This
week's Classical Break (repeated from 2011) is a celebration of the
music of Sibelius - particularly that which was influenced by his love of
traditional Finnish folk music. Read the script - it's all there! Rupert and
Mike.
Classical Break - Sibelius
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 relentlessly mythologized by the Finns and
Western world until it came to seem 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 this is 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, he 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
(Tiera was a male companion
of Lemminkainen. Here is a short piece named for him and written for
brass
septet and percussion in l898.
Track Five: Tiera
This track was excised owing to lack of time - our apologies!)
This track was excised owing to lack of time - our apologies!)
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 spins sitting 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 Six: 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 hand. 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 Seven: 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 Eight: 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 Nine: Venematka
