SIBELIUS: Symphony No. 5 in E-flat major, Opus 82
JEAN (JOHAN JULIUS CHRISTIAN) SIBELIUS was born at Tavastehus (Hämeenlinna), Finland, on December 8, 1865, and died at Järvenpää on September 20, 1957. He completed the Fifth Symphony in time for his fiftieth birthday celebrations in 1915, and he led the first performance in Helsingfors (Helsinki) on the anniversary day. He introduced a radically revised version, again in Helsingfors, on December 14, 1916. 7he present edition of the symphony is the result of still further revisions, completed in the fall of 1919, and was first played under the composer’s direction on November 24 that year, also in Helsingfors. The first American performance was given by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra on October 21, 1921. Pierre Monteux introduced the work to San Francisco in December 1940, and it was played here most recently in February 2004 with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting. The score calls for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings.
On the evening of his fiftieth birthday, an event celebrated in Finland as a national holiday, Jean Sibelius led the Helsingfors Municipal Orchestra in a program of his own music—the two Serenades for violin, the symphonic poem called The Oceanides that he had written for his visit to the United States the year before, and the new and eagerly anticipated Fifth Symphony. His position as a cultural hero at home had been established twenty-four years earlier, with the performance of Kullervo, a massive work for voices and orchestra based on the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic. The success of his Second Symphony, first heard in 1902, had given him a name abroad. He had been granted a government pension designated to keep him in Finland and that allowed him to concentrate wholly on composition. Until Paavo Nurmi made his debut at the Antwerp Olympic Games in 1920, Sibelius was the only Finn whose name was familiar throughout the world, and his compatriots were fiercely proud of him.
Sibelius’s visit to America, where the festivities included the conferral of an honorary doctorate at Yale, was the zenith of international recognition for him. Coming home, he heard in mid-Atlantic the news of the assassination at Sarajevo of the heir to the Austrian throne. He had scarcely settled into his life again when, to his horror and disbelief, virtually all Europe was at war. “I have always hated all empty talk on political questions, all amateurish politicizing,” he had written some years earlier. “I have tried to make my contribution another way.” And now Sibelius concentrated on the new symphony he had promised to deliver in time for his birthday celebrations.
Most of his music was with a German publisher, which meant that he was cut off from his royalties for the duration of the war. Trying to deal with the resulting financial hardship, he produced some potboilers for the Danish house of Hansen; moreover, he had commitments to conduct in Sweden and Norway. With professional and public distractions, work was not easy, but the score was completed. He revised it twice before he was satisfied, pulling the original four movements into three, striving ever for concentration. Not until the spring of 1919 did political stability return to Finland, and it was only in the fall of that year that the Fifth Symphony attained its final and present form.
At the end of September 1914, Sibelius had jotted these words in his notebook: “In a deep valley again. But I already begin to see dimly the mountain that I shall certainly ascend . . . God opens His door for a moment and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony.” God’s orchestra begins with an E-flat major chord so idiosyncratically voiced and scored that it says “Sibelius Five” as unmistakably as certain other E-flat chords say Emperor or Eroica. This one is built of a soft timpani roll, and the sound of French horns. Two more horns add their voices, and one of them detaches itself to play a softly musing call. This, in turn, elicits a three-note echo in flutes and oboes. Sibelius offers a few more ideas—a slowly whirling figure played by various woodwind couples, leading directly into a slower phrase for flute and clarinet; an exclamation, also with woodwinds; a sequence of chords in crescendo, cutting across the prevailing meter in cross-rhythm; and yet another exclamation.
This gives Sibelius plenty with which to generate a movement whose originality is as remarkable as its clarity. First, he lets us hear all this music again, but with the harmonic perspective realigned. That is, the first “exposition,” like its counterpart in every classical symphony, modulates to a new key; the repeat, however, stays in the original key. Now Sibelius transforms the material with wonderful diversity. Donald Tovey has described the first phase: The flute and clarinet phrase “is worked up into a wonderful mysterious kind of fugue which quickens . . . into a cloudy chromatic trembling, through which its original figure moans in the clarinet and bassoon.” In the second phase, the exclamation makes its presence known again, at a broader tempo than before and with new passion. Suddenly the tempo quickens, and the first theme is made part of a dance tune. This is in effect the symphony’s scherzo, accelerating as it unfolds. The trumpet begins a trio for this scherzo, whose recapitulation then serves as recapitulation for the entire movement. The last, obsessively repeated chord that whirls the orchestra into dizziness consists of the four notes of the horn call that emerged as the symphony’s first thematic idea.
What Sibelius does in the second movement is best described as variations on a rhythm, the thematic rhythm being nothing more complicated than two groups of five even quarter notes separated by a quarter rest. Six different tunes occur, all variants of this twice-five-note rhythm. Before the five-note figures begin, we hear some sustained introductory woodwind chords. More than preparing the appearance of the theme, they are a constant presence here, and we feel the contrast—which becomes tension—between their leisure and the gentle but persistent energy of the thematic rhythm. Twice, the variations are supported by a broadly swinging bass. Of this we shall hear more.
The finale begins in a tremendous whir. When the agitation subsides, the two pairs of French horns set up a kind of antiphonal tolling that is, in fact, the swinging bass from the previous movement. Much-divided strings accompany, playing the same music slightly out of phase. Woodwinds and cellos turn the horn theme itself into an accompaniment by superimposing a new melody of their own. Sibelius traverses this territory once more, with new harmonic perspectives revealed. The thicket of dissonance becomes ferocious and is resolved by an imperious command for silence. Then four chords and two unisons enforce order. Their sound and their timing can never cease to stun.
—Michael Steinberg
Michael Steinberg, the San Francisco Symphony’s program annotator from 1979 to 1999 and a contributing writer to our program book until his death in July, was one of the nation’s pre-eminent writers on music. We are privileged to continue publishing his program notes. His books are available at the Symphony Store in Davies Symphony Hall.
More About the Music
Recordings: The recording (on Decca) by Herbert Blomstedt and the San Francisco Symphony is out of print but available as an Arkiv CD reissue | Colin Davis with the Boston Symphony (Philips Duo) | Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon) | Osmo Vänskä and the Lahti Symphony, a disc that allows you to hear both the original and final versions of the symphony (BIS)
Readings: Robert Layton’s Sibelius in the Master Musicians series is a good basic book about the composer (Schirmer). | Layton is also the translator of the standard multi-volume biography by Erik Tawaststjerna (UC Press)—currently out of print but available at libraries. | James Hepokowski’s study of the Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge Music Handbooks) is richly insightful.