Eloq uence

SIBELIUS Karelia Suite · Four Legends The Bard · The Oceanides The Tempest: Overture En Saga · Nightride and Sunrise

Okko Kamu Eugen Jochum

JEAN SIBELIUS (1865-1957) CD 1

61’06

1 2 3

Karelia Suite, Op. 11 I Intermezzo (Moderato) II Ballade (Tempo di menuetto) III Alla marcia (Moderato)

4 5 6 7

Four Legends from the Kalevala, Op. 22 I Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of the Island II Lemminkäinen in Tuonela III The Swan of Tuonela IV Lemminkäinen’s Return

15’24 15’05 8’23 6’08

CD 2

54’00

1

The Bard, Op. 64

2

En Saga, Op. 9

4’00 7’14 4’12

6’53 18’26 Helsinki Radio Symphony Orchestra Okko Kamu

3

The Tempest: Overture, Op. 109 No. 1

4

The Oceanides, Op. 73

5

Nightride and Sunrise, Op. 55 Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks Eugen Jochum

Total timing: 115’06

5’54 8’39 13’29

In 1893, Finnish students at the University of Viipuri were organizing a pageant of tableaux from the history of Karelia, a disputed region in Finland claimed at different periods in history by Sweden and by Russia. The students asked Sibelius to compose incidental music for the pageant. Having spent time in Karelia, and feeling an affinity for its people and its land, he obliged with an overture and a total of ten short pieces to complement the action on stage. Later, he selected three of the ten pieces and published them as the Karelia Suite. (The Karelia Overture was published separately.) The suite's durability has far outstripped that of the pageant that inspired it. ‘Intermezzo’ depicts a procession of Karelian hunters bearing tributes to a Lithuanian prince. Sibelius had become acquainted with the music of Anton Bruckner during his studies in Vienna a few years earlier, and the string tremolos and horn calls that open the ‘Intermezzo’ suggest his enthusiasm for the Austrian composer's symphonies. (In more recent times, the ‘Intermezzo’ became familiar to many in the United Kingdom when it was used as theme music for a current affairs television program.) In the ‘Ballade’, the deposed Swedish king Karl Knutsson (also known as Charles VIII) is entertained by a

minstrel at Viipuri Castle and recollects happier days. A cor anglais solo contains material sung by a tenor in the original pageant. ‘Alla marcia’, for all its jauntiness, is music for a scene in which soldiers are called to battle around the ramparts of Käkisalmi Castle. In 2/4 time, it really isn’t even a march! Sibelius’s Four Legends from the Kalevala (sometimes known under the title of Lemminkäinen Suite) is based on the Kalevala. The composer, following the example of Richard Wagner’s music-dramas, began a nationalistic opera (The Building of the Boat) based on this folk epic, first published in 1835. He ceased worked on it, however, when he realised that he shouldn't (or couldn't) compete with the German master. He wrote, ‘I must be led by my inner voices.’ Not a man to waste work or ideas, he transformed some of the opera’s material into the purely symphonic Four Legends from the Kalevala, which he completed in 1896. The first performance later that year was successful enough, but following a second in 1897, critic Karl Flodin's unpleasant review suggested that the suite sounded ‘pathological’, and further complained that such music left the formerly supportive critic feeling ‘miserable, exhausted and apathetic’. This new review caused the

composer to withdraw and revise all four movements. ‘The Swan of Tuonela’ and ‘Lemminkäinen’s Homeward Journey’ were subsequently published in 1900; final revisions of the other two sections waited until 1937, well after the composer had effectively retired. ‘Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of the Island’, for all the heroism implied by the music, describes a chauvinistic philanderer. Even though he has his own young bride, Lemminkäinen, who behaves partly like Siegfried and partly like Don Juan, sets sail for the island of Saari to sow his wild oats among the island’s women, who are more than willing to let him do so. When the men return, however, they chase him away, much to the women’s chagrin. Sibelius builds up considerable harmonic and erotic tension over the movement’s fifteen-minute span, and its resolution leaves the music spent – figures in the woodwinds might represent the cries of geese calling Lemminkäinen homeward, or are they the maidens calling to him, ‘Wherefore goest thou, Lemminkäinen? Why depart thou, o handsome hero?’ In ‘Lemminkäinen in Tuonela’, the hero, wishing to impress the Daughter of the Northland, endeavours to shoot the Swan of Tuonela with an arrow. Before he can do so,

he in turn is shot by a herdsman who desires the same prize. His body is hacked to pieces and thrown into the river. His mother, seeing what has happened, collects the pieces with a giant rake, sews them together, and restores life to her son. This particular episode is depicted by music that has the quality of a crooning Nordic lullaby. However, Sibelius’s writing in this movement has more to do with the creation of atmosphere than with the literal illustration of events. ‘The Swan of Tuonela’, the most famous of the suite's four sections, and formerly intended to be the discarded opera's overture, is best described in the composer’s own words. ‘Tuonela, the land of death, the hell of Finnish mythology, is surrounded by a large river with black waters and a rapid current, on which the Swan of Tuonela floats majestically, singing.’ Her song is represented by the cor anglais. (Remarkably, Flodin complained that the cor anglais solo was ‘stupendously long and boring’.) That the river on which the swan floats is shiveringly cold is made clear by Sibelius’s chilly writing for harp and divided strings. By emphasizing the scene’s grave nobility, Sibelius keeps ‘The Swan of Tuonela’ from becoming an exercise in mere morbidity.

When Sibelius initially completed the Four Legends, 'The Swan of Tuonela' was its second movement and 'Lemminkäinen in Tuonela' was its third. Late in life, when Sibelius revised the score, he reversed the order of these middle movements, and it is this revised order that conductor Okko Kamu adopts here. ‘Lemminkäinen’s Homeward Journey’ is the exciting finale. The hero, exhausted by his labours, resolves to return home. His boat having been destroyed, he ‘transforms his cares and worries into war-horses’ and gallops through various terrains (depicted, perhaps, by the composer’s frequent key-changes) to arrive home in triumph. The composer referred to this movement as a reflection of national pride. ‘Why should we be ashamed of ourselves?’ he asked. ‘That is the underlying sentiment throughout “Lemminkäinen’s Homeward Journey.” Lemminkäinen is just as good as the noblest of earls. He is an aristocrat, without question an aristocrat!’ The Bard comes from the years immediately following Sibelius’s bleak Fourth Symphony and it shares something of that symphony's dark and pessimistic mood. In 1908, Sibelius had begun to complain of hoarseness and pains in his throat, and his doctor discovered

a tumour. This was found to be benign, but Sibelius had to give up alcohol and cigars, which had been integral to his adult life. For many years Sibelius lived in fear that the tumour would return. Robert Layton writes, ‘Nothing concentrates the mind on essentials more than the thought that one’s days may be numbered, and it is in these works (i.e. the Fourth Symphony and The Bard, and also the tone-poem Luonnotar) that one senses the closeness of death and an overwhelming feeling of isolation.’ Sibelius composed this subtle, enigmatic work in 1913 and revised it three years later. What he intended to convey in The Bard is not known. He was well acquainted with the poetry of Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1803-77), and Runeberg’s poem by the same name describes a bard, near the end of his life, who once more ‘took his lyre/And plucked sonorous chords – and died/Rendering up his soul to the spirit from which it came.’ Sibelius denied any connection between Runeberg’s poem and his tone-poem, but might it be that the composer’s recent brush with cancer left him feeling sensitive about his own mortality? His own description of the work was that it was ‘something like an ancient Scandinavian ballad from the time of the Vikings’.

In Greek mythology, the Oceanides were three thousand goddess nymphs, the daughters of Oceanus and Tethys, who oversaw all of the Earth’s fresh water. Later on, the Oceanides also came to be associated with the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, and perhaps Sibelius’s original title for the work (Aallottaret, or ‘Spirits of the Waves’) alludes to that latter association. Originally planned as a suite in three movements – enough of the second and third movements remained to allow their reconstruction and eventual performance in 2002, and it has been suggested that the first movement was comprised of material used in The Bard – Sibelius composed The Oceanides in 1914 for a music festival in Norfolk, Connecticut, which he was to visit later in the year. (It was commissioned by American composer Horatio Parker, who is remembered today chiefly for being the composition teacher at Yale University of young Charles Ives.) Shortly before his Atlantic crossing, however, Sibelius substantially revised the tone-poem, which created more than a few anxious moments for his wife, and for the copyist, who briefly even took up residence in the composer's home in order to save time. The work was completed with scarcely a moment to spare – a few additional revisions were completed after the composer's arrival

in the United States. Sibelius himself conducted the first performance on 4 June (the program also included Finlandia and Valse triste) and spoke appreciatively about the orchestra, which included musicians from the Metropolitan Opera and from Boston. As its name suggests, En Saga (1892, rev. 1902) is musical story-telling, although it is up to the listener to provide the story. It has been suggested that Sibelius was thinking not of the Finnish national folk epic, the Kalevala, which inspired several of his works, but of the Old Norse collection of poems and stories known as the Edda. However, in the 1940s, Sibelius told his secretary that the work was an expression of his state of mind at that time, and a portrait of his youth. In other words, perhaps the inspiration behind En Saga was more autobiographical than literary. Nevertheless, one can easily hear the dark mystery of Finland’s forests in this work. It was composed at the suggestion of conductor Robert Kajanus, following the success of Sibelius’s Kullervo Symphony earlier in 1892. This, then, is the earliest work presented here, and it did much to establish Sibelius’s reputation, at home and abroad, as a major composer. (Toscanini, usually no strong advocate for contemporary music, became

one of the work's champions.) The composer's revision two decades later cut over 140 bars from the middle of the score. This tightened its structure, and also made it more ‘polished’ and ‘civilized’, in the words of Sibelius's wife, who, like Kajanus, preferred the original version. Sibelius composed only one opera, but he composed a number of works for the theatre, including incidental music for Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Procopé’s Belshazzar’s Feast, and, in 1926, Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Music for the latter was requested by Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre, and it was reused, with additions and revisions, a year later in Helsinki. This was Sibelius’s most ambitious ‘collaboration’ with Shakespeare, but not his first. Early in his career, he considered composing a Macbeth symphony, and in 1909 he set two songs from Twelfth Night, ‘Come away, Death’ and ‘When that I was and a little tiny boy’. As far back as 1901, Sibelius’s friend Baron Axel Carpelan had encouraged Sibelius to look at The Tempest, believing that the play was ‘made for’ him. Sibelius eventually published eighteen individual items for The Tempest – more music, actually, than Shakespeare indicated in his text. (On the other hand, Sibelius did not

set the play's songs – there is no setting of ‘Full fathom five’, for example.) The overture is practically onomatopoeic in its musical painting of the destructive storm at sea that opens Shakespeare's play. The tone-poem Nightride and Sunrise comes from 1907 or 1908. It was composed before Sibelius began work on his Fourth Symphony. Supposedly, the idea for this work came from as far back to 1901, when Sibelius and his family had been visiting Italy. Sibelius’s relationship with his wife was not without its storms, and so perhaps there is a bit of autobiography in the description that he gave to one of his most prominent English advocates, Rosa Newmarch: ‘[this music] is concerned with the inner experiences of an average man riding solitary through the forest gloom; sometimes glad to be alone with nature; occasionally awe-stricken by the stillness or the strange sounds which break it; not filled with foreboding, but thankful and rejoicing in the daybreak.’ Raymond Tuttle

Executive producers: Cord Garben (Karelia Suite, Four Legends, The Bard, En Saga); Wolfgang Lohse (The Tempest, The Oceanides, Nightride and Sunrise) Balance engineers: Klaus Hiemann (Karelia Suite, Four Legends, The Bard, En Saga); Harald Baudis (The Tempest, The Oceanides, Nightride and Sunrise) Recording engineers: Jobst Eberhardt (Karelia Suite, Four Legends, The Bard, En Saga); Günter Hermanns (The Tempest, The Oceanides, Nightride and Sunrise) Tape editing: Jobst Eberhardt (Karelia Suite, Four Legends, En Saga); Christa Conrad, Wolfgang Werner (The Bard); Hans-Peter Schweigmann (The Tempest, The Oceanides, Nightride and Sunrise) Recording locations: Concert Hall, Helsinki, Finland, October 1972 (The Bard, En Saga), October 1975 (Karelia Suite, Four Legends); Residenz, Herkulessaal, Munich, Germany, November 1955 (The Tempest, The Oceanides, Nightride and Sunrise) Cover image: ‘Oakenfast’ by Jozef Szekeres. © 2007 Jozef Szekeres · www.blackmermaid.com · www.elf-fin.deviantart.com Eloquence series manager: Cyrus Meher-Homji Art direction: Chilu Tong · www.chilu.com Booklet editor: Bruce Raggatt

OTHER SIBELIUS RECORDINGS ON ELOQUENCE Decca 442 9493 [2CD]

Decca 480 0044 [2CD]

Symphonies Nos. 5-7; Karelia Overture; Pohjola’s Daughter; Pelleas et Mélisande; Nightride and Sunrise; Karelia Suite Anthony Collins · Thomas Jensen

Symphonies Nos. 2 & 4; Tapiola Rachmaninov: The Isle of the Dead Ernest Ansermet

Decca 442 9490 [2CD]

Symphonies Nos. 1-4 Anthony Collins

Decca 442 9487 [2CD]

Violin Concerto; En Saga; Finlandia; Valse Triste; Tapiola; Four Legends Jan Damen · Eduard van Beinum Thomas Jensen Decca 442 9447

Decca 442 9486

Sibelius: String Quartet Delius: String Quartet; Cello Sonata Fitzwilliam String Quartet George Isaac · Martin Jones

Sibelius & R. Strauss: Songs Tom Krause · Pentti Koskimies

Decca 466 9052

Decca 476 2817

Karelia Suite; Pohjola’s Daughter; En Saga; Valse Triste; Tapiola Sir Colin Davis

Violin Concerto; Two Melodies; Two Serenades; Rakastava: suite Boris Belkin · Vladimir Ashkenazy · Neville Marriner

480 3297