(This is a repeat of a broadcast from December 2011)
Sibelius
(To Mike Mullen)
Of the swan: he sits on his Father’s knee;
With a power of lifelong resonance,A short-lived man will stay with him only
In showing him the picture of a swan.
Just this recollection will soon be there,
With the music of strange isolation
Candidature’s cries excite forever.
The swan of the underworld swims and sings
On Tuoni’s river as on the lake, seen
By him, or soars between two worlds, its wings
Spreading and working on air, and its keen,
Weak-toned call is made hope in art’s reply
To loneliness and the child’s unheard cry.
(copyright Mike Burrows 02/12)
Intro: Runic Song
Interrupted By War-music
Hullo, this is Classical Break and I’m
Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme is a
tribute to the nationalist Finnish Composer, Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), whose
birthday falls on December The Eighth (two days after Finnish Independence
Day). We’ll be playing music inspired by
Finnish national folk-poetry, primarily by the epic, Kalevala. Inspired is the word. Sibelius dedicated his life to what he saw as
the heritage of a proud people denied nationhood for some six hundred years. His own life was mythologized by the Finns
and Western world until it came to seen as as potent a symbol of determination by
self and environment as anything to be found in Kalevala, enchanting in its
stories of endeavour, legend and magic.
You have just heard Runic Song Interrupted
By War-music, a movement from the Karelia Music, written near the outset of
Sibelius’ career, in 1893: it was
composed for a festival of folk-poetry and music held by Viborg University,
specifically to accompany tableaux vivants of significant events in
Finnish history. The province of
Karelia, most of which now lies within the Russian Federation, is held by Finns
to be the cradle of Finnish culture and
nationalism. The chant heard here is a representation
of the peculiar, pentatonic melodic patterns of Kalevala-singing, in which two
performers tell a story by statement and reply.
Kalevala is written in lines of a trochaic rhythm familiar from
Longfellow’s poem Hiawatha, which was written in imitation of it. Sibelius
was educated at a Finnish Duchy Grammar School, where he learned Finnish - his
first language was Swedish - and first read folk-poetry.
Now, here is Laulu Lemminkaiselle, Song To
Lemminkainen. This is a Spring poem,
dedicated to a journey made by Lemminkainen, an important character in Kalevala,
and often compared to Don Juan! This
choral and orchestral work was an offshoot of a vivid group of tone-poems,
The Four Legends, completed in 1896, a colouring in musical terms of
stories about this character.
Originally, it formed a purely orchestral passage found towards the
close of the last legend, Lemminkainnen’s Homecoming. Sibelius excised the passage and modified it
to create the new work, completed in the same year. By this time, Sibelius had become a master of
homophonic Kalevalan singing wedded to techniques of Late Romantic Classical music.
Track Two:
Laulu Lemminkaiselle
This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM,
and I’m Rupert Kirkham. We are
presenting a tribute to the Finnish Composer, Jean Sibelius, whose birthday
falls on December The Eighth. The Kullervo Symphony was Sibelius’ first large-scale
orchestral and choral work, for baritone and soprano soloists as well as choir
and orchestra. Massively and powerfully
scored, it was completed and performed in 1892.
In every sense, it is an extraordinary achievement. In five complex movements, the third and
fifth of which are choral, and lasting about 70 minutes, it was later
withdrawn by its composer, but never
revized.Its style was unique in 1892.
The Symphony was written the year after he first heard Kalevalan
folk-singing by a mistress of the art, Larin Paraske. It is a work of instinctive inspiration and
imagination as well as study, a unique synthesis of late Romantic grandeur and
pictorialism and ancient music usually played on a five-string zither.
Kullervo was the dispossessed hero, his inheritance
seized and Parents murdered in his childhood.
The Symphony tells his story, culminating in the overwhelming
finale, where Kullervo commits
suicide: the baritone asks his sword if,
now that he has revenged his parents, he can use it to kill himself!). Sibelius’ elemental imagination is fully
displayed in depicting the wooded scene of Kullervo’s Death - where he
unknowingly committed incest with his sister..
The sister, discovering afterwards that he was her brother, despaired
and threw herself into a nearby cataract.
Incidentally, their act of love in the third movement is represented with amazing verism for the
time. The symphony’s end is dominated by
a blazing motif of fate first heard in the first movement.
Track Three, Kullervo’s Death
Lemminkainen’s Homecoming was composed in 1896. In
the definitive form found four years later it is a locus classicus of Sibelius
orchestral style, particularly his mastery of pacing, economic thematic
consequence and judicious scoring. After
many adventures concluding in his being torn to pieces and thrown into the
river of hell and his reanimation by his mother, Lemminkainen returns
exultantly to Kalevala - the domain of the national patriarch, Kaleva - from the
land of the North, Pohjola. Sibelius
never wrote anything with more élan, humour and understated but true nobility. It has real sweep. As he himself observed, as Finns should, it
wears its cap on the side of its head.
Track Four:
Lemminkainen’s Homecoming
The tone-poem, Pohjola’s Daughter is
a work of Sibelius’ maturity, written in 1906, as he was venturing into a new
region in his musical thinking. It tells
of how the Maiden of the North, who sits spinning thread above the rainbow, is
wooed by the elderly musician-wizard, Vainomoinen. In mockery, she sets him various impossible
tasks to prove his suitability as a husband, which he accomplishes easily by
his magic: until she challenges him to make
a boat from the fragments of her spinning-wheel (a spinning-wheel gloriously
portrayed in one of the themes of the tone-poem). He strikes his shin with his axe and departs,
unable to stanch the bleeding! There is
a Wagnerian quality to the harmony at this point, but physical pain is most effectively
expressed! Incredibly, Sibelius
originally intended this piece of organic musical argument and seeming
pictorial exactness to tell the story of the Daughter of The Air - Luonnotar -
who gave birth to creation.
Track Five:
Pohjola’s Daughter
Luonnotar
is a nine-minute scena for soprano and orchestra written for Aino Acté, and was
first performed at the Three Choirs Festival in 1913. The Daughter of The Air becomes pregnant and
gives birth to the world. This may have a
claim to be Sibelius’ most uncanny evocation of the elements and also, of the
spirit of Finland. It is like an
apotheosis of womanhood and childbirth, its moods strangely and beautifully
conveyed by a vast range of vocal and orchestral touches. It has been said that the greatest beauty is
always strange. Sibelius is often
portrayed as a granitic-faced nordic hero, almost a statue in himself. He was probably the warmest and most
sensitive of men, with a strong streak of the feminine in his nature. As an artist, he would have seen obvious
parallels between the mother of creation and the creator of music. Certainly, he suffered dreadfully in writing
the majority of the pieces in which he sought to do real, lasting justice to
his art and country, not to mention himself.
The pain drove him to drink, caused a cancer-scare in his forties and
silenced him as a major composer for the last 30 years of his life. “You must not join in any race,” he wrote;
his artistic ideals must be his own and right for the work in progress. On the other hand, he could describe in music
of unforced greatness a unique myth of the creation of the universe. Here is Luonnotar.
Track Six:
Luonnotar
Kalevala was
a collection of some one hundred and more sequenced (and resequenced) fragments
of the poetry of the ancient Finnish people.
Its compiler, Elias Lönnrot, also gathered folk-lyrics in a book, Kanteletar,
The Daughter of The Kantele. The
kantele is the Finnish national instrument, a form of zither; it is the
instrument of the wizard Vainomoinen, and accompanies most forms of songs. In 1894, Sibelius wrote a set of part-songs
based on poems from Kanteletar:
Rakastava - The Lover.
One likes to think of the work as being associated with his wife of
fifty-five-odd years, Aino Järnefelt, whom he had married in the Summer of
1892, not long after completing Kullervo.
Here is the delightful The Path Of The Beloved.
Track Seven: The Path of The Beloved (choir)
To end this programme celebrating Sibelius’
inspiration by Finnish folk-poetry, let’s hear his setting of verses from Kalevala,
Venematka, The Boat Journey of Vainomoinen.
This was written in 1893 and re-arranged in 1914. The rearrangement is for mixed choir, Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass.
This was Classical Break and I’m Rupert
Kirkham. Today’s programme on the music
of Jean Sibelius, was researched and written by Mike Burrows. We hope that you enjoyed it and will join us
again soon! Goodbye!
Track Eight: Venematka
