Sibelius - an erotic symbolist

Researchers still captivated by composer who died 50 years ago

print this

By Hannu-Ilari Lampila
     
      Tomi Mäkelä, Professor of Music at Magdeburg University in Germany, has fulfilled a civic duty of sorts by writing an extensive and very interesting monograph on composer Jean Sibelius, who died 50 years ago.
      Germany is an important musical country, where it appears that strange and backward ideas about Sibelius continue to thrive. For that, we primarily have the influential cultural philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno to thank. Even when Sibelius was still alive, Adorno dismissed Sibelius as a primitive, untalented man of the forest.
      The back cover of the book Poesie in der Luft ("Poetry in the Air") reveals that Mäkelä’s studies rectify the image of an "exotic-naive man of nature", showing Sibelius in his "creative individuality, which is deliberately oriented toward the Central European streams of his age". The message would seem to be directed at German-speaking readers.
      Finnish Sibelius experts, Erik Tawastsjerna in the forefront, have placed Sibelius in a Central European context, seeking a balance between Finnishness and internationalism.
     
However, in nobody can beat Mäkelä in putting things into context. He finds a surprising number of Sibelius connections in the various artistic trends of his time. It is especially important that Mäkelä emphasises Sibelius’s close relationship with the modernism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
      The connection is so rich that Sibelius’s figure begins to disappear into the learned network of references. Mäkelä ends up admitting that the "anti-intellectual, anti-philosophical, and anti-verbal" Sibelius could not have had a clue about these connections much of the time.
      If Sibelius had studied philosophy and if he had pondered the ultimate questions on a deeper level, it appears that he could have, in Mäkelä’s view, thought like this. Speculation is in vogue.
      Mäkelä’s book is not an actual biography. It is not a linear visualisation of Sibelius’s life and career: the readers have to build it themselves out of fragments and endless footnotes.
     
The splintered image of Sibelius is an apparent conscious strategy. The self of Mäkelä’s Sibelius shuttles from the north, to metropolises, and to the south.
      Mäkelä constructs the self of Sibelius primarily through the subject theory of French philosopher Jaques Lacan. This is quite a good theory, although modern psychoanalysis and development psychology would offer more pertinent ones.
      The whole book is an academic discussion in which Mäkelä takes a stand on the views of other researchers. Mäkelä knows them very well, and his scholarly knowledge is impressive.
      As a researcher influenced by Germany, Mäkelä is dialectic and polemical. Cross-illumination is a good method as such, but the negative side to this is hair-splitting.
     
For Mäkelä, Sibelius is primarily a symbolist and a surrealist.
      The problem is that the symbolism of music and surrealism need to be defined above all through pictorial art and literature, because these styles are unknown in the history of music. Mysterious mental landscapes, unconsciously dreamlike language, fantasy, dreams, the world of the night, escape from rational everyday life, can be expressed in music through many stylistic methods.
      Mäkelä links symbolism with the mystery of the woman, which undoubtedly fascinated Sibelius and his artist friends to a great degree. Putting an erotic tone on Sibelius’s music brings colour to the academic character of the book.
      Mäkelä ponders the intimate relationship that Sibelius has with nature again and again. Finns like to speak about Sibelius’s pantheism, which irritates Mäkelä.
      According to Mäkelä, Sibelius had an "elemental" relationship with nature - not a romantic, or pantheistic one. If Sibelius, in his sensitive moments, experienced the presence of the impersonal primitive strength of divinity, then that should be pantheism by definition. And pantheism is not a religious cult of any kind, but rather a wordless, mystical experience.
     
Finland’s even nature is not the kind that Mäkelä feels is likely to give birth to pantheistic experiences: gorges, mountains, and rumbling mountain waterfalls are needed for that.
      But is it not possible for a Finn to experience the forest in a pantheistic manner? In Sibelius’s last great work Tapiola, mystical primitive strength run wild in a Dionysian manner, and "divine" instinctive energy flows.
     
Another Sibelius book, written by French writer Marc Vignal three years ago, is a traditional classical biography, in which the reader gets to enjoy the colourful story if Sibelius’s life, while following phases of Finland’s history from the Middle Ages.
      Vignal’s point of view is also Central European, and he intelligently places Sibelius in the political and cultural context of his age. For Vignal, Sibelius is a cosmopolitan - without forgetting his Finnishness. In Sibelius he also finds an intellectual side.
      For a Frenchman, Vignal is a clear-spoken narrator and a moderate researcher. He does not nurture French rhetoric. Instead, he writes in an Anglo-Saxon manner. Broad analyses of works are precise and to the point.
      Vignal largely follows in the footsteps of Tawaststjerna, but there are so many of his own observations, analyses, and revelations that they make the book an independent, weighty study, and a compelling reading experience.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 20.9.2007


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Branding Jean Sibelius (7.9.2007)

HANNU-ILARI LAMPILA / Helsingin Sanomat
hannu.lampila@hs.fi