The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius (review)

This is a welcome addition to the highly successful series of composer Companions and amounts to something of an antidote to Sibelius Studies, edited by Timothy L. Jackson and Veijo Murtomäki (Cambridge, 2001; reviewed in Music & Letters, 82 (2001), 663-6). Indeed, the differing natures of these parallel Cambridge publications is scarcely more pointed than here, despite an inevitable overlap of three authors. The Companion is characterized by a variety of approaches, accessibility, and a balanced editorial policy; the list of contributors reveals a refreshingly wide range of backgrounds and experience. Sibelius Studies is dominated by its lead editor (to the tune of nearly a hundred pages), acres and acres of 'Schenkerian' analysis ('prolongation' in an all too literal sense), and a narrowness of ethos that certainly had a 'reductive' effect on some notable contributions.

Daniel M. Grimley has assembled a genuine symposium, explaining that the project emerged from the 3rd International Sibelius Conference (December 2000), and something of that positive sense of collegiality permeates this volume. It is perhaps surprising to find that James Hepokoski has merely reproduced his conference paper here, despite its publication as part of the conference proceedings (Sibelius Forum II, ed. Matti Huttunen, Kari Kilpeläinen, and Veijo Murtomäki (Helsinki, 2003)); somehow his widely adopted terminology of 'rotation' (to describe Sibelian formal processes) has become applicable to this contribution. Nevertheless, 'Finlandia Awakens' offers an insightful investigation of the compositional subtleties of a work too readily dismissed by Sibelius critics, and Hepokoski's challenge to those who misunderstand the significance of this music—a new slant to counter old prejudices—is a recurrent issue in this book.

The presence of certain underlying themes gives coherence to the varied critical approaches, beyond the four sections in which these essays are grouped: Biography, Works, Reception, and Interpretation. Fundamental to all the contributions is the acknowledgement of the composer's centrality in twentieth-century music. The editor's introduction confirms that Sibelius 'challenges our received view of twentieth-century musical development as a straightforward linear progression from late Romanticism through modernism to serialism and the avant-garde' (p.1). With the enormous growth in recent Sibelius scholarship, it is rewarding to see this central tenet (which twenty years ago I could only tentatively adumbrate in my Ph.D. thesis) being renewed, confirmed, and comprehensively evaluated. The Companion offers new perspectives on issues of modernity and progressiveness that force those who still view Sibelius as traditional and marginal to think again.

Issues of national identity form an important strand here, and the book begins with two complementary perspectives. Matti Huttunen offers a fascinating overview of Sibelius's position, outlining why he became a national institution and how this ultimately was a burden. He suggests that the riddle of the incomplete Eighth Symphony arose from social-historical problems; as Finnish musical culture expanded, Sibelius retreated, and his subsequent estrangement resulted in a socially oppressed deadlock. A pivotal work in the rise and fall of Sibelius as a national hero is the epic Kullervo Symphony (a work about the rise and fall of another, mythical, national hero), which makes the study of its Vienna-based genesis compelling reading. Glenda Dawn Goss (editor of The Sibelius Companion (Westport, Conn., 1996)—it seems you can never have too many companions) delves into the psychological atmosphere of time and place. She reveals that the composer's personal anxieties lay behind his approach to this work, and these preoccupations affected both the choice and depiction of its subject matter. A searching combination of musical, literary, and psychological influences accounts for the crucially important nature of Sibelius's visit to Vienna.

Relative to Kullervo, Goss rightly asserts that there was 'no precedent for such stark, erotic realism in Finnish music', and there is something of a rather exotic, erotic element in a number of contributions to this volume. Stephen Downes discovers 'pastoral idylls, erotic anxieties and heroic subjectivities in Leminkäinen and the Maidens of the Island and the first two...