COMMENT: Could be done better

By Vesa Sirén
     
      The title of Professor Timothy L. Jackson's Sibelius the Political promises rather more than it delivers.
      He is interested in Jean Sibelius's relationship with the Nazis in the 1930s and beyond, although the composer's most active political phase took place nearly half a century earlier.
     
An article exploring the political Sibelius might be expected to deal with the composer's somewhat surprising development from being an adherent of the Svecoman movement supporting the Swedish language and culture (see link) to his backing of the Young Finns - who instead nurtured and promoted the Finnish language and culture and were congregated around the newspaper Päivälehti (1889-1904), the forerunner of Helsingin Sanomat - in the emerging struggle against Russification and for Finnish Independence. Among the founders of Päivälehti, incidentally, was Arvid Järnefelt, the brother of Sibelius's future wife Aino.
     
It might then examine his progress towards being a "protest composer", in the wake of the February Manifesto, issued in 1899 by the Czar with a view to curbing Finland's autonomous status.
      Equally, it could explore Sibelius's role as the composer of the Jäger March, first performed in Finland in 1918 and effectively the anthem of the White faction in the Civil War, albeit that when Sibelius composed the work in 1917 he could not have known that the troops referred to would actually be used against the Finnish Reds.
      The clandestine recruitment of the Finnish Jäger Battalion and their training in Germany from 1916 onwards was initially intended to weaken Russia through their use on the eastern front, thereby serving a dual purpose of furthering Germany's military ends and Finland's own aspirations towards independence.
     
Sibelius's hostile relationship with communism should be analysed, and at the same time his flirtation with the early stages of the anti-communist nationalist Lapua Movement in the post-Civil War era.
     
After all this has been gone through, one can then also turn to examining the Nazis' attempts to garner some propaganda mileage out of the ageing Sibelius, and the old composer's responses to this, as Jackson does both interestingly and contentiously.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 25.5.2010

More on this subject:
 American professor apparently alone in theories of Jean Sibelius’s Nazi connections

Links:
  Svecoman Movement (Wikipedia)
  Young Finns (Wikipedia)
  Jäger March (Wikipedai)
  Lapua Movement (Wikipedia)