Part 17 (1/2)

SIBELIUS. A FINNISH SYMPHONY[A]

[Footnote A: Symphony No. 1, in E minor, by Jan Sibelius, born in 1865.]

We must expect that the music of newer nations will be national. It goes without saying; for the music comes fresh from the soil; it is not the result of long refined culture. There is the strain and burst of a burden of racial feeling to utter itself in the most pliant and eloquent of all the languages of emotion. It is the first and n.o.blest sentiment of every nation conscious of its own worth, and it has its counterpart in the individual. Before the utterance has been found by a people, before it has felt this sense of its own quality, no other message can come. So the most glorious period in the history of every country (even in the eyes of other nations) is the struggle for independence, whether successful or not.

All on a new plane is this northernmost symphony, with a crooning note almost of savage, and sudden, fitful bursts from languorous to fiery mood. The harmony, the turn of tune have a national quality, delicious and original, though the Oriental tinge appears, as in Slav and Magyar music, both in bold and in melancholy humor. Though full of strange and warm colors, the harmonic scheme is simple; rather is the work a tissue of lyric rhapsody than the close-woven plot of tonal epic. A certain trace of revery does find a vent in the traditional art of contrary melodies. But a constant singing in pairs is less art than ancient folk-manner, like primal music in the love or dance songs of savages.

The symphony begins with a quiet rhapsody of solo clarinet in wistful minor, clear without chords, though there is a straying into major.

There is no accompaniment save a soft roll of drum, and that soon dies away.

[Music: _Andante, ma non troppo_ _espress._ (Clarinet)]

The rhapsody seems too vague for melody; yet there are motives, one in chief, winding to a pause; here is a new appealing phrase; the ending is in a

[Music]

return to the first. Over the whole symphony is cast the hue of this rhapsody, both in mood and in the literal tone.

All opposite, with sudden spring of buoyant strings, strikes the Allegro tune ending in a quick, dancing trip. The first voice is immediately pursued by another

[Music: _Allegro energico_ (2d violins) _Piu forte_ (Violins with higher 8ve.) (Cellos with higher 8ve. in violas)]

in similar phase, like a gentler shadow, and soon rises to a pa.s.sionate chord that is the main idiom of the movement.

[Music: (Strings, wood and horns)]

A second theme in clear-marked tones of reed and horns, as of stern chant, is taken up in higher wood and grows to graceful melody in flowing strings.

[Music: _marcato_]

There is a series of flights to an ever higher perch of harmony until the first Allegro motive rings out in fullest chorus, again with the companion tune and the cadence of poignant dissonance.

A new episode comes with s.h.i.+mmering of harp and strings, where rare and dainty is the sense of primal

[Music: _marcato_ (Flutes) (Strings with chord of harp)]

harmony that lends a pervading charm to the symphony. Here the high wood has a song in constant thirds, right from the heart of the rhapsody, all bedecked as melody with a new rhythm and answer. Soon this simple lay is woven in a skein of pairs of voices, meeting or diverging.

But quickly we are back in the trance of lyric song, over palpitating strings, with the refrain very like the former companion phrase that somehow leads or grows to a

[Music: _Tranquillo_ (Oboe, with other wood) (Strings with higher E)]

rhythmic verse of the first strain of the rhapsody. Here begins a long mystic phase of straying voices (of the wood) in the crossing figures of the song, in continuous fantasy that somehow has merged into the line of second Allegro theme, winging towards a brilliant height where the strings ring out the strain amid sharp cries of the bra.s.s in startling hues of harmony and electric calls from the first rhapsody.

From out the maze and turmoil the shadowy melody rises in appealing beauty like heavenly vision and lo! is but a guise of the first strain of rhapsody. It rises amid flashes of fiery bra.s.s in bewildering blare of main theme, then sinks again to the depth of brooding, though the revery of the appealing phrase has a climactic height of its own, with the strange, palpitating harmonies.

In a new meditation on bits of the first Allegro theme sounds suddenly a fitful burst of the second, that presently emerges in triumphant, sovereign song. Again, on a series of flights the main theme is reached and leaps once more to impa.s.sioned height.

But this is followed by a still greater climax of moving pathos whence we descend once more to lyric meditation (over trembling strings).

Follows a final tempest and climax of the phrase of second theme.