Chapter III: The Music of Modern Scandinavia (2)

Of far wider power as a composer was Halfdan Kjerulf (1815-1863), a composer of songs which stand among the best in spontaneity and delicate charm. His charming piano pieces in the small forms were filled with romantic color. In his many songs, simple, yet varied and original, he showed a power of evoking emotional response that forces one to compare his talent with that of Schubert. With him we should mention E. Neupert (1842-1888), who carried the romanticism of Weber and Mendelssohn into Norway, in a long and varied list of chamber and orchestral music; M. A. Udbye (1820-1889), composer of Norway's first opera _Fredkulla_; and O. Winter-Hjelm (born 1837), who was a generous composer of songs, choral and orchestral pieces in the conservative romantic style of Germany. Johann D. Behrens (1820-1890) proved himself a valuable conductor and composer for Norway's unbelievably numerous male singing societies.

But the greatest composer of the older romantic period was Johan Svendsen (born 1840). He was solidly grounded in the methods and ideals of Schumann, Mendelssohn, Gade and even Brahms, and remained always true to their vision. A specific national composer he was not, but with discreet coloring he treated national subjects in such works as the 'Norwegian Rhapsody,' the 'Northern Carnival,' the legend for orchestra _Zorahayde_, and the prelude to Björnson's _Sigurd Slembe_. In the classical forms he wrote two symphonies and a number of string quartets of marked value. As a colorist he must be highly ranked. But his color is not so much that of nationality as that of romanticism in the conventional sense. His virtues were the romantic virtues of sensuous beauty, discreet eloquence, and somewhat self-conscious emotion. But Norway found her true national propagandist in Richard Nordraak (1842-1866). This man, who died at the age of twenty-four, was a remarkably talented musician, and an unrestrained enthusiast for the integrity of his native land, both in politics and in art. It is said that his meeting with Grieg in Copenhagen in 1864, and their later friendly intercourse, determined the latter to the strenuously national aspirations which he later carried to such brilliant fruition. The funeral march which Grieg inscribed to him after his death is one of his deepest and most moving works. Nordraak's few compositions--incidental music to two of Björnson's plays, piano pieces and songs--show his effort after purely national coloring, but have otherwise no very high value.

The great apostle of Norwegian nationalism was of course Grieg. His place among the composers of whom we are now speaking was partly that of good angel and partly that of press agent. The other Scandinavian composers have basked to a great extent in the light which he shed, have taken their inspiration from him, and have learned invaluable lessons in the art of musical picture painting. He was by no means merely a nationalist. Besides acquainting the world with the beautiful peculiarities of Norwegian folk-song and with the fancied beauties of northern scenery, he showed composers in every part of the world how to use the melodic peculiarities of these songs to build up a strange and enchanting harmony, capable of calling forth mysterious pictures of the earth and sea and their superhuman inhabitants. Grieg was the first popular impressionist. He helped to shift the emphasis from the technical and emotional aspects of music to its specific pictorial and sensuous aspects. And he prepared the world at large for the idea of musical nationalism, which has become one of the two most striking facts of present-day music.

When we say that Grieg was the first popular impressionist we do not mean that he was more able or original than certain others who were working with the same tendencies at the same time. His popularity resulted to a great extent from the form and manner in which he worked. His piano music was admirably suited to making a popular appeal. It was often short and easy; it was nearly always melodious and clear. Its picturesque titles suggested a reason for its unusual turns of harmony and phrase. It was never so radical in its originality as to leave the mind bewildered. Hence Grieg became extremely popular among amateurs and casual music-lovers. His piano pieces became _Hausmusik_ as those of Mendelssohn had been a generation before. The 'impressionistic' effect was usually produced by simple means--a slight alteration of the familiar form of cadence, a gentle blurring of the major and minor modes, an extended use of secondary sevenths and other orthodox dissonances. These interested the musical amateur without repelling him, and, when listened to in association with the picturesque titles, suggested all sorts of delightful sensuous things, such as the mist on the mountains, the sunlight over the fjords, or the heavy green of the seaside pines. This musical style of Grieg's was expertly managed; it was unquestionably individual and was matured to a point where it showed no relapses to the style out of which it had developed. As an orchestral colorist Grieg was talented and original, but by no means revolutionary. He chose _timbres_ with a nice sense of their picturesque values, but in orchestration he is not a long step ahead of the Mendelssohn of the overtures.

_After a photograph from life_

Edvard Hagerup Grieg, the son of Alexander Grieg, was born in Bergen, Norway, in 1843. He was descended from Alexander Greig (the spelling of the name was changed later to accommodate the Norwegian pronunciation), a merchant of Aberdeen, who emigrated from Scotland to Norway soon after the battle of Culloden, in 1746. His father and his grandfather before him served as British consul at Bergen. His mother was a daughter of Edvard Hagerup, for many years the mayor of Bergen, the second city of Norway. It was from her that Grieg inherited both his predisposition for music and his intensely patriotic nature. She was a loyal daughter of Norway and was possessed of no small musical talent, which her family was glad to cultivate, sending her to Hamburg in her girlhood for lessons in singing and pianoforte playing. These she supplemented later by further musical studies in London, and she acquired sufficient skill to enable her to appear acceptably as a soloist at orchestral concerts in Bergen. It was a home surcharged with a musical atmosphere into which Edvard Grieg was born; and his mother must have dreamed of making him a musician, for she began to give him pianoforte lessons when he was only six years old.

Though he disliked school (he appears to have been a typical youngster in his predilection for truancy), the boy made commendable progress in his music and even tried his hand at little compositions of his own; but before his fifteenth year there was no serious thought of a musical career for him. In that year Ole Bull, the celebrated violinist, visited his father's house, and, having heard the lad play some of his youthful pieces, prevailed upon his parents to send him to Leipzig that he might become a professional musician. It was all arranged very quickly one summer afternoon; the fond parents needed little coaxing, and to the boy 'it seemed the most natural thing in the world.' Matriculated at the Leipzig Conservatory in 1858, young Grieg at first made slow progress. He studied harmony and counterpoint under Hauptmann and Richter, composition under Rietz and Reinecke, and pianoforte playing under Wenzel and Moscheles. At the conservatory at that time were five English students, among them Arthur Sullivan, J. F. Barnett, and Edward Dannreuther, who subsequently became leaders in the musical life of London; and their unstinting toil and patience in drudgery inspired the young Norwegian to greater concentration of effort than his frail physique could stand. Under the strain he broke down completely. An attack of pleurisy destroyed his left lung and thus his health was permanently impaired. He was taken home to Norway, where it was necessary for him to remain the greater part of a year to recuperate. But as soon as he was able he returned to Leipzig; he was graduated with honors in 1862.

At Leipzig Grieg came strongly under the sway of Mendelssohn and Schumann. He did not escape from that influence when he went to Copenhagen in 1863 to study composition informally with Niels Gade. While Grieg always held Gade in high esteem, the two musicians really had little in common, and the slight influence of the Dane was speedily superseded by that of Nordraak, with whom Grieg now came in contact. Nordraak was ambitious to produce a genuinely national Norwegian music, and, brief as their friendship was, it served to set Grieg, whose talents lay in the same direction, on the right path. Now fairly launched upon the career of a piano virtuoso and composer, he became a 'determined adversary of the effeminate Scandinavianism which was a mixture of Gade and Mendelssohn,' and with enthusiasm entered upon the work of developing independently in artistic forms the musical idioms of his people. In 1867 Grieg was married to Nina Hagerup, his cousin, who had inspired and who continued to inspire many of his best songs, and whose singing of them helped to spread her husband's fame in many European cities. In 1867 also he founded in Christiania a musical union of the followers of the new Norse school, which he continued to conduct for thirteen years.

Besides the giving of concerts in the chief Scandinavian and German cities and making an artistic pilgrimage to Italy Grieg at this period was increasingly industrious in composition. He was remarkably active for a semi-invalid. He had found himself; and he continued to develop his creative powers in the production of music that was not only nationally idiomatic, but thoroughly suffused with the real spirit of his land and his people. In 1868 Liszt happened upon his first violin sonata (opus 8) and forthwith sent him a cordial letter of commendation and encouragement, inviting him to Weimar. This letter was instrumental in inducing the Norwegian government to grant him a sum of money that enabled him to go again to Rome in 1870. There he met Liszt and the two musicians at once became firm friends. At their second meeting Liszt played from the manuscript Grieg's piano concerto (opus 16), and when he had finished said: 'Keep steadily on; I tell you you have the capability, and--do not let them intimidate you!' The big, great-hearted Liszt feared that the frail little man from the far north might be in danger of intimidation; but his spirit was brave enough at all times--though he wrote to his parents: 'This final admonition was of tremendous importance to me; there was something in it that seemed to give it an air of sanctification.' Thenceforward the recognition of his genius steadily increased. In 1872 he was appointed a member of the Swedish Academy of Music; in 1883 a corresponding member of the Musical Academy at Leyden; in 1890 of the French Academy of Fine Arts. In 1893 the University of Cambridge conferred on him the doctorate in music, at the same time that it honored by the bestowal of this degree Tschaikowsky, Saint-Saëns, Boito, and Max Bruch. Except when on concert tours his later years were spent chiefly at his beautiful country home, the villa Troldhaugen near Bergen, and there he died on September 4, 1907, after an almost constant fight with death for more than forty-five years.

Hans von Bülow called Grieg the Chopin of the North, and the convenience of the sobriquet helped to give it a wider popular acceptance than it deserved, for in truth the basis for such a comparison is rather slight. Undoubtedly Chopin's bold new harmony was one of the sub-conscious forces that helped to shape Grieg's musical genius. His mother had appreciated and delighted in Chopin's music at a time when it was little understood and much underrated; and from childhood Chopin was Grieg's best-loved composer. In his student days he was deeply moved by the 'intense minor mood of the Slavic folk-music in Chopin's harmonies and the sadness over the unhappy fate of his native land in his melodies.' It is certain that there is a certain kinship in the musical styles of the two men, in their refinement, in the kind and even the degree of originality with which each has enriched his art, in many of their aims and methods. While Grieg never attained to the heights of Chopin in his pianoforte music, he surpassed his Polish predecessor in the ability to handle other instruments as well as in his songs, of which he published no fewer than one hundred and twenty-five.

These songs we hold to constitute Grieg's loftiest achievement; and in all his music he is first of all the singer--amazingly fertile in easily comprehensible and alluring melodies. He patterned these original melodies after the folk-songs of that Northland he loved so ardently, just as he often employed the rhythms of its folk-dances; and by these means he imparted to his work a fascinating touch of strangeness and succeeded in evoking as if by magic the moods of the land and the people from which he sprang. On the wings of his music we are carried to the land of the fjords; we breathe its inspiriting air, and our blood dances and sings with its lusty yet often melancholy sons and daughters. Much as there is of Norway in his compositions, there is still more of Grieg. His melodies are his own and more enchanting than the folk-songs which provided their patterns; and as a harmonist he is both bold and skillful.

Grieg's place, as may be gathered from what has already been said, is in the small group of the world's greatest lyricists. He wrote no operas and he composed no great symphonies. His physical infirmity militated against the sustained effort necessary for the creation of works in these kinds; but it is also plain from the work he did when at his best that his inclination and his powers led him into other fields. He possessed the dramatic qualities and ability only slightly, the epic still less, though it cannot be denied that in moments of rare exaltation he was 'a poet of the tragic, of the largely passionate and elemental.' His nearest approach to symphonic breadth is to be found in his pianoforte concerto, which Dr. Niemann pronounces the most beautiful work of its kind since Schumann, his sonatas for violin and pianoforte, his string quartet and his 'Peer Gynt' music. Yet these beautiful and stirring compositions are, after all, only lyrics of a larger growth. Grieg himself knew well his powers and his limitations, and he was as modest as he was candid when he wrote: 'Artists like Bach and Beethoven erected churches and temples on the heights. I wanted, as Ibsen expresses it in one of his last dramas, to build dwellings for men in which they might feel at home and happy. In other words, I have recorded the folk-music of my land. In style and form I have remained a German romanticist of the Schumann school; but at the same time I have dipped from the rich treasures of native folk-song and sought to create a national art out of this hitherto unexploited expression of the folk-soul of Norway.' The spirit of the man recalls the pretty little quatrain of Thomas Bailey Aldrich:

'I would be the lyric,
Ever on the lip,
Rather than the epic
Memory lets slip.'

And this is not to disparage pure and simple song. It is enough for Edvard Grieg's lasting fame that he did have in rare abundance the pure lyric quality--that close and delicate touch upon the heart strings which makes them vibrate in sympathy with all the little importances and importunities of individual human life.

V

The one Norwegian composer, besides Grieg, who has attained an international position, is Christian Sinding (born 1856). He is consciously and genuinely national, but in almost every other way is a complement and contrast to the other northern master. Where Grieg is best in the idyllic, Sinding is best in the heroic. Sinding is apt to be trivial where Grieg is at his best--namely, in the smaller forms. On the other hand, Sinding is noble and inspiring in works too long for Grieg to sustain. In Sinding the Wagnerian influence is marked and inescapable. He, like Grieg, is most at home when working with native material--the sharp rhythms, short periods and angular line of the Norwegian folk-song--but he develops it objectively where Grieg developed it intensively. Sinding need not work from the pictorial; Grieg was obliged to. Sinding's speech is much more cosmopolitan, his harmony less pronounced, his form more conventional. At times he attains a high level of emotional expression. On the other hand, he has written much, and his reputation has suffered thereby. Frequently he is uninspired. But the sustained magnificence of his orchestral and chamber music has done much to offset the prevailing idea that the northern composers could work only in the parlor or _genre_ style. He sounds the epic and heroic note too often and with too much inspiration to permit us to question the greatness of his art.

He has worked in most of the established forms. His D minor symphony, opus 21, is one of the noblest in all Scandinavian music. His symphonic poem, 'Perpetual Motion,' with its inexhaustible energy and its glittering orchestral color, takes a high rank in modern orchestral music. His chamber music--quartets, quintets, trios, violin sonatas, etc.--is distinguished by melodic inspiration, vigorous counterpoint, and sustained structural power. His piano concerto and two violin concertos, and his grandiose E-flat minor variations for two pianos, have taken a firm place in concert programmes. As a piano composer in the smaller forms he is of course less personal, less distinguished, than Grieg. But every piano student knows his _Frühlingsrauschen_ and _Marche Grotesque_. As a song composer he may justly be ranked second to Grieg in all the Scandinavian lands. His power and sincerity in the shorter strophic song is astonishing; his strophes have the cogency and finish of the Swedish folk-song combined with the intensity and sincerity of the Norwegian. In his longer songs he is noble and dramatic; he is a master of poignant emotional expression and of sustained and mounting energy. Two of his familiar songs--'The Mother' and 'A Bird Cried'--are masterpieces of the first rank. Sinding's harmony is vigorous. An 'impressionist' in the modern sense of the term he is not. He loves the use of marked dissonance for specific effect; his harmonic style is broad, solidly based, square-cornered. It is regrettable, perhaps, that he did not work more in opera; his only dramatic work, 'The Holy Mountain,' was performed in Germany early in 1914. But this fact doubtless furnishes us the reason, for Norway does not offer a career for an opera composer, who must depend for his success on great wealth and large cities. As it is, Sinding has made a high, perhaps a permanent, place for himself in chamber and orchestral music.

Johan Selmer (born 1844) has taken a place as the most radical of the 'new romanticists' in Norway. His work is extensive and varied, and is most impressive in the larger forms. He has written a series of symphonic poems, several large choral works, many part songs and ballads, and the usual quota of _Lieder_. His chief influences were Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz. He can hardly be called a nationalist in music, for his work shows little northern feeling except where he makes use of specific Norwegian tunes; indeed he seems equally willing to get his local color from Turkey or Italy. His work is thoroughly disappointing; modelling himself on the giants, he has been obliged to make himself a gigantic mask of paper. Neither his melodic inspiration, his structural power, nor his technical learning was equal to the task he set himself. His chief orchestral work, 'Prometheus,' opus 50, is ridiculously inadequate to its grandiose subject. His _Finnländischer Festklang_ is the most ordinary sort of rhapsody on borrowed material. Of his other works we need only say that they reveal abundantly the effect of large ambitions on a little man. Along with Selmer we may mention three opera composers of Norway, none sufficiently distinguished to carry his name beyond the national border: Johannes Haarklou (born 1847), Cath. Elling (born 1858) and Ole Olsen (born 1850). The last, though yet 'unproduced' as a dramatic composer, deserves to be better known than he is. His symphonic and piano music is pleasing without being distinguished; but the operas _Lajla_ and _Hans Unversagt_ are charmingly colorful and melodic, revealing musical scholarship and fine emotional expression. Finally we may mention Johann Halvorsen (born 1864), a follower of Grieg and an able composer for violin and male chorus.

One of the most promising of the younger Norwegians was Sigurd Lie (1871-1904), whose early death cut off a career which bade fair to be internationally distinguished. Surely he would have been one of the most national of Norwegian composers. His list of works, brief because of ill health, includes a symphony in A minor, a symphonic march, an oriental suite for orchestra, a piano quintet, a goodly list of short piano pieces, and many songs and choral works. He used the Norwegian folk-song intensively, combining its spirit with that of the old ecclesiastical tone. He was a true poet of music; his moods were usually mystic, gray and religious, and his effects, even in simple piano pieces, were obtained with astonishing sureness. His harmony, though not radical, was personal and highly expressive. His songs, much sung in his native land, reveal a genius for precise and poignant expression.

One of the most popular of Norway's living composers for the piano is Halfdan Cleve (born 1879), writer of numerous works of which those in the large forms are most important. Cleve is cosmopolitan, enamored of large effects, and of dazzling virtuosity. His technique is varied and exceedingly sure, but he lacks the appealing loveliness which has brought reputation to the works of so many of his countrymen. More popular is Agathe Backer-Gröndahl (born 1847), industrious writer of piano pieces in the smaller forms. Outwardly a classicist, she has drunk of the lore of Grieg and has achieved charming and able works, distinguished by delicate feeling and care for detail. Her children's songs are altogether delightful. But when she attempts longer works her inspiration is apt to fail her.

Perhaps the most original and personal composer after Grieg and Sinding is Gerhard Schjelderup (born 1859), a tone poet of much technical ability and genuine national feeling. His songs and ballads are very fine, striking the heroic note with sincerity and conviction. In his simple songs and piano pieces, Schjelderup's innate feeling for the folk-tone makes him utterly successful. In his operas, 'Norwegian Wedding,' 'Beyond Sun and Moon,' 'A People in Distress,' and his incidental music, he lacks the dramatic and structural power for long sustained passages; but his genius for expressive simplicity has filled these works with beauties. Schjelderup's symphonies and chamber music have made a place for themselves in European concert halls equally by their freshness of feeling and by their excellence of technique.

VI

Finland's music, centred in its capital Helsingfors, was from the first under German domination. The national spirit, as we have seen, grew up under the inspiration of the _Kalevala_, then newly made known to literature. The first national composer of note was Frederick Pacius (1809-1891), born in Hamburg, but regarded as the founder of the national Finnish school. He was under the Mendelssohnian domination, but gave no little national color to his music and helped to centre the growing national consciousness. Besides symphonies, a violin concerto and male choruses, he wrote an opera 'King Karl's Hunt,' and several _Singspiele_ which contained national flavor without any specific national material. To Pacius Finland owes her official national anthem. Other Finnish composers of note were Karl Collan (1828-1871), F. von Schantz (1835-1865) and C. G. Wasenus. The Wagnerian influence first penetrated the land of lakes in the works of Martin Wegelius (1846-1906), able composer of operas, piano and orchestral music, and choral works. But the first specific national tendency in Finnish music is due to Robert Kajanus (born 1856), who achieved the freshness and primitive force of the national folk-song in works of Wagnerian power and scope. Besides his piano and lyric pieces we possess several symphonic poems of his--including _Aino_ and _Kullervo_--all markedly national in feeling.

Among the modern Finnish composers of second rank Armas Järnefelt (born 1869) is distinguished. In orchestral suites, symphonic poems (for example, the _Heimatklang_), overtures, choral works, piano pieces, and songs, he has shown spontaneity and technical learning. Poetic feeling and sensitive coloring are marked in his work. Much the same can be said of Erik Melartin (born 1875), except that his genius is more specifically lyric. His songs reflect the energy and freshness of a race just coming to consciousness. His smaller piano pieces show somewhat the salon influence of Sweden, but in all we feel that the artist is speaking. Ernst Mielck (1877-1899) had made a place for himself with his symphony and other orchestral works when death cut short his career. Oscar Merikanto (born 1868) has written, besides one opera, many songs and piano pieces, most of them conventional and undistinguished, and Selim Palmgren (born 1878) has already attained a wide reputation.

In Sibelius we meet one of the most powerful composers in modern music. Masterpiece after masterpiece has come from his pen, and the works which fall short of distinction are few indeed. He is at once the most national and the most personal composer in the whole history of Scandinavian music. His style is like no one else's; his themes, his mode of development, his harmonic 'atmosphere,' and his orchestral coloring are quite his own. But his materials are, with hardly an exception, drawn from the literature and folk-lore of the Finnish nation; his melodies, when not closely allied to the folk-melodies of his land, are so true to their spirit that they evoke instant response in his countrymen's hearts; and the moods and emotions which he expresses are those that are rooted deepest in the Finnish character. This powerful national tradition and feeling of which he is the spokesman he has vitalized with a creative energy which is equalled only by the few greatest composers of the world to-day. He has touched no department of music which he has not enriched with powerful and original works. As an innovator, pure and simple, he seems likely to prove one of the most productive forces in modern music. No deeper, more moving voice has ever come out of the north; only in modern Russia can anything so distinctly national and so supremely beautiful be found.

Jean Sibelius was born in Finland in 1865 and at first studied for the law. Shifting to music, he entered the conservatory at Helsingfors and worked under Wegelius. Later he studied in Berlin and thereafter went to Vienna. Here, under Goldmark, he developed his taste for powerful instrumental color, and under Robert Fuchs his concern for finely wrought detail. But even in his early works there was little of the German influence to be traced beyond thorough workmanship. With his symphonic poem, _En Saga_, opus 9, he became recognized as a national composer. The Finns, longing for self-expression, looked to him eagerly. They had, as Dr. Niemann[11] has put it, been made silent heroes by their struggles with forest, plain, cataract and sea, and by the bitter recent political conflict with Russia. And, as always happens in such cases, they sought to give expression to their suppressed national ideals in art. Sibelius's symphonic poem, _Finlandia_, is a thinly veiled revolutionary document and his great male chorus, 'The Song of the Athenians' (words by the Finnish poet Rydberg), gave verbal expression to the thoughts of the patriots of the nation. The former piece has explicitly been banned in Finland by Russian edict because of its inflammatory influence on the people. But all this has not made Sibelius a political figure such as Wagner became in 1848. He has worked industriously and copiously at his music, watching it go round the civilized world, keeping himself aloof the while from outward turmoil, though his personal sympathies are known to be strongly nationalistic.

It was the symphonic poems which first made Sibelius a world-figure. These include a tetralogy, _Lemminkäinen_, consisting of 'Lemminkäinen and the Village Maidens,' 'The River of Tuonela,' 'The Swan of Tuonela,' and 'Lemminkäinen's Home-faring'; _Finlandia_, _En Saga_, 'Spring Song,' and the more recent 'Spirits of the Ocean' and 'Pohjola's Daughter.' The _Lemminkäinen_ series is based on the Kalevala tale, which narrates the adventures of the hero Lemminkäinen, his departure to the river of death (Tuonela), his death there, and the magic by which his mother charmed his dismembered limbs to come together and the man to come to life. Of the four separate works which make up the series 'The Swan of Tuonela' is the most popular. It was in this that Sibelius's original mastery of orchestral tone was first made known to foreign audiences. With its enchanting theme sung by the English horn it weaves a long, slow spell of the utmost beauty. _Finlandia_ tells of the struggles of a submerged nation; the early parts of the work are filled with passionate excitement and military bustle; then there emerges the motive of all this struggle--a majestic chorale melody, scored with the strings in all their resonance, a song at once of battle and of devotion, a melody for whose equal we must go to Beethoven and Wagner. _En Saga_, the earliest of the great nationalistic works, is without a definite program, but is dramatic in the highest degree. It is a masterpiece of free form, with its long, swelling climaxes and passionate adagios, surrounded by a haze of shimmering tone-color, as though the bard were singing his story among the fogs of the northern cliffs. The national character of these works is quite as marked in their themes as in their subject-matter. Sibelius is fond of the strange rhythms of the old times--3/4, 7/4, 2/2, or 3/2 time. His accent is almost crudely exaggerated. His original themes are so true to the national character that they seem made of one piece with the folk-tunes. The mood of these works is rarely gay; the animation is primitive and savage. The prevailing spirit is one of loneliness and gloom. In the symphonic poems, which grow increasingly free in harmony, we see in all its glory the orchestral scoring which is one of Sibelius's chief claims to fame. It is no mere virtuoso brilliancy, as is often the case with Rimsky-Korsakoff. It is always an accentuation of the character of the music with the character of the tone of the instrument chosen. It is color from a heavy palette, chosen chiefly from the deeper shades, showing its contrast in modulation of tones rather than high lights, yet kept always free of the turgid and muddy.

The same qualities are shown in the four symphonies. Of these the last is a thing of revolutionary import--a daring work whose full meaning to the future of music has not begun to be appreciated. The other three are perhaps less symphonies than symphonic rhapsodies. They seem to imply a program, being filled with episodes, dramatic, epic, and lyrical, interspersed with recitative and legend-like passages. But, however free the form, the architecture is cogent. In his development work Sibelius is always masterly. Some of the passages, like the main theme of the first movement of the first symphony, or the slow movement from the same, are amazing in their imaginative power and beauty. The fourth symphony is a work apart. In the first and second movements the harmony is quite as radical as anything in modern German or French music. It is, in fact, hardly harmony at all, but the free interplay of monophonic voices.

_After a photo from life (1913)_

From this method, which at the present moment is almost Sibelius's private property, the composer extracts a quality of poetry which is impressive in its suggestions of great things beyond.

Some of Sibelius's best music has been written to accompany dramatic performances. That for Adolph Paul's play, 'King Christian II,' has been widely played as an orchestral suite. The introduction is especially fine. The warm and sweetly melancholy nocturne, the 'Elegy' for strings, and the profoundly moving Dance of Death are all movements of rare beauty. The lovely _Valse Triste_, a mimic drama in itself, written for Järnefelt's play, _Kuolema_, has carried his reputation far and wide, as the C sharp minor prelude carried Rachmaninoff's, or the 'Melody in F' Rubinstein's. There are, further, two orchestral suites from the accompanying music to Maeterlinck's 'Pelléas and Mélisande,' and Procopé's 'Belshazzar's Feast.' For orchestra we may further mention the _Karelia_ Overture, the _Scènes historiques_, the Dance-Intermezzo, 'Pan and Echo,' the melancholy waltzes to accompany Strindberg's 'Snowwhite,' the two canzonettas for small orchestras, the Romance in C major for string orchestra, the short symphonic poem, 'The Dryads,' and the Funeral march.

The violin concerto, one of the most difficult of the kind in existence, has already gained its place among the standard concert pieces for the instrument. It shows deep feeling and national color, especially in the rhythmically vigorous finale. The string quartet, _Voces Intimæ_, opus 56, is a masterly work in a reserved style. The first three movements are said to have as a sort of program certain chapters from Swedenborg. The piano music is generally on a lower plane. To a great extent it recalls Schumann and Tschaikowsky; in such works as the _Characterstücke_, opera 5, 24, 41, and 58, in the sonatina, opus 67, and in the rondinos, opus 68, we find little that can be called original. But we must remember that in these pieces Sibelius was writing music to appeal to the people, and has succeeded to a remarkable degree in raising the general standard of taste in his native land. For his most personal piano work we must look to his transcriptions of Finnish tunes, especially 'The Fratricide' and 'Evening Comes.'

In his songs for solo voice Sibelius has achieved remarkable things. The remarkable 'Autumn Evening' is a sort of free recitative, always verging on melody, accompanied by suggestive descriptive figures in the piano part. Here we see in germ one of his most important contributions to modern music--an emphasis on expressive monody. The ballad, _Des Fahrmanns Braut_, which has been arranged for orchestral accompaniment, is weaker musically, but shows the same genius for expressive melodic recitative. And not the least important and characteristic part of Sibelius's work has been in the form of male choruses. Of these we may mention 'The Origin of Fire' and 'The Imprisoned Queen,' both with orchestral accompaniment, and, above all, the magnificent 'Song of the Athenians,' which has come to have a national significance among the Finns. As we look over this remarkable list of works, from the great symphonic forms down to brief songs, and note the quantity of germinal originality they contain, their high poetry, their universal beauty and intense national expression, we must adjudge Sibelius to be a master with a creative vitality which cannot be matched by more than half a dozen composers writing to-day.

H. K. M.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] See Chapter IV.

[11] Walter Niemann: _Die Musik Skandinaviens_.