The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius.

Gray, Laura J.

The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius. Edited by Daniel M. Grimley. (Cambridge Companions to Music.) New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. [xvii, 273 p. ISBN 0-521-81552-5. $75.] Music examples, index, bibliography.

In 1933, at the height of the British Sibelius cult, Ernest Newman wrote, "We of today are much too close to Sibelius ... to attempt anything like a picture of him as the generation of 1960 or 2000 will see him" ("Sibelius: Most Personal of Great Composers [1 October 1933]," in More Essays from the World of Music, rev. ed., selected by Felix Aprahamian [London: John Calder, 1976], 2:117). From the unmitigated adulation of the 1930s, to the critical decline of the 1960s, and the recent flurry of interest since the early 1990s, Newman predicted with keen foresight the precise turning points in Sibelius's evolving reputation over the last seventy years. Today, with the completion of Robert Layton's translation of the biography by Erik Tawaststjerna, the BIS label's superb efforts to issue the entire output of the composer's works (including original versions of some), and a long-awaited complete edition, all signs point to a Sibelius renaissance, if not another cult. Symptomatic of the renewed fascination, The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius appears as the sixth essay collection on Sibelius in a decade.

With its five other "companions," why do we need a sixth? In a way, one collection begets another. Research into Sibelius's life and music is progressing so rapidly that most of the advanced research on him appears in essay collections rather than single-author monographs. Multi-contributor volumes can be issued much more quickly, can more immediately build on new discoveries, and, therefore, can represent very recent scholarship, and The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius represents the latest to date.

The editor, Daniel M. Grimley, has brought together a group of scholars who have distinguished themselves in Sibelius scholarship and beyond. More than half of the contributors read papers at the Third International Jean Sibelius Conference in Helsinki in 2000, which served as inspiration for the volume, although the book is not a record of those proceedings. That can be found in Matti Huttunen, Kari Kilpelainen, and Veijo Murtomaki, eds., Sibelius Forum Il: Proceedings from the Third International Jean Sibelius Conference [Helsinki: Sibelius Academy, Department of Composition and Music Theory, 2003]. These are new works, presumably invited submissions, not written versions of presented papers.

The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius, like most essay collections, is not a volume to be read from cover to cover. Taken together, however, the fifteen essays on various topics, organized in four parts (biography, works, influence and reception, and interpretation) establish an overarching theme best summed up by Morton Feldman in 1984: "The people who you think are radicals might really be conservatives. The people who you think are conservative might really be radical" (p. 215). Overall, the volume demonstrates Sibelius's unique treatment of contemporaneous modernist and post-modernist tendencies and proposes that, even in the most "absolute" symphonies, his music was formed out of extra-musical narratives, meanings, and influences. In a word, Sibelius was current, tapping into advanced and immediate harmonic, tonal, and formal discoveries to form his own unique and innovative structures that are only now becoming more clearly interpreted and understood. It has taken several decades to form the technical language and historical perspective to evaluate the composer's role in twentieth-century music and, on the whole, the scholarship represented in this volume, even if colored with a sometimes defensive and adulatory tone, takes important steps in assessing a corpus of music which has from the beginning eluded description and categorization.

Of special note in the analysis section of the book is Arnold Whittall's essay on the later symphonies where, through a rethinking of the third to seventh symphonies, he presents a refreshing and stimulating argument that, rather than contradicting one another, Sibelius's modernist/anti-modernist tendencies interacted to make the music particularly vital. Whittall states, "Sibelius relished the opportunity to explore ways in which these conflicting tendencies could converge" (p. 58). Stephen Downes' chapter, "Pastoral Idylls, Erotic Anxieties and Heroic Subjectivities in Sibelius's Lemminkainen and the Maidens of the Island and First Two Symphonies," weaves together tonal, harmonic and formal analysis with a reading based on archetypal heroic narrative models (in music and literature) and persuasively draws a connection between the three works. James Hepokoski's cleverly-titled essay, "Finlandia Awakens," examines the original context of the work as music for a tableau vivant and analyzes the puzzling form of this all-too-familiar, iconic work. Hepokoski suggests that, situated historically at the cusp of a new century, Finlandia ("Finland Awakens") can only be clearly understood in the context of the original themes of the tableau and of political conditions in Finland at the time: its form invokes and then swerves away from traditional sonata form, representing the "progress and drive to self-identity" (p. 91) of the burgeoning nation. In his essay on the tone poems, Grimley addresses a difficult aspect of Sibelius's music: the idea of landscape. Convincingly, he draws on scholarship from outside the Sibelius literature to reinterpret landscape beyond purely representational portrayal, seeing it as "a mode of perception," and a symbolic, cultural and, inevitably, artificial construct that can inform or even "motivate" form in Sibelius's tone poems (p. 107).

Peter Franklin's engaging summary of Sibelius's five visits to England and of the British literature on the composer is all the more interesting because of the way he brings some of the central figures of Sibelius British reception to life, namely, Granville Bantock, Ernest Newman, Rosa Newmarch, and Henry Wood. The chronology of Sibelius's introduction to the British musical world, however, is somewhat unclear here. Franklin suggests, for example, that Bantock (one of the composer's best advocates in Britain) first encountered Sibelius's music between 1897 and 1900 and that it was Bantock who "at some point" introduced Wood to the music of Sibelius through a performance of En saga at Liverpool (p. 184); whereas, without question, the first performance of a Sibelius work was given in the fall of 1901, when Wood first introduced London audiences to the "King Christian II" Suite.

Julian Anderson's fascinating contribution, "Sibelius and Contemporary Music," a review of Sibelius' influence on recent composers far beyond the expected Scandinavians, deserves special comment. Despite going perhaps too far in his concluding paragraph, where he claims "there is virtually no major composer working today who has not been directly affected by the work of Jean Sibelius" (p. 216). Anderson manages nevertheless to explain clearly, from a composer's perspective, some highly esoteric aspects of music from an array of international composers, in whose works Sibelius's influence can be felt. Anderson's essay points up just how far the pendulum has swung. The shift in musical discourse is so strong that composers at the forefront of music openly admit the compelling attraction of a composer whose music for years was considered hopelessly behind the times.

Two chapters deal with traditionally the most under-appreciated works, the songs and piano music. Veijo Murtomaki surveys the miniature piano pieces, defending their quality against a long-standing assumption of their role as potboilers in Sibelius's output, even by his most ardent champions. Jeffrey Kallberg's essay addresses a single theme ("love, sex and style in Sibelius's songs") in a handful of songs, demonstrating very convincingly that Sibelius emphasized "overall meaning" rather than focusing on individual words (p. 123), availed himself of a variety of styles, and sometimes set overtly sexual poetic themes, incorporating "fin-de-siecle visions of 'modernity,'" as sexuality's significance was increasingly recognized in the formation of the individual (p. 128).

Considering the necessary level of familiarity with Sibelius's works and some of the more advanced analytical discussion, this volume is, by and large, for Sibelius scholars. But not all the entries focus on esoteric musicology or analysis, and the amateur Sibelian will be delighted with the final chapter, where Grimley gives the last word to two of the most celebrated interpreters of Sibelius's music, Colin Davis and Osmo Vanska. In Grimley's interview with Davis, snatched between rehearsals, the conductor offers insights into the multiple layers in Sibelius' music through a conversation rich in colorful metaphor. Vanska, conducting many of the works in the BIS label's cycle, reveals that his performances often startle audiences because of his faithfulness to what Sibelius has written not only in the score, but also in manuscripts, which he often consults for clarification. His exactitude is matched by his understanding of Sibelius as a human being, making Vanska able to embrace and convey the ambivalence in Sibelius's music.

Unfortunately, Newman's crystal ball only saw clearly to the end of the twentieth century, but it would be interesting to have a clear view of just how far the pendulum of critical opinion will swing in the coming decades. Maybe we will have more perspective on reasons for our present renewed interest in the composer. Whether it results in another critical backlash or an increased interest in his music, I am confident that Sibelius's music will continue to fascinate audiences, who have remained loyal throughout the decades of critical debate.

LAURA J. GRAY

University of Waterloo