Jean Sibelius

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"Sibelius" redirects to this article. For other uses, see Sibelius (disambiguation).

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Jean Sibelius (December 8, 1865 – September 20, 1957) was a Finnish composer of classical music. Sibelius is considered to be one of the most popular composers of the late 19th and early 20th century. His music and genius have also played an important role in forming of the Finnish national identity.

Sibelius was born into a Swedish-speaking family in Hämeenlinna in the Russian Grand Duchy of Finland. He was given the name Johan Julius Christian Sibelius. He was known as Janne to his family, but during his student years he started using a French form of the name, Jean. His family consciously decided to send him to an important Finnish language school. He attended The Hämeenlinna Normal-lycée from 1876 to 1885. This should be seen as part of the larger rise of the Fennoman movement, an expression of Romantic Nationalism which was to become a crucial part of Sibelius' artistic output and politics.

Some of his most famous compositions are Finlandia, Valse Triste, the violin concerto, the Karelia Suite and The Swan of Tuonela (a movement from his Lemminkäinen Suite). He also wrote many other works, including pieces inspired by the Kalevala, seven symphonies, over 100 songs for voice and piano, incidental music for 13 separate plays, an opera (Jungfrun i tornet, which remains unpublished), chamber music (including a piece for a string quartet), piano music, 21 separate publications of choral music, and Masonic ritual music.

The Finnish graphic designer Erik Bruun used Jean Sibelius as the motif for the 100 markka note in Finland's final markka series.

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Family and personal life

Sibelius graduated from high school in 1885. He started to study law at Aleksander's Imperial University in Helsinki, but music was always his best subject at school and Sibelius quit his studies. From 1885 to 1889, Sibelius studied music in Helsinki music school (now Sibelius Academy). One of his teachers there was Martin Wegelius. Sibelius continued studying in Berlin (from 1889 to 1890) and in Vienna (from 1890 to 1891).

Jean Sibelius married Aino Järnefelt at Maxmo on June 10, 1892. Jean and Aino Sibelius's home Ainola was completed at Lake Tuusula in 1903. They had six daughters - Eva, Ruth, Kirsti (who died at a very young age), Katarine, Margaret and Heidi.

Sibelius died of cerebral hemorrhage on September 20, 1957 in Ainola. He is buried at a garden in Ainola. Aino Sibelius lived on for 12 years after her husband's death. She died in Ainola on 8 June, 1969 and is buried with her husband. In 1972 the surviving daughters sold Ainola to the state, and it was opened as a museum in 1974.

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Musical style

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Jean Sibelius was part of a wave of composers who accepted the norms of late 19th century composition, but sought to radically simplify the internal construction of the music. Like Antonin Dvorák this led him to seek idiomatic melodies with an identifiably national character; but he also brought a unique and idiosyncratic approach to developmental technique. He was influenced both by Ferruccio Busoni and Peter Tchaikovsky. The influence of the latter is particularly evident in his un-numbered choral symphony Kullervo, from 1891, as well as his Symphony No. 1 in E Minor of 1899. The influence of these two composers is evident as late as his Violin Concerto of 1903. However, he progressively stripped away formal markers of sonata form in his work, and pursued the idea of continuously developing cells and fragments until coming to a grand statement at the end. The synthesis is often so complete that it is thought that he began from the finished statement and worked backwards.

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Sibelius built much of his music with melodies that have very powerful modal implications, and that are drawn out over a number of notes. Like his contemporary, the Dane Carl Nielsen, he studied Renaissance polyphony closely, which accounts for much of the melodic and harmonic "feel" of his music. His harmonic language is often restrained and reductive in comparison with that of many of his contemporaries, and makes frequent use of pedal points. He stated "music often loses its way without a pedal". Because of this, Sibelius' music is sometimes considered insufficiently complex, but he was immediately respected by his peers, including Gustav Mahler. Later in life he was championed by critic Olin Downes but attacked by composer-critic Virgil Thomson. Perhaps one reason Sibelius attracts the ire of critics is that in each of his seven symphonies he approached the basic problems of form, tonality, and architecture in unique, individual ways. His response to criticism was "Pay no attention to what critics say. No statue has ever been put up to a critic".

Sibelius over time sought to use new chord patterns, including naked tritones, for example in the Symphony No. 4, and bare melodic structures to build long movements of music, in a manner similar to Joseph Haydn's use of built-in dissonances. Sibelius would often alternate melodic sections with blaring brass chords that swell and fade away, or he would underpin his music with repeating figures which push against the melody and counter-melody. His work is rich with literary reference, even when not explicit. The Second Symphony has a movement that has been compared to the statue in Don Giovanni sneaking by moonlight, while the stark Fourth Symphony combines work for a planned "Mountain" symphony with a tone poem based on Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven. He also wrote several tone poems based on Finnish poetry, beginning with the early En Saga and culminating in the late tone poem Tapiola (1926), his last major composition.

He published only a few minor pieces after 1926, and said he destroyed the score for a completed 8th numbered symphony. His last large works were the Sixth and Seventh symphonies, incidental music for Shakespeare's The Tempest and Tapiola. As reported in the Manchester Guardian newspaper in 1958, Sibelius summed up the style of his later works by saying that while other composers were engaged in manufacturing cocktails, he offered the public pure cold water. But for nearly the last thirty years in his life (primarily after World War I and a 1911 operation for suspected throat cancer), Sibelius avoided talking about his music and composed nearly nothing. In any case he was always a very self-critical composer.

Sibelius has fallen in and out of fashion, but remains one of the most popular 20th century symphonists, with complete cycles of his symphonies continuing to be recorded. In his own time, however, he focused far more on the more profitable chamber music for home use, and occasionally on works for the stage. Currently Paavo Berglund and Colin Davis are considered major exponents of his work. Other classic sets of recordings of the symphonies are by John Barbirolli, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Leonard Bernstein, Simon Rattle and Lorin Maazel. Herbert von Karajan was also associated with Sibelius, recording all of the symphonies except the Third, some several times. Recently Osmo Vänskä and the Sinfonia Lahti released a critically acclaimed complete Sibelius cycle, including unpublished or retracted pieces such as the first version of the Symphony No. 5 (1915).

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Media

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Selected works

These are ordered chronologically; the date is the date of composition rather than publication or first performance.

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Orchestral works

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Other works

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External links

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