Ellen Reid and Jean Sibelius: Stagnation, Creation and ‘Foreverness’

By Christopher DeLaurenti

Could there ever be another Jean Sibelius — a classical composer who is revered not only as a cultural eminence but as a national hero, perhaps even the spiritual shaper of a nation?

“People in a classical idiom can't represent that now,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Reid, whose music will share a program with and respond to the music of Sibelius. “He had such a public-facing life; he was the voice of Finland.”

Over the next few months, the beloved composer will see two of his towering compositions performed alongside new commissions responding to his influence. The first concert will feature Symphony No. 1, Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganinini, Op. 43, and the world premiere of Reid’s TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY, a Seattle Symphony commission.

Sibelius (1865-1957) is part of the canon of so-called “nationalist” composers of the 19th and 20th centuries. The designation is not narrowly political, although the composers often intended a patriotic resonance to their works. Finland had been controlled by Russia since 1809; before that, it had been part of Sweden for 600 years. Though Sibelius was a native Swedish speaker, the young composer would become a figurehead in Finland’s struggle for autonomy in the early 20th century, until it won independence in 1917. His first symphony premiered in Helsinki in 1899 along with his composition Song of the Athenians, a protest against the Russian Tsar’s attempt to rob Finland of its autonomy. The concert made him a star.

But his creative project was grander than simple political rebellion. As biographer Glenda Dawn Goss writes, “Sibelius and a handful of his predecessors and contemporaries set out to compose, conduct, draw, paint, poetize, sculpt and versify what it meant to be Finnish […] to awaken their fellow Finns to their uniqueness, their separateness and ultimately the possibilities of nationhood.” This emerging Finnish identity was indeed distinctive, tied to the landscape and literature of the country. But, as Goss points out, it was also inseparably woven into European culture as a whole. The movement claimed both sovereignty and Europeanness beyond subjection to Sweden or Russia.

The word “nationalism,” today often used with connotations of jingoism and xenophobia, obscures the emotional expansiveness of these artistic movements. As Reid puts it, “Sibelius was representing the heroic version of a whole country, its history, its nature and legacy.” During his defense at the University of Helsinki, the young composer proclaimed his vision: “There is no point in tearing down the old if there is nothing new to put in its place. This cannot be done by artificially creating a tonal system — it has to be discovered as something that is alive in folk music.”

However, for Sibelius, this rootedness was not a question of simply adapting the folk music he studied alongside Beethoven and Wagner; it meant delving into oneself. Decades later, Sibelius would explain: “I have composed a great deal in the manner of folk tunes; but those tunes have always come from my own brain, or rather from my burning Finnish heart.” Reid suggests that Sibelius’ musical expression has more in common with the contemporary American understanding of cultural identity — “thinking about the history of a place, its nature and legacy” — than with modern-day nationalism.

From early in his career, Sibelius saw himself as “a musical painter and poet,” immersed in the sensational beauty of the Finnish countryside. Working mostly in Ainola, his home in the woods, Sibelius filled his compositions with the awe, joy, dread and melancholy of the landscapes of his homeland.

Symphony No. 1, composed in his pre-Ainola days, emerged from a combination of natural and cosmopolitan inspirations. Initial sketches drew on words by the German poet Heinrich Heine and the image of a “cold, cold wind blowing from the sea” — though neither of these motifs appeared in the finished work. But the symphony attests most of all to Sibelius’s originality. Textures and moods change dramatically: an elegiac opening clarinet solo is almost hurried aside by energetic strings; the first movement roars climactically, then ends on two oddly quiet pizzicato chords.

Sibelius’ motifs often resolve in surprising ways that alternately thrilled and baffled commentators of his time. Recent critics and scholars refer to his form as “circular” (Alex Ross) or “rotational” (James Hepokoski). The music meanders, scatters, thins, coalesces. It is this cyclical quality that may make Sibelius most relatable to pandemic-era composers.

Take Ellen Reid’s TODAY AND […] piece, which, in the words of the composer, “evokes a sense of the present and also of ‘foreverness’ that feels constraining, yet expansive. ‘Today and today’ was how I experienced a lot of the last year.” Reid dramatizes the possibility of passing through disorientation to euphoria; she uses glissandi “stretched through the whole string section to create a sense of groundlessness,” and a motif develops “to propel you further into a joyful place.”

Reid was particularly interested in Sibelius’s lost Symphony No. 8, which exists only in fragments; Sibelius worked for decades on it before throwing his manuscript into the fire. “I was imagining this composer with this huge history and past and voice, sitting for 30 years staring at nature,” says Reid.

Sibelius’ attempt at his last symphony ended in despair. Like his music, his life did not build neatly and rationally to a triumphant finale. But, far from the middlebrow reactionary later critics accused him of being, his work remains moving, unpredictable, even startlingly modern.

“There are two musical notation programs,” observes Reid. “One of them is called Sibelius. Every time I open up my notation software, it plays his music.” Sibelius, a man capable of both transcendent artistry and spectacular acts of self-destruction, has become a synonym for the act of musical creation itself.

SPONSORS

Sibelius Symphony No. 1 is generously sponsored by Scan Design Foundation.

Ellen Reid's New Work is presented as part of the Seattle Symphony’s New Music WORKS initiative, which is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.