MUSIC: Finland’s King

The deeply forested, lake-strewn country of Finland was celebrating a national festival. Every Finnish hamlet was gaily festooned and beflagged. Schoolchildren had the day off. Deputations from the provinces and from many foreign countries, converging on Helsingfors, the capital,, bore testimonials signed by many a foreign bigwig. At night the festivities culminated in a gigantic concert in the city’s largest auditorium, with two symphony orchestras and a choir of 500 voices. There were 8,000 people in the audience. In places of honor sat President Svin-hufvud, Field Marshal Baron Mannerheim and the visiting Prime Ministers of Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

Focus of all this celebration was a vigorous, severely dressed oldster, whose polished, monolithic head rose above an oversized collar. For many hours he stood patiently erect—with a curious bearing of rustic urbanity and retiring self assurance —receiving the congratulations of state officials, municipal leaders, foreign envoys and friends. At the concert all eyes were upon his rugged figure as he sat, with his small, dapper wife, between the President and the Field Marshal. Though urged, he declined to make a speech. Even when Finland’s Premier, Dr. Kivimaki, addressing the great audience, presented him with a laurel wreath symbolic of an entire nation’s debt, he remained firmly and shyly silent. It was only later, at a banquet given by intimate friends, that he tried to express his gratitude. As he stood up, however, emotion overcame him. Dumbly, the fierce-faced old man clasped his wife in his arms, expressed in a long embrace feelings he could not utter. The old man was Jean Julius Christian Sibelius, most famous of present-day composers and “Uncrowned King of Finland”; the occasion was his seventieth birthday.

That was two years ago. Next week Sibelius has another birthday. This time there will be no speeches, no receptions, no disquieting crowds of idolaters. That birthday belonged to Finland. This belongs to Sibelius. Full of years and honors, he will pass the day at his villa, “Ainola,” in the forests some 30 mi. north of the capital, not expecting a visit from even one of his five married daughters. Yet for him his 72nd birthday will be more important than his work. A good part of his day will be spent “working in undisturbed peace.” His Eighth Symphony, for which the world has been waiting twelve years, is drawing towards completion. So perhaps is his life’s work. As a level-headed countryman, he knows that, having passed three score and ten, none of his remaining vigor need be spared for fripperies. At 72, important tasks still remain to be accomplished.

Cold Water. Though his eminence is still somewhat grudgingly conceded in Central Europe, for Central Europeans have a firm faith that only a Central European can write a good symphony, little Finland’s great man Sibelius is regarded by many a musician as the lineal successor of Beethoven and Brahms. His present fame has arrived slowly and late. His music, individual, serious, austere and sometimes forbidding, contains no trace of modernistic tricks or formulas. As he once remarked to his publisher (in Swedish) “Här i utlandet fabricemr ni cocktails i olika külorer, och nu kommer jag med rena källvattnet” (“Other composers may manufacture cocktails of every color; I offer the public pure cold water”).

Among his 150-odd compositions, chief importance attaches to his seven symphonies, acknowledged masterpieces in a form that has been successfully tackled only by a handful of the greatest figures in music. The first two symphonies—more ingratiating, less austere than the rest— have long been popular.

Only a decade ago Sibelius’ cold water was considered a drink for connoisseurs to sip. But of late the public taste for his invigorating music has reached the proportions of thirsty demand. In 1935 a poll of the Columbia Broadcasting System’s U. S. and Canadian listeners gave him first place in popularity (Beethoven was second) among all composers, past and present. This autumn Manhattan’s Radio City MusicHall Conductor Erno Rapee unhesitatingly undertook to broadcast Sibelius’ entire set of seven symphonies. The Boston Symphony and Philadelphia Orchestra play them far oftener than the once-popular symphonies of Tchaikovsky and Cesar Franck. The great bald Finn has come into his own.

The Bohemian garret-&-starvation conception of a great artist does not apply to Sibelius. Since 1897 he has enjoyed a modest pension from the Finnish state, which has provided him with leisure to compose. At his house at Jarvenpaa he lives the secluded life of a highly respectable country gentleman. His five daughters have long since gone forth to marry and raise families of their own. He and his wife live alone, looked after by two maids. He relishes good food and drink, smokes continually the best and largest Havana cigars, is partial between meals to well-aged whiskey served in beautiful cutglass tumblers. Visitors to “Ainola” are impressed by his measured hospitality and particularly by the genuine good nature which belies his fearsome face.

I, Sphinx. About his own music Sibelius is cagey. Some have called him Sphinxlike, and he has found the description a great convenience. Nowadays, when English-speaking visitors get too inquisitive about how he composes or when his next symphony will be finished, he replies with regretful, laconic shrug: “I, Sphinx.” There are grounds to suspect that he has quantities of early unpublished compositions stored about the house, that he has already outlined the movements of a Ninth Symphony in addition to those of his forthcoming Eighth. A visitor’s inquisitiveness invariably brings the same Finnish shrug, the favorite, inevitable reply.

About other people’s music Sibelius talks a great deal. But he was embarrassed by the wide publicity given his disparagement of Wagner, and has begun to hedge a little in his public statements. “Wagner, a genius . . . yo, yo, a great genius,” he conceded airily to a recent interviewer. Earlier he had made no bones about his private estimate of the Pride of Bayreuth: “Wagner is rude, brutal, vulgar and completely lacking in delicacy! . . . For instance he shouts T love you, I love you.’ To my mind that is something that you should whisper. . . . Look at his orchestration, that mass of different instruments in unison!” Wagner “suggests a butler who has been created a baron.” About the music of Stravinsky he is unenthusiastic, finds extreme Modernist Schonberg “unsympathetic.”

But he is fond of Italian opera, particularly of Verdi, whom he considers one of the greatest figures in music. For him Mozart and Mendelssohn “are the two greatest geniuses of the orchestra,” and Beethoven, “the master above all others.” However, in a recent interview he remarked with a twinkle: “All good composers lived in Egypt 5,000 years ago.”

Whatever the rating he gives him, there can be no doubt that his favorite musician is Jean Sibelius. He owns three radios and never misses a broadcast of his own compositions, tuning in inaccurately and listening intently to the resultant howling mixture of music and static. “You must be a good, very good musician to listen to radio,” he says, “to get details.”

Not entirely confident of his position as a great musician, he is very appreciative of appreciation, collects, reads and rereads every small item that is written about him in the most provincial newspapers. On the subject of his interpreters he is diplomatic, has indiscriminately praised Conductors Koussevitzky, Beecham, Werner Janssen and his countryman Robert Kajanus. He has a comforting motto: “Better have it played badly or wrong than not at all.”

Sibelius has conceived much of his music wandering through the forests surrounding his house. When engrossed in his work he keeps irregular hours, prefers to compose late at night. He proudly remembers that in his younger days he often worked three nights and two days at a stretch. Seldom does he use the piano when composing. He conceives and elaborates his ideas in his mind and puts pen to paper only when every detail of the score has been thought out. Once his notes are down on paper, he seldom makes alterations, and has often sent scores to publishers without bothering to try them out on any instrument.

His admiring wife says: “Sibelius continues to live at a tremendous pace, with great intensity and energy. He is still like a young man full of dreams and hopes.” He stands erect as a general, his ivory-colored dome rising from strong heavily-built shoulders; he still clothes himself with meticulous care, favors a double-breasted blue or grey lounge suit, a broad-brimmed felt hat; he wears specially built, handmade German shoes; on his numerous walks he stalks through the country swinging a heavy stick. And 72 or not, like all true Finns he takes his sauna (Finnish steam bath) once a week in the bathhouse that stands on the grounds near his house.

Jean v. Paavo. Politically and by temperament Sibelius is a nationalist. A large number of his early works (Kullervo, the Karelia Suite, Finlandia, et al.) were written as patriotic tributes. Though no one has succeeded in identifying any of his melodies as folk themes, considerable controversy still goes on as to whether he has been influenced by national Finnish idioms. His ancestry contains both Finnish and Swedish strains. Clergymen, doctors, merchants and small landowners, including a few intelligent musical amateurs, were his progenitors. He springs from the great ranks of the bourgeois.

His father was a regimental physician, and Sibelius was born at Tavastehus, a small town in the interior of Finland. He was just an ordinary little boy when he began to study the piano at the age of nine, but he started to compose almost immediately. At 15 he took up the violin, with the local military bandmaster as instructor. In his mature years he confessed to an early ambition to become a great violinist. The respectable Sibelius family, however, considered a career as a musician too precarious. They suggested law, and for a time the young composer dutifully pegged away at the University of Helsingfors. But he spent all his spare time composing and studying harmony with Martin Wegelius at the Music Institute.

Music won out, and in 1889, at the age of 24, Sibelius went to Germany to continue his musical studies. There he immersed himself for the first time in the great orchestral music of the Central European romantics. After a year in Germany he went to Vienna, studied with Carl Goldmark and Robert Fuchs, met Brahms who complimented him on his work. When he returned to Finland after an absence of three years, the young man of 27 was already regarded as a figure of national consequence. After a few years of teaching composition and violin at the Musical Institute of Helsingfors he was awarded the grant that enabled him to devote the remainder of his life exclusively to composition. When he was younger Sibelius traveled much in Germany, France and Italy, composed several of his works away from home. In 1914 he visited the U. S., teaching for a short time at Boston’s New England Conservatory.

To U. S. musicians the two biggest living composers in the world are undoubtedly Finland’s Sibelius and Germany’s Richard Strauss (Salome, Der Rosenkavalier). U. S. audiences would probably include a third—dapper, chameleonesque Igor Stravinsky (Le Sacre du Printemps, Petroushka).

In the world at large Finland, home of honest muscular seamen, has been more famous for her athletes than for her salons. But Tavasts and Karelians (all Finns are one or the other) point with greater pride to Finland’s world’s champion literacy record, boast that, except for 0.9% every last Finn today can read and write, exhibit Modernist Architect Eliel Saarinen as world evidence of Finnish culture. If you were to ask on the streets of a U. S. city who was the outstanding modern Finn, chances are the reply would be: Paavo Nurmi. But if you asked the same question on the streets of Helsingfors the answer would almost certainly be: Jean Julius Christian Sibelius.