Jan Sibelius.    A new wind from the cold North. Blank. 7

One of the best exponents of Sibelius’s music to visit Australia was the Finnish conductor PAAVO BERGLUND .The name is as interesting as was the man’s face.The given name PAAVO is Finnish ,  whilst the family name BERGLUND is Swedish.As to the face , he had the high cheekbones and the slanted eyes which indicated a Central Asian genetic ancestry.Such a combination of names seems to point to a split in national identity . Indeed in the northern part of Finland live the SAMI , the inhabitants of Lapland who have a Middle Asian provenance and whose way of life is centred on reindeer herding .Finland had for many years been a Swedish protectorate and in the 19th century became a Russian protectorate.Sibelius was born in 1865 .at a time when the smaller nations of Europe were beginning to agitate for political independence and to assert their distinctive cultural identities. Jan Sibelius’s full name was JOHAN JULIUS CHRISTIAN SIBELIUS. Nothing FInnish about those names .Indeed ,with his family and friends he spoke Swedish and it was only later in life that he learnt to speak Finnish.Most of the over 100 songs he wrote were set to Swedish language texts. Yet this man became known as the great FINNISH composer.Finland is a country of lakes and forests,heir to a pagan ethos where there is no clear division between the man ,nature ,and the Divine. Culturally Sibelius was European,but as a composer he allied himself to a distant past when nature spoke to man ,or rather when man thought he could understand what nature was saying. Finnish is a language unrelated to any of the other major European language groups,Germanic,Latin,Slavic or even Celtic .Sibelius is the great Nordic nature lover and his music blew a cold ,invigorating breath of fresh air into the musty concert halls of Vienna and Berlin.Listen to “En Saga “ and “The Swan of Tuonela” and you will hear these long,drawn out melodies which seem to meander endlessly,seemingly without direction .  It is as if we are tuned into    Sibelius’s thoughts and feelings as he walks in the woods, alone but not lonely .He belongs to this bleak cold landscape which  speaks to him in a language he understands, a language he has translated  into superb and evocative music .

Here are two Sibelius quotes  which tell us much about the composer.

Upon moving to his country home.   “ All the song had died in me in Helsinki”.

A reply to his critics. “ Whereas other composers are engaged in manufacturing cocktails of every hue and description I offer the public pure cold water.”

And then ,when a statue was erected in his honour “A statue has never been erected in honour of a critic”.

One can understand how he felt. Audiences loved his music and there is nothing the critics hate more than the success of  a popular LIVING composer. He had been called the world’s WORST composer by certain critics . Let the music speak for itself.It cannot explain theory or mathematics,it cannot predict the future  or make electoral promises , but it is above all that .Sibelius evokes a mysterious past and at times it  seems that one is listening to the soul of nature ,and you feel insignificant but part of something much bigger than you could ever be. It’s a sort of enchantment from a time when religion was magic and  nature was  religion’s book.