The works by Sibelius at this year’s Lahti International Sibelius Festival all come from the earlier part of his career. In them we meet a composer in the process of finding his identity and establishing himself as a leading voice who could proudly represent his country internationally.

The earliest of the pieces predate both Sibelius’s breakthrough as a composer and the decisive shift towards orchestral music as the focus of his output. In the String Quartet in A minor (1889) and Piano Quintet in G minor (1890) we meet a student composer – but not a beginner: the quartet was his graduation piece from the Helsinki Music Academy, whilst the quintet finds him eager to experiment with larger forms and bigger sonorities. This desire, coupled with a growing fascination with Finland’s national epic, the Kalevala, led inevitably to Kullervo, a massive symphonic work for soloists, male choir and orchestra premiered in 1892. Its first performance, described by one listener as ‘like a volcanic eruption’, allowed Sibelius to stake a justifiable claim to be Finland’s foremost composer.

Contrary to popular belief, however, the spectacular success of Kullervo did not mean that Sibelius abandoned other genres. He composed piano music throughout his career and his F major Piano Sonata dates from 1893; its slow movement in particular reflects the interest in the Finnish folk idiom that had also been apparent in Kullervo (though Sibelius hardly ever quotes actual folk tunes). Among the commissions he received that same year was one for a set of music for historical tableaux, ‘Scenic Music for a Festival and Lottery in Aid of Education in the Province of Viipuri’. The event was a thinly disguised protest against Russian rule in what was then the Grand Duchy of Finland. The full score was first performed that November and in the months that followed Sibelius selected the most attractive movements for concert use – and the Karelia Suite was born. He also wrote a large number of solo songs with piano accompaniment, mostly settings of poems in his native Swedish. He orchestrated a few of these himself (among them Våren flyktar hastigt), whilst some of the rest (Illalle, Svarta rosor) have been orchestrated by other people. Arioso is a special case: as a solo song it counts as a mature work (1911), but its musical material originally had a different text; it was part a university graduation cantata composed in 1897.

Sibelius also showed an interest in opera, not least Wagnerian music drama; he visited Bayreuth in 1894 and worked on his own contribution to the genre, Veneen luominen (The Building of the Boat). In the end, though, he turned away from Wagner and his world; ‘I am a tone painter and poet. Liszt’s view of music is the one to which I am closest’, and much of the opera’s musical material was recycled in a set of four tone poems, Lemminkäinen, the first versions of which were premiered in 1896. Here, as in Kullervo, stories from the Kalevala are retold in music, though in the purely orchestral Lemminkäinen it is the general atmosphere of the adventures that is evoked rather than specific details of the narrative.  

Not all of Sibelius’s orchestral music from the 1890s had an extra-musical programme or a clear political agenda. In the tone poem Vårsång (Spring Song), adapted from an ‘Improvisation’ from 1894, the focus is on melody – glorious melody. Like the earlier En saga, it is an ‘expression of a state of mind’.

By the latter part of the 1890s, Sibelius – by now well into his thirties – was ready for a new challenge: the first of his mighty cycle of seven symphonies. Here, too, he avoided overt political messaging and musical story-telling, and was thus free to write a four-movement symphony that broadly follows the conventions of the classical tradition. In this work his own by now unmistakable style is combined with stylistic nods in the direction of Tchaikovsky and Bruckner. As the critic Richard Faltin wrote, ‘The composer speaks the language of all mankind, yet a tongue that is none the less his own.’ And ‘all mankind’ – or at least music-lovers throughout Europe – soon had a chance to hear the piece, as it was one of the featured works on the Helsinki Philharmonic Society Orchestra’s European tour in 1900.

Andrew Barnett