 (eBook)
Candle Row Press
In 2022, I reviewed a most interesting and perceptive book by David Vernon in which he discussed the eleven symphonies of Gustav Mahler – Das Lied von der Erde was rightly included, as was the Tenth symphony which Maher left unfinished at his death. If I remember correctly, I read some social media posts at around that time which indicated that he planned to write a comparable book about the Sibelius symphonies. Other projects intervened, including a book about the string quartets of Beethoven (review). Now, though, the Sibelius book has arrived and I’m delighted to find that the scope has extended beyond the seven numbered symphonies to include consideration not only of Kullervo but also of the tone poems.
Across the fifteen chapters of this book, Vernon explores the seven symphonies and eleven tone poems; in addition, and very rightly, he gives due weight to Kullervo andthe Lemminkäinen Legends, noting that “Sibelius himself often claimed to have written nine symphonies, including Kullervo and Lemminkäinen”. Furthermore, he devotes a chapter, as we shall see, to a crucial late work that is neither symphony nor tone poem; and there’s a final chapter in which he discusses the never-to-be-completed projected Eighth symphony and describes the composer’s last three decades. But the book is more than just a discussion of these pieces. Vernon also details the composer’s life and times and, to varying degrees, he refers to a good number of other compositions in Sibelius’s extensive and varied catalogue of works.
Before discussing any of the major works which from the spine of this book, David Vernon gives us an excellent biographical sketch of Sibelius’s formative years. This includes useful discussion of the composer’s early pieces, most of them chamber works. All this is vital in order to set into context the series of hugely significant orchestral works of Sibelius’s maturity.
I was delighted to find that Kullervo gets significant coverage. I well remember Paavo Berglund’s pioneering recording of the work with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. I pounced on it when my local library acquired a copy but I failed to appreciate it properly at first (probably the use of the Finnish language in the third and fifth movements didn’t help). Eventually, I came to see it as an important composition in its own right and one which is crucial in our understanding of Sibelius. Clearly, David Vernon takes the same view. His essay on Kullervo is excellent, not least because he’s very informative on the literary sources and the contemporary patriotic context, He goes so far as to say that “Finland did not declare independence from Russia on 6 December 1917. It did so on 28 April 1892, the day Jean Sibelius’s…Kullervo was given its world premiere”. That’s a big claim, but Vernon is very persuasive. It’s a great shame that, after its initial successful performances, Kullervo spent so many decades in the shadows; its re-emergence through the work of Berglund and others considerably deepened our appreciation of Sibelius.
Vernon offers a good survey of early works such as En Saga, Spring Song and The Wood Nymph. I learned much from his chapter on Lemminkäinen, Four Legends from the Kalevala, not least through the way he draws out the links to the aborted opera The Building of the Boat, on which Sibelius worked in 1893 and 1894.
As well as giving plenty of insights into the literary associations with Sibelius’ music – just as he did with Mahler – Vernon is equally good on the historical context. That comes out, of course, when he considers overtly patriotic works such as Kullervo and En Saga. But he also makes the reader aware of the timing of the unveiling of the First symphony. Vernon emphasises that the symphony’s premiere took place at a time of heightened tension between the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland and Imperial Russia. A specific event was the publication in 1899 of the Tsar’s February Manifesto, just a few weeks before the symphony was unveiled. The Manifesto curtailed Finnish autonomy in many ways. Of course, the decree itself could not have influenced the composition of the symphony – it came too late for that – but Vernon argues that it must have influenced the way the work’s first audience heard their country’s leading composer’s first abstract symphony: “the work stood as a formidable allegory for Finnish resistance against continued Russian subjugation”. This chapter contains a good example of the way in which David Vernon can sometimes make points that are provocative. Writing of the way in which the symphony’s opening clarinet solo is brought back on the violins at the start of the finale he says this: “The theme’s re-emergence is histrionic, hyperbolic, almost comic – but distressingly so, like a confused old general wheeled out by politicians for their own sordid purposes. The theme is war-weary, tired, the memories of previous campaigns seen now from a contemporary, and darker, perspective”. I must admit, I don’t hear that powerful musical utterance in quite the same way – and I’ve deliberately listened to a couple of recordings just to check – but that’s not to say that I’m “right” and Vernon is “wrong”; everyone hears and responds to music in different ways. The key point is that Vernon has made me think about the music anew, as he does elsewhere in the book, and that can only be a good thing.
The symphonies and tone poems aren’t discussed in artificial isolation. The text contains plenty of references, even if only in passing or in footnotes, to other works, not least songs and solo piano pieces. A number, such as the Eight Songs, Op 57 (1909) receive quite detailed treatment. He considers briefly the Violin Concerto and in so doing he shows how the composition – and especially the revision – of this piece fitted into Sibelius’s never-ending development and growth as a composer. As he comments, the concerto is “an orchestral masterpiece that simultaneously developed Sibelius’s formal techniques in compression and expression while also calling an end to the more idealistic public style he had hitherto explored”.
The Third symphony is, perhaps, underrated by some, even now. (In passing, I’m always intrigued that it was the only one of the seven symphonies which Herbert von Karajan, a distinguished Sibelian, never recorded; indeed, I’m not sure he ever performed the work in concert.) Vernon clearly – and rightly – thinks highly of it; he sums it up as “a far-reaching and revolutionary as well as a marvellously original and convincing achievement”. The Fourth symphony was composed in the aftermath of a period of serious ill health which culminated in (successful) surgery for throat cancer in 1908. As a consequence, Sibelius foreswore both tobacco and alcohol for several years, including during the time he was writing the Fourth. Vernon notes that this extended period of abstinence helped both his marriage and his mental concentration – and therefore his work. He is greatly admiring of the gaunt masterpiece that is the Fourth symphony, about which he writes with particular eloquence. He digs below the forbidding surface of the music to find other emotions and throws down something of a challenge to listeners: “We have to probe a little further. For all its darkness and despair, this symphony has a discreet dignity and understated courage, a lilting self-confidence, to go with its audacity and austerity.”
Mention of Sibelius’s lifelong weakness for – indeed, dependence on – alcohol and tobacco reminds me that the heroine of Vernon’s book is Aino, Sibelius’s extraordinarily patient wife. He doesn’t flinch from referring to the composer’s lengthy alcohol-fuelled binges and makes it clear that Aino must have suffered significantly as a result. Yet she loyally stood by Sibelius for sixty-five years of marriage.
There is an excellent discussion of the Fifth symphony and its evolution from the original four-movement version, completed in haste (1915) to the magnificent three-movement structure we know today. As Vernon says, a book such as this is not the place for a detailed exposition of the revisions but he gives the reader just enough information. As he notes, Sibelius would probably be “appalled” that his first thoughts on the symphony were in the public domain through Osmo Vänskä’s BIS recording. I agree with his view that listening to the original version can be “a strangely disorientating experience”. Nonetheless, I feel that recording gives us a precious and significant insight into Sibelius’s evolution of the score. Notwithstanding his concluding judgement that the Fifth “is the divine majesty of the world, at its zenith and in the noontide sun”, he very rightly draws attention to the darker countenance of parts of this masterpiece.
I was intrigued by Vernon’s suggestion that when he came to compose the enigmatic, elusive Sixth, Sibelius may have inserted the bar lines only after writing the music. That freedom enabled the composer to generate “a symphony of suspended animation, time floating amid a freedom that also produces tension”. He’s greatly admiring of the Seventh symphony which, together with the Fourth, he regards as the Finnish master’s greatest achievements.
I mentioned near the start of this review that David Vernon includes a chapter on a work that is neither symphony nor symphonic poem. This is the incidental music, Op 109, which Sibelius composed for a production of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Vernon recognises the stature of this music and writes about it with great enthusiasm and understanding. Given his academic background in literature, it’s no surprise that his exposition of this incidental music is firmly rooted in the play itself. Sibelius later fashioned two orchestral suites from this music but the original score takes over an hour to play and runs to no fewer than thirty-six numbers, upon each one of which Vernon briefly comments. He demonstrates how the music fits into the symphonic music that Sibelius had in his mind at this time. (I think one could argue that the depiction of a storm which serves as the Overture is arguably even more searing in its intensity than the terrifying storm that he whipped up in Tapiola.) That towering, forbidding masterpiece is the last piece that Vernon considers in detail and he delivers a fine chapter on this extraordinary work. There follows a valuable chapter which is primarily concerned with Sibelius’s projected Eighth symphony, a work which he eventually realised was beyond him; he’d effectively written finis to his symphonic career with the Seventh. This final chapter of the book is important, though, because Vernon discusses the struggles with the Eighth and also details for us the work which Sibelius continued to do for a number of years as he gradually withdrew from public life and active music-making. As Vernon comments early on in the book “the infamous ‘silence of Järvenpää’ is both a little misleading and somewhat unfair: can composers not retire, like architects or accountants, barristers or baristas?”
I’m conscious that in appraising this book much of what I have written concerns the symphonies. This should not be taken as any kind of implicit suggestion that what David Vernon has to say about the symphonic poems is any less important and illuminating; such is not the case.
Every chapter ends with a short analysis of each work discussed therein. Vernon is a perceptive and admirably descriptive analyst He has a good turn of phrase too. He describes Pohjola’s Daughter thus: “His symphonic fantasy is a journey into pain and humiliation, but it is also a voyage of self-discovery, a mythical vision of acquiescence, acceptance and contingency, with isolation and seclusion the great teachers”. Writing of the Sixth, he says this: “Caught between the solar intensity of the Fifth and the stellar eternity of the Seventh … [the D minor symphony is] all moonshine on a dark lake”. My favourite, though, comes in his essay on the Seventh. Vernon notes the radicalism of this symphony yet also its development of tradition. He comments that in this symphony its creator aimed “to augment classical ideals even as it also unobtrusively seeks to destabilise them – it is what we might call a ‘Trojan Norse’” (my italics).
There are two valuable appendices, both entitled ‘Further listening’. The first is a succinct guide to recordings of the music of Sibelius with particular reference, of course, to the orchestral music discussed in this book. The second is subtitled ‘Beyond Sibelius’. This is a short guide to the music of twenty composers who followed Sibelius, ranging from some of Sibelius’s contemporaries to several composers of today. With one exception – the Icelandic composer, Anna Thorvaldsdottir – all are Scandinavian,
Though the title of the book suggests that it is a discussion of Jean Sibelius’s chief orchestral works it is definitely more than that. David Vernon offers us a perceptive biographical and musical study of this great composer built around the framework of those important works. Carefully considered, cogently argued and elegantly written, this is a study of Finland’s great composer which is provocative at times but which presents us with an enlightening and stimulating portrait of the man and his music. I learned much from it and emerged from reading it with a greater appreciation of the works considered within it. As the distinguished Sibelius interpreter, Sakari Oramo puts it in his foreword: “David Vernon’s book helps everyone, no matter how previously informed, to find their own way into Sibelius’s extraordinary world.”
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