The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  As the twentieth century rumbled on, composers with strong national ties were haunted by feelings of obsolescence. Many twentieth-century symphonies, concertos, oratorios, and chamber works of the so-called conservative type were rich in lamentations for a lost world, elegies for the golden age, forebodings of disaster. Some found it difficult to keep writing: Elgar, who died in 1934, failed to finish another large-scale piece after his supremely elegiac Cello Concerto of 1918–19, and Rachmaninov, whom Tchaikovsky had anointed his heir apparent, produced only five major works from 1917 until his death in 1943.

  “I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien,” Rachmaninov wrote in 1939. “I cannot cast out the old way of writing, and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me. Unlike Madame Butterfly with her quick religious conversions”—this is presumably Stravinsky—“I cannot cast out my musical gods in a moment and bend the knee to new ones.” Sibelius felt the same pang of loss. “Not everyone can be an ‘innovating genius,’” he wrote one day in his diary. “As a personality and ‘eine Erscheinung aus den Wäldern’ [apparition from the woods] you will have your small, modest place.”

  And yet the so-called regional composers—for whom Sibelius speaks in this book as a representative—left behind an imposing body of work, which is integral to the century as a whole. Their music may lack the vanguard credentials of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, at least on the surface, but some words from Nielsen’s book Living Music make a good counterargument: “The simplest is the hardest, the universal the most lasting, the straightest the strongest, like the pillars that support the dome.” Precisely because these composers communicated general feelings of mourning for a pretechnological past, or, more simply, yearning for vanished youth, they remained acutely relevant for a broad public.

  Mainstream audiences may lag behind the intellectual classes in appreciating the more adventurous composers, but sometimes they are quicker to perceive the value of music that the politicians of style fail to comprehend. Nicolas Slonimsky once put together a delightful book titled Lexicon of Musical Invective, anthologizing wrongheaded music criticism in which now canonical masterpieces were compared to feline caterwauling, barnyard noises, and so on. Slonimsky should also have written a Lexicon of Musical Condescension, gathering high-minded essays in which now canonical masterpieces were dismissed as kitsch, with a long section reserved for Sibelius.

  Born in 1865, Sibelius was not merely the most famous composer Finland ever produced but the country’s chief celebrity in any field. He played a symbolic but active role in the drive toward Finnish independence, which was finally achieved in 1917. Asked to characterize their culture, Finns invariably mention, alongside such national treasures as the lakeside sauna, Fiskars scissors, and the Nokia cellular phone, “our Sibelius.” Before the advent of the euro, Sibelius’s monumental head graced every hundred-markka banknote. Mostly because of him, classical music has retained a central role in modern Finnish culture. The country’s government invests enormous sums in orchestras, opera houses, new-music programs, and music schools. The annual Finnish expenditure on the arts is roughly two hundred times per capita what the U.S. government spends on the National Endowment for the Arts.

  In a certain sense, Finns are strangers in the European family. Belonging to the Finno-Ugrian category, they speak a language largely unrelated to the Indo-European group. For centuries they were governed by the kingdom of Sweden; then, in 1809, they became a semi-autonomous grand duchy of tsarist Russia. In the late nineteenth century, the Swedish influence remained strong, with a minority of Swedish speakers forming the upper crust of society. Sibelius belonged to this Swedish elite; his father spoke no Finnish, and he himself learned it as a second language. Yet, like many of his generation, he avidly joined in the independence campaign, whose cultural apparatus blended traces of ancient tribal ritual with invented mythologies in the Romantic vein. The nationalist movement became more urgent after Tsar Nicholas II introduced measures designed to suppress Finland’s autonomy.

  The national legends of Finland are contained in the Kalevala, a poetic epic compiled in 1835 by a country doctor named Elias Lönnrot. Cantos 31 through 36 of the Kalevala tell of the bloodthirsty young fighter Kullervo, who “could not grasp things / not acquire the mind of a man.” While collecting taxes for his father, Kullervo has his way with a young woman who turns out to be his sister. She commits suicide, he goes off to war. One day he finds himself again in the forest where the rape occurred, and strikes up a conversation with his sword, asking it what kind of blood it wishes to taste. The sword demands the blood of a guilty man instead of an innocent one, whereupon Kullervo rams his body on the blade. In 1891 and 1892, Sibelius used this rather dismal tale as the basis for his first major work, Kullervo, an eighty-minute symphonic drama for men’s chorus, soloists, and orchestra.

  Kullervo anticipates the folk realism of Stravinsky and Bartók in the way it heeds the rhythm and tone of a Kalevala recitation. In 1891, shortly after completing two years of study in Berlin and Vienna, Sibelius traveled to the old town of Porvoo to hear runic songs chanted by the folksinger Larin Paraske. The Finnish epic has a meter all its own: each line contains four main trochaic beats, but vowels are often stretched out for dramatic effect, so that each line has its own pattern. Instead of smoothing out the poetry into a foursquare rhythm, Sibelius bent his musical language in sympathetic response. In the setting of the passage below—from “Kullervo and His Sister,” the third movement of Kullervo—the orchestra maintains a pattern of five beats in a bar while the chorus elongates its lines to phrases of fifteen, ten, eight, and twelve beats, respectively.

  The harmony, meanwhile, drifts away from major-and minor-key tonality. The runic melodies, with their overlapping modes, twine around the chords that lie beneath them; at moments, the accompaniment amounts to a rumbling cluster, a massing together of the available melodic tones.

  Kullervo had a decisively successful first performance in Helsinki in 1892. For the remainder of the decade, Sibelius worked mainly in the tone-poem genre, consolidating his fame with such works as En Saga, The Swan of Tuonela (part of the symphonic Lemminkäinen Suite), the Karelia Suite, and Finlandia. Sibelius’s mastery of the orchestra, already obvious in Kullervo, became prodigious. The Swan of Tuonela, which was initially conceived as the overture to an unfinished Kalevala opera, begins with the mirage-like sound of A-minor string chords blended one into the next over a span of four octaves. Sibelius’s early works, like contemporaneous works of Strauss, obey a kind of cinematic logic that places disparate images in close proximity. But where Strauss—and later Stravinsky—used rapid cuts, Sibelius preferred to work in long takes.

  Sibelius finished his first two symphonies in 1899 and 1902, respectively. On the surface, these were typical orchestral dramas of the heroic soul, although Sibelius’s habit of breaking down themes into murmuring textures sounded strange to many early listeners. Finns quickly appropriated the Second as an emblem of national liberation; the conductor Robert Kajanus heard in it “the most broken-hearted protest against all the injustice that threatens at the present time,” together with “confident prospects for the future.” In other words, the symphony was understood as a gesture of defiance in the face of the tsar. Although Sibelius rejected this interpretation, images of Finnish struggle may well have played a role in his thinking. In the finale of the Second, a slowly crawling, rising-and-falling pattern in the violas and cellos shows a distinct likeness to a figure in the second scene of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov—the scene in which Pimen the monk records the villainies of Tsar Boris.

  At a time when verbal declarations of national feeling were censored by tsarist overseers—at one performance Finlandia had to be presented under the title Impromptu—the Second served as the focus of clandestine patriotic demonstrations. It was thus the first in a series of politically charged twentieth-century works; secret programs would, of course, late
r be attached to Shostakovich’s symphonies.

  No such messages were detected in Sibelius’s other “hit” scores of the period, the brilliantly moody Violin Concerto and the affectingly maudlin Valse triste, but they cemented his international reputation and therefore increased his stature at home. It was around this time that Sibelius’s alcoholism became an issue. He would fortify himself with liquor before conducting engagements and afterward disappear for days. A widely discussed painting by the Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela, The Problem, showed Sibelius in the middle of a drinking bout with friends, his eyes rolled back in his head. Although the composer was now supported by a state pension, he ran up large debts. He was also beset by illnesses, some real and some imagined. Cracks were appearing in the facade that “Finland’s hero” presented to the world.

  In 1904 Sibelius tried to escape the multiplying embarrassments of his Helsinki lifestyle by moving with his family to Ainola. There he set to work on his Third Symphony, which was itself a kind of musical escape. In contrast to the muscular rhetoric of Kullervo and the first two symphonies, the Third speaks in a self-consciously clear, pure language. At the same time, it is a sustained deconstruction of symphonic form. The final movement begins as a quicksilver Scherzo, but it almost imperceptibly evolves into a marchlike finale: the listener may have the feeling of the ground shifting underfoot.

  It was in the wake of composing this terse, elusive work that Sibelius got into a debate with Gustav Mahler on the nature of the symphony. Mahler came to Helsinki in 1907 to conduct some concerts, and Sibelius presented his latest ideas about “severity of form,” about the “profound logic” that should connect symphonic themes. “No!” Mahler replied. “The symphony must be like the world. It must be all-embracing.”

  Sibelius kept a close eye on the latest developments in European music. On visits to Germany, he made the acquaintance of Strauss’s Salome and Elektra and Schoenberg’s earliest atonal scores. He was variously intrigued, alarmed, and bored by these Austro-German experiments; more to his taste was the sensuous radicalism of Debussy, whose Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun,” Nocturnes, and La Mer revealed new possibilities in modal harmony and diaphanous orchestral color. In general, though, he felt ill at ease in the fast-moving environs of Berlin and Paris. He resolved to stay true to his Alleingefühl, his feeling of aloneness, to play his role as “apparition from the woods.”

  In his next symphony, the Fourth, Sibelius presented his listeners with music as forbidding as anything from the European continent at the time. He wrote it in the wake of several risky operations on his throat, where a tumor was growing. His doctors instructed him to give up drinking, which he agreed to do, although he would resume in 1915. The temporary loss of alcohol—“my most faithful companion,” he later called it—may have contributed to the claustrophobic grimness of the music, which, at the same time, bespoke a liberated intellect. The first few bars of the symphony extrapolate a new dimension in musical time. The opening notes, scored darkly for cellos, basses, and bassoons, are C, D, F-sharp, and E—a harmonically ambiguous whole-tone collection. It feels like the beginning of a major thematic statement, but it gets stuck on the notes F-sharp and E, which oscillate and fade away. Meanwhile, the durations of the notes lengthen by degrees, from quarter notes to dotted quarters and then to half notes. It’s as if a foreign body were exerting gravitational force on the music, slowing it down.

  The narrative of the Fourth is circular rather than linear; it keeps revisiting the same unresolved conflicts. An effort at establishing F major as the key of the initially sunnier-sounding second movement founders on an immovable obstacle in the form of the note B-natural, after which there is a palpable shrug of defeat. The third movement dramatizes an attempt to build, note by note, a solemn six-bar theme of funerary character; the first attempt falters after two bars, the second after five, the third after four, the fourth after three. The fifth attempt proceeds with vigor but seems to go on too long, sprawling through seven bars without coming to a logical conclusion. Finally, with an audible grinding of the teeth, the full orchestra plays the theme in a richly harmonized guise. Then uncertainty steals back in.

  The finale thins out as it goes along, as if random pages of the orchestral parts have blown off the music stands. This is music facing extinction, a premonition of the silence that would envelop the composer two decades later. Erik Tawaststjerna, Sibelius’s biographer, reveals that the middle section of the movement is based on sketches that Sibelius made for a vocal setting of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” in a German translation. It is easy to see why a student of the Kalevala would have savored Poe’s mesmerizing repetition of images—and also easy to see how a man of Sibelius’s psychological makeup would have been drawn to its melancholia:

  “Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!

  Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”

  Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

  The German version duplicates the rhythm of Poe’s original, so the curious listener can correlate lines of “The Raven” with corresponding material in the Fourth’s finale. A softly crying flute-and-oboe line in the coda exactly fits the words “Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’” The symphony closes with blank-faced chords that are given the dynamic marking mezzo-forte, or half-loud. That instruction is surprising in itself. Most of the great Romantic symphonies end with fortissimo affirmations. Wagner operas and Strauss tone poems often close pianissimo, whether in blissful or tragic mood. Sibelius ends not with a bang or a whimper but with a leaden thud.

  When the Fourth Symphony had its first performance, in April 1911, Finnish audiences were taken aback. “People avoided our eyes, shook their heads,” Aino Sibelius recalled. “Their smiles were embarrassed, furtive or ironic. Not many people came backstage to the artists’ room to pay their respects.” This was a Skandalkonzert in Scandinavian style, a riot of silence.

  “A symphony is not just a composition in the ordinary sense of the word,” Sibelius wrote in 1910. “It is more a confession of faith at different stages of one’s life.” If the Fourth is a confession, its composer might have been on the verge of suicide. Yet, like so many Romantics before him, Sibelius took a perverse pleasure in surrendering to melancholy, finding joy in darkness. “Freudvoll und leidvoll,” he wrote in his diary—“Joyful and sorrowful.” In his next symphony, he set himself the goal of bringing to the surface the joy inherent in creation.

  Joy is not the same thing as simplicity. The Fifth begins and ends in crystalline major-key tonality, but it is an unconventional and staggeringly original work. The schemata of sonata form dissolve before the listener’s ears; in place of a methodical development of well-defined themes there is a gradual, incremental evolution of material through trancelike repetitions. The musicologist James Hepokoski, in a monograph on the symphony, calls it “rotational form”; the principal ideas of the work come around again and again, each time transformed in ways both small and large. The themes really assume their true shape only at the end of the rotation—what Hepokoski calls the “telos,” the epiphanic goal. The method is similar to the one that J. Peter Burkholder, in his studies of Ives, calls “cumulative form.” Music becomes a search for meaning within an open-ended structure—a microcosm of the spiritual life.

  At the beginning of the Fifth, the horns present a softly glowing theme, the first notes of which spell out a symmetrical, butterfly-like set of intervals: fourth, major second, fourth again. (Fifty years later, John Coltrane used the same configuration in his jazz masterpiece A Love Supreme.) Sibelius’s key is heroic E-flat major, but the melody turns out to be a rather flighty thing, never quite touching the ground. A rhythmic trick adds to the sense of weightlessness. At first it sounds as if we’re in a standard 4/4 meter, but after a syncopated sidestep it turns out that we’re in 12/8. A rotation process begins: the material is broken into fragments and reshaped. In the fourth rotation an electrifying change occurs: t
he tempo accelerates by increments until the music is suddenly hurtling forward. Sibelius achieved this effect by way of an exceptional feat of self-editing. After the premiere of the first version of the symphony in 1915, he decided to rework it completely, and one of the things he did was to cut off the ending of the first movement, cut off the beginning of the second, and splice them together. The accelerating passage becomes a cinematic “dissolve” from one movement to another.

  The second movement of the Fifth provides a spell of calm, although beneath the surface a significant new idea is coming to life—a swaying motif of rising and falling intervals, which the horns pick up in the finale and transform into the grandest of all Sibelian themes. The composer called it his “swan hymn”; he recorded it in his notebook next to a description of sixteen swans flying in formation over his Ainola home. “One of my greatest experiences!” he wrote. “Lord God, that beauty! They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a gleaming, silver ribbon…That this should have happened to me, who have so long been the outsider.” The swans reappeared three days later: “The swans are always in my thoughts and give splendor to [my] life. [It’s] strange to learn that nothing in the whole world affects me—nothing in art, literature, or music—in the same way as do these swans and cranes and wild geese. Their voices and being.”