Download JEAN SIBELIUS Symphony No. 4 in A minor, Op

JEAN SIBELIUS
Symphony No. 4 in A minor, Op. 63
Born: Hämeenlinna, Finland, December 8, 1865
Died: Järvenpää, Finland, September 20, 1957
Work composed: 1909-11
First performance: Helsinki, April 3, 1911, the composer conducting
Jean Sibelius wrote his Fourth Symphony during a particularly trying period in his life.
When he began forming ideas for this piece, in the autumn of 1909, he was beset by
troubles. A year earlier doctors had discovered a malignant tumor in his throat. Although
an operation removed it, his surgeon gave a guarded prognosis. For several years Sibelius
worried that his time might be short. (Ironically, he lived nearly half a century longer,
into his nineties.) Moreover, he had to give up cigars, a pleasure he had enjoyed greatly
for years. He also decided to abandon alcohol, another favorite amenity. Never drawn to
asceticism, Sibelius now found that condition thrust upon him.
There were other worries. The composer was deeply in debt, his small stipend from the
Finnish government being not nearly enough to meet his expenses. During the year 1910,
as he tried to sustain work on his new symphony, Sibelius frequently had to leave
composing and deal with his creditors. Were all this not sufficiently depressing, Sibelius
increasingly felt alienated from new compositional trends. Music by Arnold Schoenberg
and other exponents of the nascent modern movement proved little more appealing. This
sense of estrangement from the musical vanguard fueled a growing resentment at what
Sibelius believed was a general lack of appreciation for his work. “No one, no one at all
discusses me,” he complained in his diary. “I’m completely out of the picture.”
In light of these worries and complaints, it is hardly surprising that the Fourth Symphony
endured an arduous creation. From the beginning, Sibelius saw it as the start of a new
direction for his work. “I am intentionally burning my boats,” he proclaimed to his diary
as he began writing the work in earnest, in January 1910. “Holding high the banner of
real art.” But by spring his optimism had waned. “Again in the deepest depression,” reads
a diary entry of April 21. In early August Sibelius was still wrestling with the central
development passage of the first movement. Two weeks later he crossed out all he had
written of it and started over.
Sibelius struggled with the composition into the first months of 1911. He finished the
work just in time for its inclusion on a concert of his music in April of that year. The
symphony puzzled listeners and critics. “Everything seems strange,” one reviewer wrote.
“Posterity must decide whether the composer has overstepped the boundaries dictated by
sound, natural musicianship.”
What posterity has decided is that the Fourth Symphony is a masterpiece. Although its
four-movement outline implies a classical symphonic plan, the music with which Sibelius
fills that familiar mold is as original as any he wrote. It is also perhaps the most interior,
the most subjective. Throughout the composition, we encounter striking melodic
gestures, unexpected turns of harmony and highly evocative textures, none sounding like
the thoughts of any other composer. There are powerful orchestral statements but also
passages with the delicacy of chamber music. While the composition can be analyzed in
terms of symphonic form and the evolution of its thematic materials, it more readily gives
the impression of unfolding according to its own logic and impulses. Much of the music
seems dark, strange, disquieted.
It is reasonable to ask what such a piece might “mean,” and more specifically whether it
reflects in any way the composer’s circumstances at the time he wrote it. Sibelius denied
this, insisting that the symphony contained no allusions, biographical or otherwise, that it
was purely an abstract musical work. And yet, in November 1910, while in the throes of
creating this piece, Sibelius wrote in his diary: “A symphony, after all, is not a
‘composition’ in the usual sense. It is more like a declaration of faith at various stages in
one’s life.” Individuals need to make declarations of faith when faced with some crisis.
Sibelius was, of course, within his rights in maintaining a reticence about this. But the
music of his Fourth Symphony surely speaks of some spiritual challenge and the faith of
a determined artist in meeting it.
What to Listen For
The brooding passage for low strings and bassoons that opens the symphony establishes
the somber tone of its initial movement. Much of the scoring here has the delicacy of
chamber music, and this is true in the rest of the work also. The second movement
presents the light textures and buoyant rhythms of a scherzo, while the third seems a quiet
and deeply personal meditation. With the finale we at last find some of the robust kind of
music for which Sibelius is well known and admired, though even here the composer
uses his orchestral forces fairly judiciously. The closing minutes bring a return of the
solemn tone and unadorned string timbre of the symphony’s opening moments.
© 2015 Paul Schiavo