Högtärade Maestro: Högtärade Herr Baron. Korrespondensen mellan Axel Carpelan och Jean Sibelius 1900-1919 ed. by Fabian Dahlström (review)

Axel Carpelan (1859-1919), to whom the master dedicated his Second Symphony (1902), has long been a key if somewhat cloudy figure. Karl Ekman (1935) called him a "highly cultured man and a thoroughly distinguished personality." His great-nephew, the late Bo Carpelan, wrote Axel's feigned diary as a novel (1986), translated into English and French. For Sibelius's prime biographer, Erik Tawaststjerna, he had "little real stamina" and "never got himself far enough to undertake sustained [music] criticism, let alone playing or composing." For Glenda Dawn Goss (2009), he was "a most curious, even weird, yet wonderful figure." His appearance, bearing bouquets for the orchestra's members, at the departure of the Helsingfors Philharmonic for the World Exposition in Paris (1901), had caused much, well-remembered merriment. Later on, Sibelius, a bull in the china shop, brought it up in conversation with Axel, not realizing that Axel had been the bearer of floral gifts—a painful scene that Axel, in his turn, then recalled in a letter to Sibelius of April 13, 1911: "You had forgotten that I was that wretched figure."

It was a fraught relationship. Dahlström inserts pertinent passages from Sibelius's diaries (which, the Dagböcker 1909-1944, Dahlström published in 2005, with exhaustive commentary). On October 7, 1911, Sibelius called Carpelan "a strange, somewhat comical gentleman," and, on December 29, 1911, wrote: "Axel Carpelan [is] no longer my friend. Can't figure out the reason." By January 30, 1912, they had made up, and Axel announced yet another visit to Ainola, the Sibelius villa, whereupon Aino, Mrs. Sibelius, stated that she wanted to leave forthwith. (Aino and Axel were a prickly pair; Dahlström includes their correspondence as well, in which Axel goes on, and on, about his devotion to her husband.) On August 24, 1912, Sibelius recorded a vignette from Ainola, "at which I [Janne] couldn't control myself—it has to be finished between us, but—this my only admirer and friend—it feels hard." In his note (500), Dahlström suspects that the contretemps is the one described by Tawaststjerna: Axel grabbed Janne's hand as the chubby composer was about to take a second helping: "Not one more potato!"

Diets were not the only cause of friction; the diary for November 16, 1913 says: "It's all over with Axel because of Kajanus"—Robert Kajanus, the composer and conductor who, Sibelius thought, was stealing his thunder and his friend. Axel was a worrywart, a nervous Nellie, and a buttinsky. Yet the letters from Axel's side constantly—almost tediously— bear witness to his devotion and admiration. The two were a perfect fit, in their hypochondria (the letters complain incessantly about illnesses, real and imagined), in their emotional fragility, and in their talent. Axel had an expert command of music—he could read Sibelius's scores as they came to him and imagine how they would sound. Helpfully, he commented on details of orchestration and dynamics; he "burned" with desire to get the score of The Oceanides, composed and performed for Sibelius's concert at the Stoeckels' music-shed in Norfolk, Connecticut in 1914. When he at last received it, belatedly (November 17, 1915), he was beside himself: "A new break-through, new style and technique: Such sounds and harmonies [as] I have never heard before."

Effectively, he warned Sibelius away from opera; on December 6, 1909, after an excursion to Helsingfors to hear Madama Butterfly, he wrote: "Taken large, opera is a monstrosity, a debasement of music and of drama, too." (The production is identified by Dahlström [489]: the premiere took place on November 24, in Swedish Theater, and the Helsingfors Philharmonic was in the pit. The conductor was Georg Schneevoigt, of whom Carpelan—as a letter of December 15, 1916, tells us—entertained...