R.J. STOVE lives in Melbourne, Australia and is the author of A Student’s Guide to Music History (ISI Books).

Music-lovers today have certain consolations
not available three decades
ago, even if we do have to share the
planet with Britney Spears and 50 Cent.
For one thing, we need no longer feel remotely
apologetic about defending four
late-Romantic giants: Sibelius, Elgar, Puccini,
and Rachmaninoff. All four, and Sibelius
in particular, have inspired during
recent years quantities of serious research
that even in the early 1970s would have
been unimaginable. Given this newfound
critical respect, the abrupt dismissals that
Sibelius once inspired from fashion-conscious
(and less fashion-conscious but still
squeamish) pundits in America, above all,
make in retrospect for a surreal experience.
Paul Henry Lang, the Hungarian-born
Columbia University professor, made precisely
one reference to Sibelius (and that
decidedly hostile) in the 1,107 pages of his
almost unbelievably erudite 1941 survey
Music in Western Civilization. A year earlier,
and inhabiting a far lower intellectual level
than Lang occupied, Virgil Thomson—
the New York Herald Tribune journalist and
apparatchik—found himself provoked by
Sibelius’s Second Symphony into argumentum
ad verecundiam mode:

Twenty years’ residence on the European
continent has largely spared me
Sibelius . . . vulgar, self-indulgent,
and provincial beyond all descrip
tion. I realize that there are sincere
Sibelius-lovers in the world, though
I must say I’ve never met one among
educated professional musicians.

Equally, we should not overlook the
sustained, frequently frenzied, wrath to
which Sibelius moved progressive spirits
in Central Europe: notably Schoenberg
disciples René Leibowitz (author of a twopage
essay entitled Sibelius: Le Plus Mauvais
Compositeur du Monde) and T. W. Adorno
(who, when not engaged in the higher
reaches of anti-family junk-science, fancied
himself as a musicologist and composer).
In his characteristically shrill and uncouth
idiolect, Adorno denounced Sibelius as
representing “Aunt Jemima’s ready-mix for
pancakes extended to the field of music.”
Not only did Adorno regard as a personal
affront Sibelius’s absence of interest in
Schoenbergian methods, but he suffered
from the widespread and simple-minded
belief that any preoccupation—like Sibelius’
own—with wilderness and with folklegends
constitutes unassailable evidence
of Nazi affinities.

Today it is hard to credit such pamphleteering
as Adorno’s, Leibowitz’s, and
Thomson’s with any significance except
the historical and the psychiatric, so inextricable
is it from Marxist-modernist
worldviews that are themselves museumpieces.
Meanwhile, quietly, gradually, and
diligently, genuine scholars have been
enlarging our comprehension of Sibelius’
musical mind. The late Finnish critic
Erik Tawaststjerna made his life’s work
the production of a three-volume Sibelius
biography; British critic Robert Layton
not only translated Tawaststjerna’s magnum
opus into English, but provided—and
repeatedly revised—his own, indispensable,
single-volume guide to Sibelius’s life
and art. Now comes Andrew Barnett’s
book, which occupies the philological end
of the analytic spectrum. Barnett, benefi
ting from the Sibelius-related discoveries
announced by cataloguer Fabian
Dahlström as recently as 2003, does what
Layton never set out to do: he discusses
everything Sibelius wrote, concentrating in
particular on the copious juvenilia (much
of it for chamber ensembles) that Sibelius
himself suppressed. Because, to put
it politely, not all of Sibelius’s published
juvenilia bears the stamp of greatness, the
temptation is to disparage the unpublished
material as justly neglected. Unfortunately
for this neat conclusion, Sibelius demonstrated
several times his own lack of judgment
in deciding what music he should let
out of his study and what he should not.
After all, he permitted one of his finest
early pieces, the choral symphony Kullervo,
to be performed exactly once before he
withdrew it. Only in 1958, a year after his
death, was Kullervo ever heard again. After
that, its innate excellence—and its right
to a place alongside his seven canonical
symphonies—remained unquestionable.

At times Barnett’s commentary suggests
a slightly desperate roll-call of trivia he
would rather ignore: “It is hard to summon
up much enthusiasm for the Suite in A
Major“; “The Prelude for brass septet . . .
is perhaps best seen as an experiment”; “a
pallid Mélodie for piano [with] . . . a rather
half-hearted fanfare-like idea”; “an attractive
enough but by no means a distinctive
work”; and so forth. More often than not,
though, Barnett is both enthusiastic about
the forgotten efforts he has uncovered and
the cause of enthusiasm about them in his
readers. He mentions a Piano Trio, from its
creator’s twenty-second year (1887), which
sounds enticing enough for comprehensive
revival. Since the Swedish record company
BIS is steadily working its way towards a
complete Sibelius edition, we shall duly
be able to test Barnett’s reportage for
ourselves. Until then, the musical examples
in Barnett’s appendix cannot fail to be
useful.

Much of Sibelius’s method can be
summed up in a solitary anecdote. During
his old age, his numerous visitors included
British recording producer Walter
Legge, who asked whether Sibelius’s
Sixth Symphony—that post-apocalyptic
pastoral—had been influenced by Monteverdi
and Palestrina. There immediately
fell an embarrassed silence, in which the
composer’s eyes “froze harder than ever,”
and he stalked out to the garden. Legge
apologized for having made so indiscreet
an enquiry, whereupon the following
dialogue ensued:

LEGGE: Forgive me—I promise not
to ask such a question again.
SIBELIUS: If you want to pee, do it
here; it’s better than inside sanitation
in this part of Finland.

This response epitomizes Sibelius’s
disposition: the terseness, the downrightness,
the indifference to surface polish,
the gnomic unpredictability. One feature
of his idiom which continues to perturb,
despite the half-century that has elapsed
since his passing, is his disdain for conventional
conclusions. Most of his masterpieces
do not end so much as stop. Still,
such is his gift for timing that they never
sound unfinished. Nor would we have
them cease in any other manner: a Sibelius
without brusquerie would not be Sibelius
at all.

In recounting the broad outlines of
Sibelius’s career, Barnett has no astonishing
revelations. Sibelius’s financial ineptitude
has long been known: he sold for a
pittance the rights to his greatest popular
hit, Valse Triste (much as Rachmaninoff
sold for a pittance the rights to his greatest
popular hit, the Prelude in C Sharp Minor).
Barnett quotes a poignant letter from
the composer’s wife, attempting in her
husband’s absence to fight off creditors:
“We have here a whole collection of bills
and demands and my head is simply spinning
. . . I think about you all the time
and I don’t have the will to stop myself
crying.” Likewise openly admitted has
been Sibelius’s drinking problem, a condition
quite beyond the normal alcoholic
intake that Nature allots to Finns. (After
one binge at Gothenburg, Sweden, in
1923, he managed to stagger up to the
conductor’s rostrum on time; but in his
soused state, he mistook the concert for a
rehearsal, and therefore brought the performance
to a halt). Yet whatever connection
Sibelius’s boozing had with his ultimate
inactivity must be conjectural. That inactivity
itself, although famous, was hardly
uninterrupted. While Sibelius published
precious little new music in his last thirty
years—years which Barnett deals with in a
mere twenty-seven pages—he revised his
older music till a few weeks before the end;
and for long he hoped against hope that
his artistic conscience would allow him to
release his long-awaited Eighth Symphony.
Sadly, it never did. “How tremendously
tragic,” he confided to his diary when a
mere fifty-nine, “is the fate of an aging
composer. The work doesn’t flow as fast
as before.” Self-criticism, almost always
excessive in his case, eventually metastasized
into outright creative paralysis; and
he burned the symphony’s entire manuscript
during World War II. Did he subsequently
regret doing this? Possibly, since
his diaries indicate something of a bipolar
temperament from his youth onward. On
consecutive days in August 1896 he wrote
“my life often feels empty” and “Life feels
so rich again.” At any rate, the deed was
done, and we are forced to guess at what
musical treasures the flames consumed.

Along with Sibelius’s profound doubts
in major matters went a certain harmless
vanity in minor matters, this vanity
deriving in part from his small size.
Camera-shy on the whole, he nevertheless
somewhat enjoyed giving in photographs—
like another vertically challenged
twentieth-century artist-patriot, Yukio
Mishima—the impression of awesome
physical bulk. He found “Jean,” the
Frenchified version of his Christian name,
more congenial than the “Janne” with
which he had been baptized. Periodically
he had delusions of aristocratic lineage,
and on occasion he could resemble Evelyn
Waugh: “Flirting with the workers,”
he noted in the 1890s, “[is] worse than
currying favor with the upper class. One
has to crush so much of one’s own personality.”
Amid the Bolshevik-engendered
Finnish civil strife of 1918, he endured such
malnourishment that he lost twenty kilograms
over two months. Russian governments
considered him blatantly subversive:
Finlandia, the most renowned of his earlier
compositions, had the rare distinction of
being banned twice, first by Czar Nicholas
II’s regime, and again (in 1939–1940) by
Stalin’s. With Sibelius’s eightieth birthday
in 1945, his pre-eminence among Finns
lay beyond dispute, and was acknowledged
by Finnish presidents and prime ministers,
who made pilgrimages to his home, who
proffered wreaths at his funeral, and who
now and then permitted his portrait to
appear in his lifetime upon postage stamps.
But no amount of adulation could remove
his tendencies to black despair.

If there are sadder, bleaker utterances
in orchestral music than Sibelius’s quintessential
expressions of melancholy—The
Swan of Tuonela, the Fourth and Sixth
Symphonies, the Violin Concerto’s
opening movement—they cannot readily
be identified. (Tuonela is, in Finnish folklore,
hell: leave it to Scandinavians to
envisage hell as freezing.) Joy, when it does
occur in Sibelius’s output—as in the Fifth
Symphony’s finale—seems inseparable
from laborious heroism. It never belongs
to the realm of what Gustav Holst called
“domestic emotions.” Sibelius himself
described his style as “pure cold water”;
and with the passing of years it became
colder and colder, less and less conventionally
humane. His last tone poem, Tapiola
(Tapio being Finnish mythology’s forest
god), is a seventeen-minute hymn to the
most desolate pantheism. For its literary
equivalent, one must go to Robert Frost’s
febrile eschatological rumination, “Fire
and Ice,” (dating from 1920, only six years
prior to Sibelius’s score), which observes
that “for destruction” the power of ice is as
great as fire “and would suffice.”