The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius Laura J. Gray The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius. Edited by Daniel M. Grimley. (Cambridge Companions to Music.) New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. [xvii, 273 p. ISBN 0-521-81552-5. $75.] Music examples, index, bibliography. In 1933, at the height of the British Sibelius cult, Ernest Newman wrote, "We of today are much too close to Sibelius ... to attempt anything like a picture of him as the generation of 1960 or 2000 will see him" ("Sibelius: Most Personal of Great Composers [1 October 1933]," in More Essays from the World of Music, rev. ed., selected by Felix Aprahamian [London: John Calder, 1976], 2:117). From the unmitigated adulation of the 1930s, to the critical decline of the 1960s, and the recent flurry of interest since the early 1990s, Newman predicted with keen foresight the precise turning points in Sibelius's evolving reputation over the last seventy years. Today, with the completion of Robert Layton's translation of the biography by Erik Tawaststjerna, the BIS label's superb efforts [End Page 133] to issue the entire output of the composer's works (including original versions of some), and a long-awaited complete edition, all signs point to a Sibelius renaissance, if not another cult. Symptomatic of the renewed fascination, The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius appears as the sixth essay collection on Sibelius in a decade. With its five other "companions," why do we need a sixth? In a way, one collection begets another. Research into Sibelius's life and music is progressing so rapidly that most of the advanced research on him appears in essay collections rather than single-author monographs. Multi-contributor volumes can be issued much more quickly, can more immediately build on new discoveries, and, therefore, can represent very recent scholarship, and The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius represents the latest to date. The editor, Daniel M. Grimley, has brought together a group of scholars who have distinguished themselves in Sibelius scholarship and beyond. More than half of the contributors read papers at the Third International Jean Sibelius Conference in Helsinki in 2000, which served as inspiration for the volume, although the book is not a record of those proceedings. That can be found in Matti Huttunen, Kari Kilpelainen, and Veijo Murtomaki, eds., Sibelius Forum II: Proceedings from the Third International Jean Sibelius Conference [Helsinki: Sibelius Academy, Department of Composition and Music Theory, 2003]. These are new works, presumably invited submissions, not written versions of presented papers. The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius, like most essay collections, is not a volume to be read from cover to cover. Taken together, however, the fifteen essays on various topics, organized in four parts (biography, works, influence and reception, and interpretation) establish an overarching theme best summed up by Morton Feldman in 1984: "The people who you think are radicals might really be conservatives. The people who you think are conservative might really be radical" (p. 215). Overall, the volume demonstrates Sibelius's unique treatment of contemporaneous modernist and post-modernist tendencies and proposes that, even in the most "absolute" symphonies, his music was formed out of extra-musical narratives, meanings, and influences. In a word, Sibelius was current, tapping into advanced and immediate harmonic, tonal, and formal discoveries to form his own unique and innovative structures that are only now becoming more clearly interpreted and understood. It has taken several decades to form the technical language and historical perspective to evaluate the composer's role in twentieth-century music and, on the whole, the scholarship represented in this volume, even if colored with a sometimes defensive and adulatory tone, takes important steps in assessing a corpus of music which has from the beginning eluded description and categorization. Of special note in the analysis section of the book is Arnold Whittall's essay on the later symphonies where, through a rethinking of the third to seventh symphonies, he presents a refreshing and stimulating argument that, rather than contradicting one another, Sibelius's modernist/anti-modernist tendencies interacted to make the music particularly vital. Whittall states, "Sibelius relished the opportunity to explore ways in which these conflicting tendencies could converge" (p. 58). Stephen Downes' chapter, "Pastoral...