Kullervo tells the story of the tragic hero of the Kalevala, the Finnish national folk epic, in the form of a 90-minute, five-movement ‘symphonic poem’ for two soloists, male chorus and orchestra. The patriotic Sibelius abandons his career as a concert violinist and pens his first masterwork To get to the heart of this enigmatic composer, we explore his life through his ten greatest works, casting a light, too, on some of his lesser-known, but equally fine musical achievements. But not even Sibelius’s teeming imagination could have envisaged the acclaim that greeted the major work that followed, when he conducted its premiere in Helsinki in 1892. A year of study in Berlin, then another in Vienna, widened his creative horizons. Realising that this level of performance would be beyond him, Sibelius began to take his composing more seriously.
His dream of becoming a virtuoso violinist received a reality check through his friendship with Ferruccio Busoni, the master-pianist brought in to teach at the Institute. The family could not afford to give Sibelius an upmarket Swedish-speaking education, so he went to local Finnish-speaking schools instead, with fortunate consequences for his nation’s musical future.Īrriving in Helsinki to study at the recently founded Music Institute, Sibelius at once adopted his father’s feckless spending habits: he was to struggle with debt and drinking issues for the next four decades. All three siblings turned out to be exceptionally talented, to judge from the large amount of chamber music composed by the teenage Sibelius for the family piano trio, with himself playing the violin, his older sister Linda as pianist, and his younger brother Christian the cello. Maria Sibelius took her family to live with her mother, and her children grew up in a music-supporting environment.
Sibelius’s father was a doctor who died in a typhoid epidemic when ‘Janne’ was only two, leaving a pregnant widow and a mountain of debts.
Yet besides his uncanny ability to evoke the northern landscape, Sibelius also revelled in the sunlit world of the Mediterranean south, both in reality (large parts of the Second Symphony and Tapiola were composed during visits to Italy) and in his imagination: the symphonic poem The Oceanides was one of several works inspired by the mythology of ancient Greece. These qualities alone are enough to place Sibelius among the ‘greats’. Perhaps no composer has identified so closely with the natural world, nor conveyed its changing moods and atmosphere with deeper mastery and expressive force. He excelled also as a composer of songs and choral music, but since these set mainly Swedish and Finnish texts, they tend to be seldom heard outside the Nordic scene. The same is true of Sibelius’s incidental music for the theatre, a genre in which his touch was peerless. And today’s concert programming does not generally favour the quite short forms of many Sibelius works: ‘The Swan of Tuonela’ and ‘Lemminkainen’s Return’, once familiar, have become less so. Works like the Fourth Symphony, or the symphonic poems The Bard, Tapiola and Luonnotar, present a level of originality and imagination so searching that they still disconcert many listeners.
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