Since 2019, I’ve been annotating a Sibelius cycle from Alpha Classics, recorded with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra under Santtu-Matias Rouvali. The last of the symphony recordings is just out, though there’s the suggestion some more tone poems will follow before the cycle wraps up. This latest volume combines the composer’s last two symphonies with the music he wrote for a Copenhagen production of The Tempest.
Much links the music. In the gravitational momentum of the last two symphonies, which flow like differently-sized rivers, Sibelius had apparently become aware that the symphonic circle might not need to close; that a symphony could end openly or inconclusively while still carrying plenteous meaning. I’ve always thought the music from The Tempest presents the successful, ‘finished’ side of what we hear in the composer’s so-called Late Fragments (the only orchestral music that followed it); that incidental music to Shakespeare’s most elusive play was probably a better fit for the characteristically disjointed new ideas Sibelius could never quite bring to symphonic maturity.
What also links the works, of course, is our old friend ethyl alcohol. I tried to address this in the booklet note, which I titled Ultimate Fluidity. Here is the passage in question:
During a panel discussion at the Southbank Centre back in 2018, an audience member – I think, in fact, Edward Clarke of the UK Sibelius Society – asked how Sibelius’s alcohol addiction had shaped his output. I laughed. Out of nervousness, I suppose, as it was a touchy subject and I hadn’t properly considered it – and because the issue of alcohol and artistry is often treated as something lighter than alcohol and family breakdown, for example (in Sibelius’s case it fueled both).
We take alcoholism more seriously these days. But so should we take the interaction between habit, addiction and art – as hinted at in the sleeve note. Would Sibelius’s music sound as it sounds, had the composer been on the wagon? I doubt it. Would the entirety of Finland’s national art – so much of it created by alcoholic men, for better or worse – exist as it exists? Surely not. That extends from the classical works of Finland’s first creative blossoming to so much contemporary Finnish art and cinema including almost all of Aki Kaurismaki (in 2019 I saw Aleksi Salmenperä’s film Tyhjiö, which resonated strongly).
Alcohol is a recurring theme in The Northern Silence and in pages 201-206 I try to grapple with it seriously, touching on the idea of alcohol’s role in the evolution of Sibelius’s musical thinking; the sense that the substance ‘acted as a portal into the deeper levels of the composer’s consciousness.’ There is more work to be done here, and some excellent work is being done in Finland. And let’s not forget the time two Finns imbibed precisely the amount of ethyl alcohol the composer was supposed to have put away on one day, and recorded it for televisual prosperity (alas, I can’t find the links).
The whole artistic idea of inebriation is different in Finland to in Denmark; the fun-inducing champagne of Nielsen and Lumbye next to the hard liquor of Sibelius – not so much depressive, as a lubricant for potential release from intensity of thought (the fundamental process of most of Sibelius’s symphonies). In his novel Havoc, Tom Kristensen’s protagonist the journalist Ole Jastrau describes intoxication as ‘a poem without a form’, before signing off into oblivion.
In Sibelius’s case, the form was absolutely new – flowing with gravitational certainty as much as with something entirely intangible. In the Late Fragments Sibelius seemed to be fighting his own inebriation; reaching for themes that are sliding across the floor of a sinking ship, the composer trying to remember snatches of a piece that he had once known by heart (to paraphrase Edward St Aubyn). My old university buddy Anthony used to describe alcohol as ‘the great social lubricant.’ Perhaps Sibelius just substituted the ‘social’ for something else.