Sallinen: Symphony No. 1
Aulis Sallinen was born April 9, 1935 in Salmi, Finland, and currently divides his time between Finland and France. He composed his Symphony No. 1 in 1970-71 and it was premiered on December 2, 1971, by the Helsinki City Symphony Orchestra, Jorma Panula conducting, as part of the opening festivities of Finlandia House in Helsinki. These are the first San Francisco Symphony performances. The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), three oboes, three clarinets (third doubling bass clarinet), two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, timpani, glockenspiel, marimba, tubular bells, wood blocks, tam-tam, vibraphone, bass drum, cymbals, side drum, harp, and strings.
When Aulis Sallinen burst onto the international music scene in the late 1960s he was already well along in his career. He was schooled at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, where his principal composition teachers were the distinguished figures Aarre Merikanto and (following Merikanto’s death) Joonas Kokkonen. His music explored the paths of microtonality and serialism that were de rigueur at that time, though he qualified as a conservative by the obsessively doctrinaire standards of, say, a Boulez. Even during that phase of his career a sense of restrained lyricism seemed instinctual. From 1960 to 1970 he served as General Manager of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and this baptism in the practical aspects of the music world proved to be formative. “The time I spent at the Radio,” he later told an interviewer, “was a real university education for me. If my teachers had a stylistic influence on my works, it was all washed away.” In the mid to late 1960s he accordingly underwent a stylistic conversion as a composer. His works took on a more unabashedly lyrical character, revisiting principles of tonality that had long been set aside by the academic mainstream, and he became an exponent of what became widely, if vaguely, referred to as neo-Romanticism.
In the 1960s he also began teaching at the Sibelius Academy, where after more than a decade he was named by the Finnish government as Artist Professor, beginning in 1976. In 1981 this was converted to a lifetime appointment, which was structured so as to enable Sallinen to live as a full-time composer thereafter. During these critical years Sallinen irrevocably embraced tonality as an essential force in his composition, and in so doing he engendered considerable controversy. In some quarters this was viewed as a reactionary sell-out, in others as an act of musical liberation. (Analogous scenarios were being played out elsewhere at the time; one thinks, for instance, of the similar re-orientation of our own George Rochberg.) Some hailed Sallinen as the successor to Jean Sibelius (the highest imaginable praise in Finnish musical circles), a comparison buttressed by an elemental spareness in several of his scores from the early 1970s, particularly his first two symphonies. But it was his operas that most strikingly attracted the listening world’s attention. His first, Ratsumies (The Horseman), was unveiled at the Savonlinna Festival in 1975, and since then he has created five more. His humorous and ironic opera Kuningas lähtee Ranskaan (The King Goes Forth to France, premiered in 1984) has become a sort of cult classic, with its story—the King of England and his entourage escape an encroaching ice age by marching across the frozen English Channel to invade France—taking on the aspect of a cautionary tale of environmentalism in the quarter-century since it was introduced.
“The 1970s and 80s were an absolute whirl for me,” Sallinen recently recalled. “Commissions were coming in from all over the world. Things have since calmed down now that there’s a younger generation to commission. And that’s as it should be.” Nonetheless, he has remained as busy as he wants, and as a septuagenarian he can look back over a hefty oeuvre that includes six operas and eight symphonies, the last of which he produced in 2001. Of his First Symphony he has remarked: “This work . . . was originally entitled just Sinfonia. At that time, as a 35-year-old composer, I could not have known that the piece would have (at least) seven successors.” He now composes steadily but at a relaxed pace. “If I try to write too many [pieces],” he explains, “they don’t have time to mature. And I don’t understand the point of churning out vast quantities, seeing that there’s already too much music in the world.” During the most recent decade he has grown passionate about chamber music, which appeals to both his penchant for precision and his practical streak. “Musically, it’s just as demanding, but physically less strenuous,” he says. “What’s more, chamber music has its uses; here in Finland we have a fine young generation of musicians. In addition to the traditional instrumentalists we have accordion players, guitarists. . . . It really is a fascinating world.”
Sallinen’s First Symphony is an entirely serious work; the sense of knowing humor that informs many of his later scores had not yet become a distinguishing feature of his style. The piece won first prize in the competition sponsored by the City of Helsinki to mark the opening of Finlandia House in 1971, and it was premiered as part of the festivities for that occasion. Cast in a single movement about sixteen minutes in duration, it unrolls in an overriding moderate tempo, though sections briefly and gradually hasten or slacken from the basic pace. Within this prevailing sameness the symphony passes through highly effective episodes, stunning in their beauty, precious even, at times replete with eerie tintinnabulations. Sustained, slow-moving melodies often proceed by consecutive notes of the scale, developing out of tiny motifs into luxuriant spans. Those that leap by skipped intervals, such as a prominent pentatonic progression, seem somehow shocking in this landscape. At the work’s midpoint we sense an allusion to the Dies irae chant, a morbid reference that is perfectly suited to this haunted landscape.
Tonality is never much in question. The piece begins and ends in F-sharp minor and is shot through with minor triads. If the interstitial events sometimes veer into relative atonality the ear is never left completely without a mooring. Pedal points often serve to anchor the harmonies. Textures tend toward leanness in a way that reminds a listener of Sibelius—especially late Sibelius, as in that composer’s Seventh Symphony and his tone poem Tapiola, which also seem present here through a certain emotional coolness. It would be wrong to call Sallinen’s style expressionless, but his emotional points are rendered with a removed objectivity. There’s a chill in the air for much of this symphony, often conveyed by hovering string chords. Woodwinds interject their spare motifs with mordant tartness, and brasses, playing as a section, emerge with nearly apocalyptic power, at one point leading the orchestra in a surging theme that seems ripped from a menacing page of Prokofiev.
When all is played and done, Sallinen’s First Symphony lingers in the mind as a work of mystery. This character, however, is born not of haziness or ambiguity, but rather through what seems to be hyper-clarity. Listening to this score one might imagine oneself traveling through outer space at a speed that must be swift and yet seems slow, aware of the peril that lies without but nonetheless seduced by the hypnotic, crystalline beauty that gleams from all around. “Good art,” Sallinen has observed, “is always lucid and full of vitality.”
—James M. Keller
More About the Music
Recordings: Ari Rasilainen conducting the Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz, as part of an ongoing “Sallinen Edition”; here coupled with the composer’s Symphony No. 7 (subtitled The Dreams of Gandalf), his Chorali (rather a sister work to the First Symphony), and his Solemn Overture (King Lear) (CPO) | Okko Kamu conducting the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra; coupled with Chorali, his Symphony No. 3, and several chamber works (BIS)
Reading: From Sibelius to Sallinen: Finnish Nationalism and the Music of Finland, by Lisa De Gorog (Greenwood) | Historical Dictionary of the Music and Musicians of Finland, by Ruth-Esther Hillila and Barbara Blanchard Hong (Greenwood)