After music, silence
Norman Lebrecht SIBELIUS, VOLUME III, 1914-1957 by Erik Tawastjerna, translated by Robert Layton Faber, £30, pp. 347 In the low-slung city of Helsinki, there is a restaurant on top of what was once the tallest building where the menu has not changed in 60 years. Overlooking the bay and archipelago, this is where General Carl Gustav Mannerheim liked to lunch as he led his people to independence from Russia in 1918, and twice to war in 1938- 44. Even now, the spartan fare and icy vodka call to mind the precariousness of a new nation squashed between two former ruling powers and long reduced to the shaming impotence of `Finlandisation'.
It was while lunching in Mannerheim's restaurant that I started to appreciate why Jean Sibelius destroyed his Eighth Symphony, feeding professionally copied sheets of full score into the furnace of his laundry room early in 1945. 'After this, my husband became calmer and gradually lighter in mood,' said the long-suffering Aino Sibelius. 'It was a happy time.'
Having worked on the symphony from 1930-33, promising premieres to Serge Koussevitsky in Boston and the Royal Phil- harmonic Society in London, Sibelius was assailed by a plague of self-doubt. He tinkered with the score for another decade and told one of his sons-in-law that if he could not finish the symphony his life would have been lived in vain. In the mean- time, however, the Russians invaded and he must have wondered what effect a Sibelius failure might have on national morale: he was Finland's most famous sym- bol, enlisted by Mannerheim to appeal for international aid.
He was the author of the national anthem and of songs that every schoolchild sang. On his 70th birthday, all the Helsinki newspapers came out with Sibelius editions, the prime ministers of Sweden, Norway and Denmark attended a festive concert and even Hitler (whom Sibelius loathed) sent him the Goethe Medal. He shouldered a huge burden of patriotic responsibility and personal self-worth. He would not let himself or his country down. So he burned the stubborn symphony, and felt the better for it.
This, of course, is critical speculation. The evidence, all of it anecdotal, is arrayed with a minimum of authorial comment in the final part of the late Professor Tawast- jerna's long-awaited biography. Com- pressed from the last two of five Swedish volumes and smoothly translated by Robert Layton, this is the official life, authorised by the Sibelius heirs who granted full access to family papers — extant ones, that is, for it might be assumed that a man who could bum a whole symphony had recourse to the laundry room for other suppressions. The diaries, though, seem frank enough about his repetitive binges, frustrations and depressions:
Am alone, alone and again alone! We all live together in our home country and manage to get on famously. Yet underneath it all we hate each other good and proper.
It comes as a shock to realise that this is a happily married father of five and the spiritual father of an emergent nation writing in his cosy dacha as Christmas decorations are being hung in 1914. An artist's self-perception can override or dis- tort all that goes on around him, yet Sibelius in his dark moments was acutely aware of political and social realities and reproached himself bitterly for the pain he inflicted on his lofty but devoted wife. He appears to have lived both in this world and half out of it.
The book picks up his saga shortly before he turned 50, as Finland entered its fight for freedom and he struggled to achieve the Fifth Symphony, which underwent two public versions before reaching a satisfacto- ry outcome (some now prefer the earlier drafts). The near-concurrent consumma- tion of both dreams led Sibelius into the best decade of his life, inspiring two further symphonies, the symphonic poem Tapiola, the ballet-pantomime Scaramouche and countless choruses and songs. He became greatly admired in England, where the leading conductors and composers vied for his friendship, and increasingly in America. Yet the bile of a Baltic music crit- ic could drive him to distraction, and the deaths of his brother and friends aroused in him a terror of growing old. For the last third of his long life, Sibelius was creatively silent.
Tawastjerna relates the story so master- fully that events unfold apparently of their own momentum and one ends the book with hardly any questions. Yet there are large lacunae in the life that demand inter- pretation — why, for instance, did Sibelius go 10 years between the fourth and fifth symphonies and what really compelled his terminal 30-year silence? The answers lie in the addictive aspects of his personality that are explored in Guy Rickards' recent biography (Phaidon Press) — his addiction to alcohol, tobacco, women and, occasion- ally, violence, allied to the possible effects of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). Some of these tendencies are acknowl- edged by Tawastjerna, but they are taken so much for granted that the reader, and maybe the author himself, is rendered unaware of their destructive power. It is in the overcoming of these forces that Sibelius and his music can be seen in their full greatness.
Faber have done the book no favours by scrooging on illustrations, apart from a grainy cover portrait and two blurry sheets of symphonic autograph. For £30, the read- er has a right to expect visual stimulus and a nicer grade of paper. This is, after all, an indispensable biography. It is, for the forseeable future, the standard work on a composer who after another of those dark silences is now returning larger than ever to our concert halls and cultural life. If Faber did not feel that way, why bother to publish at all?
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