Download The Swan of Tuonela, Op. 22, No. 2

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NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
By James M. Keller, Program Annotator
The Leni and Peter May Chair
The Swan of Tuonela, Op. 22, No. 2 (from the Lemminkäinen Suite)
Symphony No. 4 in A minor, Op. 63
Finlandia, Op. 26, No. 7
Jean Sibelius
T
his season music lovers around the globe are
joining to celebrate the sesquicentennial of
the birth of Jean Sibelius, the most revered of Finland’s composers and a major 20th-century exponent of the symphony. In the 1890s he
emerged as the leading composer of Finnish nationalism, the figure who would most persuasively capture in sound the substance and spirit of
his nation’s history and mythology and transmit
them to the world outside.
Finland’s folk heritage had been largely codified during the 19th century, especially through
the publication of the Kalevala (Land of the Heroes), the epic that Elias Lönnrot compiled from
ancient pagan myths; he published the collection in 1835 and expanded it for a new edition in
1849. Before long, Finns who were inspired by
these writings turned their attention to the remote expanses of Karelia, in the eastern part of
the country near the White Sea, where ancient
poetic forms still survived. These discoveries
gave rise to the 19th-century brand of Romanticism known as Karelianism.
Sibelius was much swept up in the Karelian
movement, and in 1891 he traveled to that
region to visit a particularly renowned folk singer
and to transcribe the pieces the singer performed. Several concert works grew out of his encounters during that trip, including the Karelia
Suite and the Kullervo Symphony. In 1893 he
embarked on a Kalevala-inspired opera, The
Building of the Boat (Veneen luominen). He
didn’t get far with the project, but the exercise
gave him the basic material for an orchestral
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suite tracing the adventures of Lemminkäinen,
a cheerful, rather comical figure from the Kalevala who must accomplish several heroic deeds
(including traveling to Tuonela to slay the resident swan with a single arrow) before he will
be allowed to marry Pohjola’s daughter, the
Mistress of the North.
The Lemminkäinen Suite is a collection of four
tone poems, reflecting the composer’s interest at
that time in the music of Liszt, who had invented
the genre some decades before. Probably the repertoire work it most resembles in this regard is
Smetana’s Má Vlast (My Fatherland, 1872–79);
the movements of Sibelius’s work, closely related in their subjects, trace a single sweep of mythological legend, much as Má Vlast captures
snapshots of Czech history and landscape.
The Lemminkäinen Suite was worked out in
fits and starts, and considerable revision occurred before the 1896 premiere of its four movements. The overture to The Building of the Boat
became The Swan of Tuonela: it was placed second, following Lemminkäinen and the Maids of
the Island and preceding Lemminkäinen in Tuonela and Lemminkäinen’s Return. Revisions and
re-orderings ensued in 1897 and later, with The
Swan of Tuonela achieving its final form in 1900.
Of the four movements, only The Swan of Tuonela
and Lemminkäinen’s Return (a.k.a. Lemminkäinen’s Homecoming) have been widely represented in the concert hall. A bad review from one
critic at its unveiling made the composer very
touchy about his Suite. The other two movements were not played again until 1935, and the
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complete four-movement suite was not published
until 1954. (Because of Sibelius’s re-ordering of
the movements of the Lemminkäinen Suite, The
Swan of Tuonela is identified sometimes as Op. 22,
No. 2, and sometimes as Op. 22, No. 3.)
In an inscription at the top of his score, referring to the passage in Canto 14 of the Kalevala in which this waterfowl is introduced,
Sibelius explains:
Tuonela, the land of death, the hell of Finnish mythology, is surrounded by a large
river with black waters and a rapid current,
on which the Swan of Tuonela floats majestically, singing.
A small, deep-pitched and dark-hued orchestra lends a mysterious atmosphere to this
travelogue through the realm of the dead, and
the swan’s mournful, modal death-song (Andante molto sostenuto) is hauntingly intoned by
the English horn. The orchestration is masterful throughout, and the string writing is especially notable, dividing into as many as 17
parts, all muted except for the double basses,
and including (near the end) a brief passage of
shivering tremolos played col legno (that is,
with the wood of the bow) to yield an especially
stark effect. A spirit of resignation pervades the
movement, a sense of gravity, of tender melancholy, of hushed wonder at the desolation of
this frigid underworld.
When Sibelius embarked on his Symphony
No. 4 in 1910 he was grappling with intimations
of mortality. The composer had been punishing
his body for many years, particularly by overindulging in alcohol. In 1908 Sibelius began experiencing pain in his throat. A tumor was
diagnosed, and he borrowed enough money to
travel to Berlin for surgery. In the end, it took
14 operations to finally locate and remove the
tumor. Fearing a recurrence, the composer gave
up alcohol and tobacco for the next seven
years, a period his wife remembered as the happiest in their life together although, deprived of
his principal crutch, Sibelius was not at all
content with the situation.
The Swan of Tuonela, Op. 22, No. 2
Jean Sibelius
Born: December 8, 1865, in Tavastehus (Hämeenlinna), Finland
Died: on September 20, 1957, in Järvenpää, Finland
Work composed: The Swan of Tuonela, the first of the four tone poems comprising the Lemminkäinen Suite — also known as Four Legends from the Kalevala — was conceived in 1893 (as part of an
opera project that never came to fruition), provisionally completed in 1895, and revised in 1897 and
1900
World premiere: April 13, 1896, in Helsinki, Finland, as part of the complete Lemminkäinen Suite,
with the composer conducting the Helsinki Philharmonic
New York Philharmonic premiere: January 18, 1915, with Walter Damrosch conducting the New
York Symphony (which would later merge with the New York Philharmonic)
Most recent New York Philharmonic performance: June 18, 2005, David Robertson, conductor
Estimated duration: ca. 10 minutes
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Sources and Inspirations
Excerpts from the section of the Kalevala that relates Lemminkäinen’s misadventure in the underworld, and
his encounter with The Sawn of Tuonela, offer quite gruesome details. (Don’t worry; Lemminkäinen gets patched up in the next Canto). This 1888 translation by John Martin Crawford may remind many of Longfellow’s
Hiawatha (1854–55). As it happens, Longfellow consciously modeled that famous epic poem on the Kalevala:
Then the reckless Lemminkäinen,
Handsome hero, Kaukomieli,
Braved the third test of the hero,
Started out to hunt the wild-swan,
Hunt the long-necked, graceful swimmer,
In Tuoni’s coal-black river,
In Manala’s lower regions. …
Nasshut, blind and crippled shepherd,
Wretched shepherd of Pohjola,
Stood beside the death-land river,
Near the sacred stream and whirlpool,
Guarding Tuonela’s waters,
Waiting there for Lemminkäinen,
Listening there for Kaukomieli,
Waiting long the hero’s coming. …
Quick the wretched shepherd, Nasshut,
From the death-stream sends a serpent,
Like an arrow from a cross-bow,
To the heart of Lemminkäinen,
Through the vitals of the hero. ...
Lemminkäinen, wild and daring,
Helpless falls upon the waters,
Floating down the coal-black current,
Through the cataract and rapids
To the tombs of Tuonela.
There the blood-stained son of death-land,
There Tuoni’s son and hero,
Cuts in pieces Lemminkäinen,
Chops him with his mighty hatchet,
Till the sharpened axe strikes flint-sparks
From the rocks within his chamber,
Chops the hero into fragments,
Into five unequal portions,
Throws each portion to Tuoni,
In Manala’s lowest kingdom,
Speaks these words when he has ended:
”Swim thou there, wild Lemminkäinen,
Flow thou onward in this river,
Hunt forever in these waters,
With thy cross-bow and thine arrow,
Shoot the swan within this empire,
Shoot our water-birds in welcome!”
Lemminkäinen’s Mother, by Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela, 1897
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One senses darkness in the two major pieces
that arrived in the aftermath of this health crisis:
his string quartet Voces intimae and the Fourth
Symphony. Indeed, on one occasion he referred
to the latter as “a psychological symphony.” Of
Sibelius’s symphonies, the Fourth may be the
toughest to crack, uncompromising in its austerity and enigmatic in its emotional stance. Writing in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians (Second Edition), musicologist James
Hepokoski describes it as,
broken, despairingly contemplative, irretrievably lonely in tone, the product of much
compositional struggle and, above all, a resolute statement of the separatist side of his
conflicted artistic persona.”
While maintaining the classical stance of the
four-movement symphony, this work contains
some of Sibelius’s most modernist harmonic
writing, the whole piece being riddled through
with the interval of the augmented fourth (or tritone), in which is embedded a sort of bitonal
ambivalence. Themes do not develop in a
conventional way and the individual movements follow idiosyncratic structural paths.
Sibelius had struck an essentially Romantic
stance in his first two symphonies and a refined
Classicism in his Third. He strides bravely into
modernism in his Fourth, but he does so while
marching to his own drummer. This music has
practically nothing to do with the musical modernism that was making headlines at the time
— not with the inscrutable atonality of Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet (unveiled in 1908),
for example, or Stravinsky’s Firebird (introduced
in 1910). It’s premiere preceded by two months
that of Stravinsky’s Petrushka, but Sibelius
seems almost to have had premonitions of that
piece (and perhaps had heard advance gossip
about it) when he wrote to the British critic Rosa
Newmarch that his Fourth Symphony was “a
protest against present-day music. It has nothing, absolutely nothing of the circus about it.”
Conductor and composer Jussi Jalas (1908–85),
the husband of Sibelius’s daughter Margareta,
wrote in Kirjoituksia Sibeluiksen sinfonioista: Sinfonian eettinen pakka (Writings on Sibelius’s Symphonies: The Ethical Necessity of the Symphony):
For us Finnish musicians Sibelius’s Fourth
Symphony is like the Bible. We approach it with
great respect and devotion. In this work Sibelius had seen the unfathomable tragedy of life’s
inconsistency, and given it expression boldly,
by new means and in a new musical language.
Notwithstanding the independent and selfreliant spirit of its people, Finland was accustomed to existing in a state that fell short of real sovereignty. Since the 12th century it had operated
Symphony No. 4 in A minor, Op. 63
Jean Sibelius
Work composed: spring 1910 through early 1911, dedicated to Eero Järnefelt, the composer’s
brother-in-law
World premiere: April 3, 1911, in Helskinki, Finland, with the composer conducting the Orchestra of
the Helsinki Philharmonic Society
New York Philharmonic premiere: January 18, 1915, with Walter Damrosch conducting the New
York Symphony (which would later merge with the New York Philharmonic)
Most recent New York Philharmonic performance: October 27, 1987, Erich Leinsdorf, conductor
Estimated duration: ca. 36 minutes
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as a largely ignored province of Sweden (with
Russian incursions now and again), and in
1809, pursuant to the upheavals of the Napoleonic Era, it was established as an autonomous grand duchy within the Russian Empire,
which made not much difference to the average
Finn on the street. But in 1894 Nicholas II ascended to the throne and five years later he decided to crack down on his Finnish subjects,
issuing the so-called February Manifesto that
vastly limited civil rights. There wasn’t much
the Finns could do about it — not until 1917 did
they finally declare their independence from
Russia — but they entered a phase that became
known as the “years of passive resistance.”
The Finns’ nationalistic sentiments began to
bubble up in the form of public protests.
During the summer of 1899 the Russians turned
their attention to controlling the Finnish press
and closed down one newspaper after another.
In response, the Finnish press organized a public
extravaganza, as a benefit for the Press Pension
Fund, that included dramatic tableaux illustrating events in Finnish history. Sibelius was asked
to compose appropriate music to accompany the
performance at Helsinki’s Swedish Theatre. He
ended up providing an overture, a piece to illustrate each of the five ensuing tableaux, soft background music to accompany the connecting
spoken sections, and a concluding tone poem.
The tableaux added up to an epic depiction of
Finnish history, comprising (following the Overture) “Väinämöinen’s Song” (a nod to the ancient
past), “The Finns are Baptized” (thereby embracing Christianity), “Duke Johan at Åbo Castle”
(a.k.a. “Festivo,” a dazzling glimpse of old Finnish nobility), “The Finns in the Thirty Year War”
(an episode from the 17th century), “The Great
Unrest” (a period of temporary Russian domination in the early 18th century), and, to end, “Finland Awakes!” (celebrating the hopefulness of
emerging Finnish nationalism at the time of the
performance). All in all, it was a daring cat-andmouse game in which the Finns pushed their nationalist agenda while hiding behind the
ostensibly charitable goal of raising funds for
aging journalists. The irony of the event was not
lost on Governor-General Nikolai Ivanovich
Bobrikov, who was overseeing the Russianization
of Finland at the time. Acknowledging the absurdity, he proposed that the seats in the theater’s
Imperial Box be put up for auction for the event,
Bad Influences
A health crisis precipitated by chronic drinking may have contributed to a sense of darkness in Sibelius’s Symphony No. 4. Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s famous 1894 painting Symposium: the Problem pictures Sibelius, the painter himself, and the composer Robert Kajanus “in their cups” around a table, with Sibelius
staring into space in bleary-eyed withdrawal, a cigarette dangling between his fingers. (A fourth character is
presumed to be composer Oskar Merikanto; it’s hard to be sure since he is passed out with his head buried
in the crook of his arm.) Apart from a large, Kalevala-inspired eagle’s wing superimposed over the painting’s
lefthand corners, it would seem to be an unfortunately realistic depiction. By 1903 Sibelius’s
wife, abetted by his close friends, felt that removing Sibelius from the source of temptation
would be salutary. The couple bought land and
built a little home in Järvenpää, some 20 miles
north of Helsinki — far away enough to keep the
composer’s big-city friends from dropping in,
which always afforded an excuse for a drink.
The idea was effective to some degree, but the
composer’s resources remained focused on the
bottle and he fell increasingly into debt.
Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s Symposium:
The Problem, 1894
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“in the interests of so good a cause.”
Sibelius’s contribution might easily have been
consigned to the rarely visited heap of occasional
music that composers have provided for soonforgotten events throughout history. But in this
case his efforts were not destined to fade once
the final curtain fell. Sensing the musical value
of his score, he refashioned the overture and the
first five episodes into his Scènes historiques
(Op. 25 and Op. 66), two sets of three pieces,
each published, respectively, in 1911 and 1912.
The most famous portion of his Press Pension
Celebrations music, by far, was its closing number, “Finland Awakes!,” which he would revise
a year after its composition into his most enduringly popular composition, the tone poem Finlandia. Sibelius did not attach that name to the
piece early on. In the context of seething political unrest it could not be presented under a title
that would so explicitly proclaim its nationalist
import. In fact, the piece was effectively banned
from performance in Finland for its first few
years. The Germans became acquainted with it
under the title Das Vaterland, and the French
learned it as La Patrie, but in the Baltic Provinces
it waspurveyed under the blandly uninformative
title of Impromptu.
Nonetheless, the piece and its patriotic subtext
were an open secret, and the Finns soon embraced it as an emblem for their aspirations of autonomy. Sibelius himself was not quite done with
In the Service of the State
Contrary to widespread popular assumption, Finlandia is not the national anthem of Finland. That honor
goes instead to a song by composer Fredrik Pacius
and lyricist Johan Ludvig Runeberg that was known as
“Vårt land” (in Swedish) when it was unveiled in 1848,
and is more commonly referred to today under its Finnish title “Maamme.” (Actually, even that is only an
unofficial national anthem, since it was never declared
through a legislative act.) Nonetheless, Finlandia — or
at least the “big tune” that arrives well into the piece —
is widely accepted as a national hymn. Curiously, it was
the national anthem of the African country of Biafra during the brief span of its existence, from 1967 to 1970.
it. In 1938, after he had essentially retired from
composition, he created an arrangement of it for
men’s chorus (“Finlandia-hymni”), and in 1948
he recast it yet again, this time for mixed chorus.
Instrumentation: The Swan of Tuonela calls for
oboe, English horn, bass clarinet, two bassoons,
four horns, three trombones, timpani, bass
drum, harp, and strings. Symphony No. 4 employs two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two
bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings. Finlandia calls for
two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals,
triangle, and strings.
Finlandia
Jean Sibelius
Work composed: 1899, as “Finland Awakes!,” the conclusion of the orchestral music for a dramatic
presentation of the Press Pension Celebrations; revised into its stand-alone form in 1900
World premiere: in its “Finland Awakes!” version, on November 4, 1899, at the Swedish Theatre in
Helsinki; in its revised form on July 2, 1900, in Helsinki, by the Philharmonic Society, Robert Kajanus,
conductor
New York Philharmonic premiere: January 22, 1920, Josef Stransky, conductor
Most recent New York Philharmonic performance: October 27, 1987, Erich Leinsdorf, conductor
Estimated duration: ca. 8 minutes
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