It was with the sanction of a people that Sibelius came to his task. For centuries before his birth the race that bore him had lain prone upon its inclement coasts. But now a new vigor was germinating within it. Youth had overtaken it once more, and filled it with the desire of independence. Chained to the Russian Empire, it was reaching out toward all that could give it the strength to persist and endure, toward all that could give it knowledge of its proper soul. And so Sibelius, in the search for the expression of his own personality, so much at one with that of his fellows, was traveling in the common way. The word that he was seeking, the word that should bring fulfilment to his proper soul, was deeply needed by his fellows. Inarticulate thousands, unaware though they were of his existence, awaited his work, wanted the sustenance it could give. And, certainly, the sense of the needfulness of his work, the sense of the large value set upon his best and purest attainments by life itself, must have been with Sibelius always, must have supplied him with a powerful incentive and made enormously for his achievements. He must have felt all the surge of the race driving him. He must have had continually the marvelous stimulus of feeling about him, for all the night and the cold, the forms of comrades straining toward a single lofty goal, felt himself one of an army of marching men. This folk, far in its past, had imagined the figure of a hero-poet, Vainemunden, and placed in his hands an instrument "shaped out of very sorrow," and attributed magical power to his song. And Sibelius, bowed over his music-paper, must have felt the dream stir within him, must have felt incarnate within himself, however incompletely, that mysterious image, and so proceeded with his work everlastingly assured that all he actually accomplished woke from out of the heart of the people, and responded to its immemorial need.
Out of such an impulse his art has come. No doubt, some of it is not the response entirely worthy of so high a stimulus. Few modern composers of eminence are as singularly uneven as Sibelius. Moods like that which mothered the amiable elegance of the "Valse Triste" and that which produced the hard and naked essentiality of the Fourth Symphony are almost foreign to each other. The creative power itself is extraordinarily fitful in him. It is as if, for all his physical robustness, he has not quite the spiritual indefatigability of the major artist. He has not that inventive heat that permits the composer of indisputably the first rank to realize himself unflaggingly in all his independence and intensity. Too often Sibelius's individuality is cluttered and muffled by that of other men. No doubt every creative artist passes through a period of submission to alien faiths. But in Sibelius there appear to exist two distinct personalities, the one strong and independent, the other timid and uninventive, who dominate him alternately. Even some of the music contemporaneous with the magnificent Fourth Symphony is curiously ineffectual and pointless. True, the color, the air and tone of the North are never entirely absent from his work. His songs invariably recapture, sometimes almost miraculously, the dark and mourning accents of the Scandinavian folk-song. For all the modernity of medium they are simple and sober. Moreover, in those of his compositions that approach banality most closely, there is a certain saving hardness and virility and honesty. Unlike his neighbor, Grieg, he is never mincing and meretricious. We never find him languishing in a pretty boudoir. He is always out under the sky. It is only that he is not always free and resourceful and deeply self-critical. Even through the bold and rugged and splendid Violin Concerto there flit at moments the shadows of Beethoven and Wagner and Tchaikowsky. The first theme of the quartet "Voces intimæ" resembles not a little a certain theme in "Boris." The close of "Nightride and Sunrise" is watered Brahms and watered Strauss. And there are phrases in his tone-poem that commence with all his proper rhythmic ardor and then suddenly degenerate. There are moments when his harmonic sense, generally keen and true, abandons him completely. And even works like the "Finlandia" and "Karelia" overtures, for all their generosity of intention, for all their suggestion of peasant voices lifted in song, disappoint because of the substitution of a popular lyricism, a certain easy sweetness, for the high poetry one might have anticipated.
And yet, one has but to turn to the symphonies of Sibelius to encounter music of another intensity, and gauge the richness of response that, at times, it is given him to make. It is as if the very dignity and grandeur of the medium itself sets him free. Just as the form of the concerto seems to have given his sense of the violin a play apparently denied it by the smaller mediums, so these larger orchestral forms seem to have liberated his imagination, his orchestral genius, and made him poet of his folk indeed. His personal quality, spread more thinly in his songs and tone-poems, is essentialized and developed in these other works. The symphonies themselves are in a sense the stages of the essentialization. In the first of them his language emerges, to an extent imparting its unmistakable coloration to a matter perhaps not entirely distinguished. There is a looseness and lushness, a romanticism and balladry, in the work, that is not quite characteristic. Still, the honesty, the grimness and savagery and lack of sensuality, are Sibelius's own. The adagio is steeped in his proper pathos, the pathos of brief, bland summers, of light that falls for a moment, gentle and mellow, and then dies away. Something like a memory of a girl sitting amid the simple flowers in the white northern sunshine haunts the last few measures. The crying, bold finale is full of the tragedy of northern nature. And in the Second Symphony the independence is complete. The orchestra is handled individually, sparingly, and with perfect point. Often the instruments sound singly, or by twos and threes. What had been but half realized in the earlier work is distinct and important in this. It is as if Sibelius had come upon himself, and so been able to rid his work of all superfluity and indecision. And, curiously, through speaking his own language in all its homeliness and peasant flavor, he seems to have moved more closely to his land. The work, his "pastoral" symphony, for all its absolute and formal character, reflects a landscape. It is full of home sounds, of cattle and "saeters," of timbered houses and sparse nature. And through it there glances a pale evanescent sunlight, and through it there sounds the burden of a lowly tragedy.
But it is only with his Fourth Symphony, dubbed "futuristic" because of the unusual boldness and pithiness of its style, the absence of a general tonality, the independence of the orchestral voices, that Sibelius's gift attains absolute expression. There are certain works that are touchstones, and make apparent what is original and virtuous in all the rest of the labors of their creator, and give his personality a unique and irrefragable position. The Fourth Symphony of Sibelius is such a composition. It is a very synthesis of all his work, the reduction to its simplest and most positive terms of a thing that has been in him since first he began to write, and that received heretofore only fragmentary and indecisive expression. In its very form it is essence. The structure is all bone. The style is sharpened to a biting terseness. The coloring is the refinement of all his color; the rhythms have a freedom toward which Sibelius's rhythms have always aspired; the mournful melody of the adagio is well-nigh archetypical. All his life Sibelius has been searching for the tone of this music, desiring to speak with its authority, and concentrate the soul and tragedy of a people into a single and eternal moment. All his life he had been seeking the prophetic gestures of which this work is full. For the symphony is like a summary and a conclusion. It carries us into some high place before which the life of man is spread out and made apparent. The four movements are the four planes that solidify a single concept. The first sets us in a grim forest solitude, out in some great unlimited loneliness, beneath a somber sky. There is movement, a climax, a single cry of passion and despair, and then, only the soughing of wind through hoary branches. The scherzo is the flickering of mad watery lights, a fantastic whipping dance, a sudden sinister conclusion. In the adagio, a bleak lament struggles upwards, seems to push through some vast inert mass, to pierce to a momentary height and largeness, and then sinks, broken. And through the finale there quivers an illusory light. The movement is the march, the oncoming rush, of vast formless hordes, the passage of unnamed millions that surge for an instant with their cries and banners, and vanish into nothingness. It is possible that Sibelius will create another work similarly naked and intense. More definitive, it cannot be.
Loeffler
Legend records of Inez de Castro, Queen of Castile, that she was dethroned and driven into exile by a rival, and that before her husband and her partisans could restore her to kingdom, she had died. But her husband caused her body to be embalmed and borne with him wherever he went. And when finally he had vanquished the pretender, he had the corpse decked in all the regal insignia, had it set upon the throne in the great hall of the palace of the kings of Castile, and vassals and liegemen summoned to do the homage that had been denied the unhappy queen in her lifetime.
The music of Charles Martin Loeffler is like the dead Inez de Castro on her throne. It, too, is swathed in diapered cloths and hung with gold and precious stones. It, too, is set above and apart from men in a sort of royal state, and surrounded by all the emblems of kingdom. And beneath its stiff and incrusted sheath there lies, as once there lay beneath the jeweled robes and diadem of the kings of Castile, not a living being, but a corpse.
For Loeffler is one of those exquisites whose refinement is unfortunately accompanied by sterility, perhaps even results from it. But for his essential uncreativeness, he might well have become the composer uniquely representative of the artistic movement in which the late nineteenth-century refinement and exquisiteness manifested itself. No musician, not Debussy even, was better prepared for bringing the symbolist movement into music. Loeffler is affiliated in temper, if not exactly in achievement, with the brilliant band of belated romanticists who adopted as their device the sonnet of Verlaine's beginning.