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The analytical enclave of Sibelius studies also includes
essays, by Elliott Antokoletz, Peter Franklin, James Hepokoski and
Tim Howell, which do not involve extensive graphic material of the
prolongational type. Yet there is a fair degree of consensus between
the prolongationists and the pragmatists that current musicological
orthodoxies with respect to the interaction of formalism and hermeneutics
are to be encouraged. Even Laufer, who counts as relatively conservative
in his recourse to generalised principles of voice-leading analysis,
has claimed that a view of the first movement of Sibelius’s
Fourth Symphony
as symbolizing a struggle to victory, from darkness to light,
from nothingness to life, or from turmoil to serenity (somehow
all the same poetic idea) [...] is not really an extra-musical
symbol: it is intrinsically part of the compositional idea, an
idea which is technically set forth by the vast auxiliary cadence
spanning the entire movement.
Laufer’s words, from his contribution to Schenker studies
2 (Cambridge, 1999), are cited by Antokoletz here (p.304), and apart
from their ideological significance their presence indicates the
high degree of intertextuality to which Sibelius studies,
like so much present-day musicology, aspires. The book provides
ample food for thought in its own right, but you are likely to get
much more out it if you also have access to other writings on the
composer by Laufer, Murtomäki, Howell and Hepokoski, as well
as to Jackson’s contribution to Bruckner studies (Cambridge,
1997), and his handbook on Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony (Cambridge,
1999). Jackson is especially prodigal in his cross-references, and
he often corrects, sometimes in quite fundamental ways, the interpretations
offered in his own earlier work. But it is his use of the kind of
‘poetic idea’ promulgated in my quotation from Laufer
1999 which does most to define the character of his 98-page contribution
here.
The governing poetic idea – or organic process – laid
down for Sibelius by Jackson is that of ‘crystallization and
entropy’, a trope which Jackson sees as embodying ‘the
devolution of order into chaos’ (p.175). Unlike, for example,
Schumann and Brahms – ‘men of the optimistic nineteenth
century’ (whose symphonies in C Jackson also considers in some
detail) Sibelius ‘doubts the possibility of resurrection’,
and is therefore more of a ‘modernist’ (p.178). In the
Fourth Symphony’s finale, ‘entropy triumphs and the hero’s
life inexorably ebbs and dissipates back into chaos and nothingness’
(p.269): and even the Seventh Symphony – often seen, spiritually,
as the polar opposite of the Fourth – links closure with catastrophe
and disaster. Quite how Jackson squares this reading with the Seventh’s
‘definitive tonal arrival’, and the corresponding sense
of decisive resolution and fulfilment, which surely counter any
tendencies to entropic dissolution, is far from clear. But in any
case he moves well beyond the poetic parameters of crystallisation
and entropy in order to highlight the ‘theologized domestic
drama’ (p.179) of the Seventh’s representation, in the
celebrated trombone theme, of Sibelius’s wife Aino. This ‘domestic’
aspect, which would remain hidden were it not for annotations in
the sketches, is elaborated by Jackson into a narrative embracing
the ‘wife-mother’ identity, and the kind of associations
with home and mother-earth which, he believes, justify the sweeping
claim that ‘matrimonial and nationalist issues intertwine in
Sibelius’s music from Kullervo to the Seventh Symphony and
Tapiola’ (p.179).
Jackson’s use of the biographical card does not extend to
involving what is probably the most poignant of the Sibelius diary
entries from the time of the sixth and seventh symphonies, cited
in another article: ‘Alcohol, which I gave up, is now my most
faithful companion. And the most understanding! (11 November 1923)’
(p.137). Indeed, there is a fundamental paradox in Jackson’s
work, in that the more widely he casts his interpretative net, the
more reductive (and non-dialectical) his readings become. There
is for example no hint of how the ‘public’ symphonic rhetoric
of Sibelius’s Seventh interacts with the hidden domestic, personal,
autobiographical element, which – even if we accept the logic
of translating the trombone theme’s heroic, expansive, positive
tone into a portrait of a loved domestic companion – we can
only ‘hear’ after we’ve been persuaded (by the physical
evidence of what is found on paper) that the composer put it there.
It seems no less plausible to argue that those assertions of personal
identity which centre on Aino represent a compositorial need for
self-expression which is fundamentally – subversively –
at odds with the process of communication from composer to listeners
and interpreters (performers and musicologists alike). This tension
is relevant to ideas about Sibelius’s ‘progressiveness’,
adumbrated here by Tim Howell, and linked to his important earlier
insight (in the published version of his doctoral dissertation,
New York 1989) about the subversive way in which certain pitch constructs
serve to ‘dilute, if not destroy, any sense of middleground
diatonic or tonal progression’ (cited by Antokoletz, p.307).
No less relevant to the idea of subversiveness is Antokoletz’s
own concept of a ‘hybrid’ musical language, involving
‘semi-functional diatonic folk modes and their cyclic-interval
[...] transformations’ as well as functional tonality (pp.297–98)
– since whether the result is as ‘highly integrated’
as Antokoletz claims is open to question. (Antokoletz himself (p.303)
refers to the ‘conflicting, yet pivotal interaction between
modal tonality and the more ambiguous whole-tone sphere’ as
an early twentieth-century resource: emphasis added.) Most pertinent
of all, however, is the concept of Sibelius’s ‘modern
classicism’, introduced by Hepokoski in his revelatory handbook
on the Fifth Symphony (Cambridge, 1993), and not explicitly built
on in his Sibelius studies analysis of the Sixth Symphony.
Nevertheless, Hepokoski’s talk of a Sibelian ‘dialogue’
between ‘modern’ and ‘pre-modern’, and of the
composer’s attempts to ‘sidestep predetermined formal
conventions’ (p.323), as well as the sense in which ‘the
old formal categories are still “there”, still conceptually
present through their conspicious acoustic absence’ (p.324)
seem sensitive to what I am calling ‘subversion’. In particular,
Hepokoski’s notion of a rotational form which is also teleological
is flexible enough to embrace the more episodic, yet far from fragmented,
kind of organisational principles which I see as more relevant to
the later Sibelius than Jackson- or Laufer-style organicism.
In this context, one of the most interesting points in the volume
is Veijo Murtomäki’s identification of a formal ‘problem’
in the early symphonic ballad Skogsrået (1894–95), where
‘Sibelius simply juxtaposes different formal sections without
connective elements smoothing over the junctures’ (p.123).
Was Sibelius ever more of a modernist than here? But where does
this early radicalism leave Murtomäki’s over-arching ‘Ursatz’
for Skogsrået, which begins in C major and ends in C sharp
minor (p.110)? Also revealing, given the composer’s denials
that the basic ideas from which his works tended to evolve were
in any sense ‘fragments’, is Timo Virtanen’s sketch-supported
contention that Pohjola’s daughter was ‘assembled [...]
using fragments conceived over a period of several years’ (p.144).
This is obviously not to suggest that the finished work itself conveys
a sense of fragmentation, but it does hint at a possible tension
between the function of transitions and the overall ‘unity’
of Pohjola’s daughter and the Seventh Symphony.
Underlying my own interpretation of the Seventh is the belief that
modern classicism (as distinct from classicism proper, rooted in
diatonic tonality, as also from a more genuinely modernistic neo-classicism)
involves the tendency to subvert structural fundamentals (both formal
and harmonic) as well as the effort to affirm them. The nearest
Jackson seems to get to this feature in his analysis of the Seventh
is his view of ‘apparently “strong” tonics’
being ‘devalued’ (p.261), but in the end he is so committed
to the principle of ‘an over-arching V–I auxiliary cadence’
controlling ‘the entire structure’ (p.260) that the possibility
of more flexible, less rigorously integrated or consistently hierarchical
processes gaining the upper hand is never seriously considered.
Even if it were claimed that Jackson himself positively subverts
Schenkerian theory by attaching to the Seventh Symphony as a whole
the kind of incomplete structural progression Schenker saw as valid
only on the tiny time-scale of Chopin’s A minor Prelude (op.24),
his characteristically comprehensive tracing of comparable elements
across the classical and romantic tonal tradition risks forcing
the composers involved into the confining straitjacket of psychological,
cultural forces which they are helpless to resist, or subvert, still
less to criticise.
No less risky, I feel, is Laufer’s more ‘orthodox’
prolongational reduction of the Seventh Symphony, engineered to
support the claim that ‘the effect of the formal design, with
its synthesis of contrasts, is to create a single entity, one vast
sweep, of culmination, of renewal and completion’ (p.355).
Laufer’s meticulously crafted graphs are finely reproduced
here, making detailed scrutiny a positive pleasure, and his virtual
exclusion of hermeneutic flights of fancy makes a salutary contrast
to Jackson’s rhapsody. Yet, just as nature, in the poetic epigraph
to Tapiola, embodies ‘savage dreams’ and ‘magic secrets’
which make it partially if not essentially inscrutable to humanity,
so it is difficult to justify the assumption that Sibelius’s
music can be constrained quite as decisively as Laufer and Jackson
imply. In a very different kind of discourse, Peter Franklin claims
that it is the ‘post-modern’ concern with ‘details
of sexuality, gender representation, and narrative techniques’
which is ‘subversive of Kullervo’s more traditional or
conventional interpretation as an exercise in “nationalism”
’ (p.74). I would suggest that reading subversiveness into
Sibelius’s mature work is an even more useful defence against
the interpretative underlining of those aspects of tradition and
convention which, if left unchallenged, can easily seem superficial.
All in all, however, it is pleasing to find that, despite their
sincere commitment to over-arching organicism, the editors of Sibelius
studies have not sought to bring all the contributions under
the constraints of a party line. For example, Eija Kurki is allowed
the artless question – ‘If his symphonic music was inspired
by an extra-musical source (such as the text of a play), did Sibelius
perceive his symphonies as embodying something extra-musical?’
(p.92) – without the call-to-order of an editorial footnote
recommending close study of other, longer essays in the volume.
The diversity of voice and range of reference (Elliott Antokoletz
is particularly creative in his relevant recourse to writers one
might have thought long forgotten, including Burnett James), is
exemplary, and methodology is broad enough to embrace Murtomäki’s
old-style (and pretty unpersuasive) table of motivic ‘connections’
between Die Walküre, Madama Butterfly, La bohème and Sibelius’s
‘Lemminkäinen and the maidens of the island’ (p.133).
It remains only to note that production values are excellent, and
that the (high?) price is not unreasonable, given the number of
pages and the generous provision of sketch facsimiles and music
type (score extracts and graphs). Even if, like me, you find plenty
to disagree with, this is a volume to make you think, perhaps as
never before, about a composer whose importance seems certain to
grow as – if – the new music of the new century goes in
for ‘modern classicism’ in a big way.
Arnold Whittall’s most recent book is Musical
composition in the twentieth century (OUP, 2000)
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