Symphony No. 1 in E minor, Opus 39

Jean Julius Christian Sibelius was born in Hämeenlinna (then known by the Swedish name Tavastehus), Finland, on December 8, 1865, and died in Järvenpää, near Helsinki, on September 20, 1957. He took the Gallicized form of his first name, Johan, in emulation of an uncle. Sibelius composed his First Symphony in 1898 and 1899 and conducted its first performance in Helsinki on April 26, 1899.

Sibelius’s Symphony No. 1 is scored for 2 flutes (doubling piccolos), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, harp, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).

For a composer whose reputation rests primarily on his achievements as a symphonist, Jean Sibelius started work on his first numbered symphony relatively late. When Sibelius began sketching his Symphony in E minor in the spring of 1898, he was 32 — still nearly enough a young man, but far from precocious. Sibelius’s belated start was consistent with broader trends in the Austro-German musical “mainstream” during the second half of the 19th century. The weight of the post-Beethoven tradition had become enough of a burden that figures as distinct as Brahms and Bruckner shared the view that the symphony was a form that should only be tackled with the wisdom of middle age. Matters were more complicated still for Sibelius, given his position as a Finnish composer on the geographic and cultural periphery of German-speaking concert life. During his twenties, Sibelius had trained in the musical power centers of Berlin and Vienna, where he was exposed to tense debates about the symphony’s future. Ironically, it was also in Vienna where Sibelius’s eyes were first opened to the distinctive character of his homeland’s cultural traditions. For most of the decade following his return to Finland in 1891, Sibelius’s energies were directed domestically, towards forging a uniquely national mode of compositional expression.

All-important for Sibelius’s brand of “national romanticism” was the folk music of Karelia, a rural area mostly located in modern-day Russia. Because Karelia remained untouched by modernization, nationalists considered it a repository of the Finnish ethos in its purest, most primordial form. The most important artifact of Sibelius’s early engagement with Karelianism was his choral symphony Kullervo (1892), which used a rude, “primitivist” idiom to depict episodes from Finland’s national epic, the Kalevala. A few years later, while Sibelius was under the spell of Richard Wagner, he repurposed his attempts to write an opera in his Lemminkäinen Suite (1895), a set of four Kalevala tone poems that he sometimes described as a symphony. The E minor symphony may have been Sibelius’s earliest numbered essay in the form, then, but it was hardly his first attempt to come to grips with problems of symphonic construction.

Work on the First coincided with an important shift in Sibelius’s professional priorities. Having established his reputation at home, by the end of the 1890s Sibelius was once again setting his sights beyond Helsinki in hopes of making inroads on international, cosmopolitan markets like the ones he spent time in as a student. To this end, Sibelius knew he would need a musical calling card — a work of some stature, but one not overtly preoccupied with “local” Finnish concerns. A symphony would do the trick. Signaling his engagement with the Austro-German “mainstream,” it would also be an effective vehicle for exporting his national-romantic idiom. After all, in a purely abstract symphony, that idiom could be untethered from explicitly Finnish poetic or mythological references. As the musicologist and Sibelius specialist James Hepokoski indicates of the First, Finnish listeners would have remained conscious of its Karelian folkloristic allusions, while international audiences would have instead heard it as vaguely, exotically “Nordic.”

Ironically, the English-language commentary on the First has been preoccupied with what may seem like a different matter altogether: the symphony’s affinities with scores by Russian composers like Tchaikovsky and Borodin. During the 19th century, Finland was a subject of the Russian Empire, and even after tensions started to flare in 1899, following attempts by Tsar Nicholas II to curtail Finland’s political autonomy, interchange between Russian and Finnish intellectuals remained widespread. (Saint Petersburg was easily accessible from Helsinki via steamship.) In this atmosphere, it was only natural that Sibelius would have known and admired some of Tchaikovsky’s works, especially his Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, which was only five years old in 1898.

Even so, the extent to which Sibelius was influenced by specific Russian scores remains an elusive subject. Some recent Sibelius scholarship suggests that many of the melodic, coloristic, and formal attributes of pieces like the First — attributes that English-speaking listeners have long heard through the prism of “Russianness” — may not have been direct borrowings from the likes of Tchaikovsky. The missing link was Sibelius’s Karelianism. The Finns were not the only ones drawn to Karelia; as a border region, it was a source of fascination for Russian-speaking artists and elites, too. On the contrary, Russian folklorists began collecting Karelian peasant songs long before their Finnish counterparts, and during the 19th century, those songs nourished the work of composers like Tchaikovsky. When Sibelius remarked of Tchaikovsky that “there is much in that man that I recognize in myself,” he may have been referring not just to his identification with specific works by Tchaikovsky, but also, to a broad Karelianist heritage they both shared.

The E minor symphony announces its Karelian folkloric preoccupations from the start, with a slow introduction that opens a portal onto an imagined Finnish past. The stark introduction features a moody clarinet solo, accompanied by the distant rumbling of timpani. The bard-like clarinet has primeval melodic simplicity that borrows from Karelian runolaulu, or Kalevalaic “rune singing,” which Sibelius had lauded as a resource for national romanticism in an 1896 lecture on Finland’s folk music. Violin tremolandos signal the onset of the Allegro energico, which presents an impulsive, thrusting theme conforming to “heroic” first-movement symphonic conventions. Two aspects of the theme encapsulate the symphonic plot to come. First, it has a “flaw” — it is interrupted by a violent tuba-and-timpani downbeat, followed by a dissonant ensemble cry recalling Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique. Over the course of the E minor symphony, Sibelius will return repeatedly to this sonority as a kind of harmonic idée fixe. Second, the impulsive theme hovers uneasily between a pair of related tonal centers, G major and its “oppressive,” undesirable double, E minor. The tension between the two tonalities will not be resolved until the symphony’s final pages.

Drawing on part of the clarinet chant, a contrasting thematic area foregrounds icy strings, twinkling harp, and twittering flutes. As Hepokoski argues, these materials represent a return to the “once upon a time” of the enchanted Finnish past, which had only partially been glimpsed in the introduction. They lead to an extended passage of call-and-response between solo oboe and paired flutes and clarinets, their mournful, “archaic” incantation again evoking rune singing. A development section works through elements of both thematic areas — the heroic, impulsive theme and the static, shamanistic rune songs. Quintessential Sibelius is the retransition to the recapitulation. Here, chromatic scales ascend and descend at varied speeds, producing a nearly athematic sound mass that evokes a snowstorm’s white-out. Soon, the violins and violas offer a fragment of the impulsive theme, like an apparition dimly visible through the snow. Although the apparition eventually achieves G major, a doleful, remorseless coda affirms the “oppressor,” E minor.

The Andante (ma non troppo lento — “but not too slow”) immediately indicates that E minor’s victory was only temporary: the music begins in the key of E-flat major. That key’s particular relationship to G major was one that Romantic-era composers typically used to signify tropes of reverie, fantasy, and the idyllic, and Sibelius does the same. The Andante’s dreamy, noble principal theme, first heard in muted strings, incorporates a modified version of the Pathétique dissonance, now wrapped with languorous chromatic voice leading. An abrupt cut to a bassoon chant — Sibelius described the bassoon’s timbre as “strongly Finnish in character” — seems to prevent the melody from fully blooming. In retrospect, however, it merely heralds a stormier, more dramatic elaboration of the dreamy-noble theme. A contrasting episode, marked Molto tranquillo, revisits the never-never land of the first movement’s contrasting theme group: forest murmurs; the rune chant, heard in the far distance on the solo horn; and more twittering winter birds.

The rustic, propulsive major-mode Scherzo recalls those of Bruckner, of whose music Sibelius formed a positive impression in Vienna. Characteristic of Sibelius, who was always experimenting with structural truncations, a perfumed Lento (ma non troppo) Trio begins without warning following another appearance of the Pathétique sonority, now given a decadent cast by low brass, bassoons, and cellos. The trio returns to the idyllic ambiance discerned in earlier movements, confirming the now-established pattern: the Pathétique sonority functions as a gateway to the fantastic world of the lost, mythical Karelian past. By necessity, however, the visions of that past are always fleeting, forever receding from view.

Taking a page from Tchaikovsky’s later symphonies, the Quasi una fantasia finale begins with a return to the first movement’s bardic clarinet chant, now transformed into a full-throated string motto. The finale’s subtitle refers to the tropes of reverie and fantasy that had been activated whenever the earlier movements conjured an imagined Finnish past, thus portending one last reckoning with the folkloric idyll. A faster tempo introduces a menacing E minor sonata theme, initially presented in low staccato woodwinds. It is offset by a prototypal late-Romantic “big tune,” which too is related thematically to the clarinet chant. It has a warm optimism that suggests G major may yet win out. Importantly, the “big tune” repurposes the languorous chromatic voice leading of the second movement Andante’s main theme, suggesting a synthesis of the score’s folkloric agenda — a final attempt to bring the mythic Finnish past into the present of turn-of-the-century symphonic discourse. A development section elaborates on the menacing theme. This music has a snarling, martial urgency that is not difficult to hear in terms of the conflicts with Russia that were brewing as Sibelius was completing thesymphony. First reemerging in the solo clarinet, the “big tune” manages to withstand the developmental onslaught, but it ultimately fails to reach G major, instead resolving to the “wrong” key, B major, the dominant to E minor. With tragic inexorability, the optimistic tune curdles into unhappy resolve, and following a piercing string dissonance, a coda confirms the victory of the E minor oppressor. Even so, the symphony’s closing pages are marked by a stoic determination that suggests neither Sibelius, nor the Finnish people, have had the last word.

Matthew Mendez

Matthew Mendez is a San Francisco-based musicologist and critic who specializes in 20th- and 21st-century repertoire. He received a Ph.D. in music history from Yale University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Stanford University. Mr. Mendez was the recipient of a 2016 ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award for outstanding music journalism.

The first Boston Symphony Orchestra performances of Sibelius’s First Symphony — likely the U.S. premiere performances — took place January 4 and 5, 1907, led by Karl Muck.