Preface

Summary

The theme of this book is the corpus and poetic environment of Jean Sibelius’s art songs. Sibelius’s powerful music has found admirers all over the world, but his international reputation is largely based on his symphonies, symphonic poems and violin concerto. The vocal works have remained at the margins, even for art song enthusiasts. In large part, this is due to the language barrier – Sibelius mainly set texts in Swedish and Finnish, both of them marginal European languages – but it is also due to his unconventional aesthetics, breaking away from the nineteenth- century German traditions that dominate the lied canon. In his own way, Sibelius belongs among the innovators of the lied tradition like Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and, finally, Arnold Schoenberg: fin de siècle composers embracing the rise of modernity. Sibelius’s more than one hundred art songs form a significant portion of his musical works, much too important to be neglected.

The literature on Sibelius, his life and his compositions, is extensive, spanning from early personal and anecdotal biographies (Furuhjelm, von Torne, Ekman, Johnson, Levas, Gray, Downes) to more recent books, such as more detailed biographies by Robert Layton, Andrew Barnett, Tomi Mäkelä, Marc Vignal, Ferruccio Tammaro and so forth. Erik Tawaststjerna’s five volumes on Sibelius in Swedish (compressed to three volumes in Robert Layton’s English translation) were groundbreaking when they appeared (1965–88), as he was the first scholar able to gain access to Sibelius’s diaries and other primary sources, and Tawaststjerna’s work has remained foundational to this day. Fabian Dahlström’s comprehensive catalogue Jean Sibelius: Thematisch-bibliographisches Verzeichnis seiner Werke (2003) was the first publication of a series of important documents, a goldmine for the Sibelius scholar. It was followed by Sibelius’s diary (2005) and his correspondence with Count Axel Carpelan (2010) and Adolf Paul (2018), all three with extensive commentaries. Sibelius’s correspondence with his wife, Aino, was published in three volumes, the first two in Finnish versions by Suvi-Sirkku Talas (2001, 2003), and the third (2007) including their original mix of languages, Swedish and Finnish. Glenda Dawn Goss’s book Sibelius: A Composer’s Life and the Awakening of Finland (2009) equals Tawaststjerna’s work in its profound descriptions of the political and linguistic context in which Sibelius became a national icon.