![]() Press censorship was a strong characteristic of Russian rule, and in 1899 Sibelius was asked to compose some music for a “Press Celebrations” event. This was the political backdrop against which Finlandia was formed. Later, it would prove a continual font of inspiration for Sibelius, whose patriotic feelings chimed in with many other Finnish dissenters. Part of the Finns’ cultural fightback derived from the 1835 the publication of Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala – a collection of indigenous legends and folktales which formed a kind of mythic history of Finland. Finnish nationalism rose up in response to this foreign influence, and Tsar Nicholas II’s introduction of another wave of Russification policies in 1908 only served to strengthen anti-Russian feeling. For almost the entirety of the 19th century, Finland existed as a “Grand Duchy” within the Russian empire, which sought to decrease Finland’s autonomy by imposing so-called “Russification” policies. But in 1808 what ostensibly began as a temporary occupation of Finland by Russia in order to put strategic pressure on Sweden became an invasion that would last over a century. Would you like to make the case for a music genre, or a particular recording artist? Contact the Arts + Culture editor.From as far back as the Middle Ages, Finland was in the competing spheres of influence of the empires of Sweden and Russia. Many of us will never see those lands, but in Sibelius, at least we can hear them. ![]() Perhaps more than anything, his innovative music is marked by the search for a “pure-sound” - a sound released from its shackles - for which he sought inspiration in the vast lakes, pine trees and wildlife surrounding his home “Ainola” (after his wife Aino) and the Finnish landscape. He battled health problems, including an alcohol addiction, which lead to throat tumours and one scandalously drunken appearance as a conductor of his sixth symphony in Sweden, in 1923. A bon-vivant of sorts, he was also highly self-critical, revising or completely re-writing many works throughout his career. Sibelius composed seven symphonies (and an eighth he destroyed), as well as numerous stage, chamber, choral and piano works, but almost nothing in the final 30 years of his life. His early compositional style was also grounded in the traditional Viennese classicist models of Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert, but the opposite impulse – a radical, violently-progressive Finnish style captured in the great orchestral works – was by far the strongest and most transformative. Think, for example, of the potent evocation of sexual shame in Flickan kom ifrån sin älsklings möte, (The girl returned from meeting her lover). ![]() These works have received comparatively little attention, but it was here that the most traditional aspects of his personality found expression, in their sentimental smoothness and their references to old-world social mores. In the following decade Sibelius’s reputation spread beyond national borders, with performances of his works given across Europe, under the batons of Hans Richter, Weingartner, Toscanini, and Richard Strauss. ![]() The work instantly identified him as the musical voice of pro-Finnish-culture activism, and in 1897 the Finnish Senate confirmed his status as a national artist by awarding him an annual pension of 3,000 marks. Haunting modal melodies in obsessively reiterative patterns (adumbrating minimalist and post-minimalist techniques of the 1970s and 80s) are threaded through intense, dark textures and uneasy, jolting rhythmic arrangements, creating within just a few seconds a sound-world unmistakably Finnish and Sibelian. The five-movement work draws elements of programmatic symphonic writing together with soliloquies, dialogues and recitations from the “runes” (poems) of the Kalevala, the national folk epic. During the 1890s he cemented his position as Finland’s leading composer, mostly owing to the 1892 premiere of his massive symphonic poem Kullervo, his first declaration of a mature, self-consciously “modern” aesthetic.
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