Sibelius Tapiola

Introduction to the Episode

0:00Hello and welcome to Sticky Notes, the classical music podcast. My name is Joshua Weilerstein, I'm a conductor, and I'm the music director of the Orquestra Nationale de Lille and the chief conductor of the Alborg Symphony. This podcast is for anyone who loves classical music, works in the field, or is just getting ready to dive in to this amazing world of incredible music. Before we get started, I want to thank my new Patreon sponsors, Jamie, Michael, Leo, Peter, AJ, Sean, Rick, Gregory,

0:37Tom, Heather, Bruce, Vicky, Ed, and John, and all of my other Patreon sponsors for making Season 11 possible. If you'd like to support the show, please head over to patreon.com slash sticky notes podcast. And if you are a fan of the show, please take a moment to give us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It is greatly appreciated. I just returned from a fantastic week with the Orquestra Nationale de Lille. We did a program called Broadway by Night with Lakeisha Jones and

1:09Aisha DeHaas. Tons of Gershwin and Bernstein and Rogers and Hart. Lots of Broadway music. Just a real pleasure to do that as the last concert of the season in Lille. And now I'm basically off for about four or five weeks from conducting before heading back to Lille to start our season. And it's been a really interesting season in Lille because we've been outside of our hall, which has been a whole experience in and of itself. But we are so excited to be returning back to our concert hall, the Nouveau Sièque,

1:42coming up in September. And for today's episode, this is a Patreon-sponsored episode by Tyler, who asked for Sibelius' Tapiola, a piece that I've always loved and was so excited to get to cover today. I really hope you enjoy it.

Context of Sibelius and Tapiola

2:17Widespread they stand, the Northland's dusky forests. Ancient, mysterious, brooding savage dreams. Within them dwells the forest's mighty god. And wood sprites in the gloom weave magic secrets.

2:47These lines are affixed to the first page of Sibelius' tone poem, Tapiola, a piece that is mysterious in many ways and stands as Sibelius' last completed major work. You might be expecting me to say that Sibelius died soon after its composition, but this is not the case. Sibelius wrote Tapiola in 1926, but did not pass away until 1957. Over the course of Sibelius' final 30 years, he wrote almost no music, a creative silence that has never been properly explained.

3:22There are many theories about this silence, but the answer to why Sibelius stopped composing might never be found. So we have this final major piece, Tapiola, written at the very height of the composer's powers. Tapiola, a piece of around 15 to 20 minutes in duration, is concentrated Sibelius at its very best. It is a piece full of mystery, atmosphere, and most of all, the immense and overwhelming power of nature. Tapiola directly translates to the realm of Tapio, Tapio being

3:58the forest spirit that is prominent in the Finnish national epic myth, the Kalevala. Throughout this piece, Sibelius uses an incredible economy of ideas to create something wholly unique. There is not a single composer who sounds like Sibelius, and furthermore, no piece of Sibelius' that sounds like this one, save for maybe the seventh symphony, written just before Tapiola. It is a piece absolutely at odds with modern life, with the speed and energy of a city, with the short attention-grabbing dopamine hits of social media,

4:32and even with our modern understanding of nature. As the writer Jay Goodwin says, quote, Like all art, music is chiefly a humanistic pursuit, meant to provide us with a window to our world. In this piece, however, there is the hair-raising sense that the paradigm has been reversed, and that we are the ones being watched. There is the sense that the music is listening to us. I would only change one word in that quotation, which is that during Tapiola, I think we have the

5:03sense that nature is listening to us, because this music is essentially nature. I can't wait to talk you through this wonderfully enigmatic work, coming right up on Sticky Notes.

5:33First of all, thank you to Tyler for sponsoring today's episode on Patreon. The writer Alex Ross says this about Sibelius' music as he entered the 1920s. Quote, Instead of writing the music of his imagination, he wanted to transcribe the very noise of nature. He thought that he could hear chords in the murmurs of the forests and the lapping of the lakes.

6:05He once baffled a group of Finnish students by giving a lecture on the overtone series of A Meadow. One of the reasons offered for Sibelius' silence after Tapiola is that like Rachmaninoff and Elgar, for example, he felt it impossible to take on the new style of music being written in the age of Schoenberg and A Tonality. Rachmaninoff actually said this beautifully, writing, quote, I feel like a ghost wandering in a world-grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing,

6:38and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me. I cannot cast out my musical gods in a moment and bend the knee to new ones. And Sibelius wrote in his diary, quote, Not everyone can be an innovating genius. As a personality and as an apparition from the woods, you will have your small, modest place. Composers like Rachmaninoff and Sibelius were

7:08also in a strange place in terms of the reception of their works. They were lionized in the English-speaking world and viciously looked down upon in Central Europe. They were both held up as the carriers of tradition and the destroyers of progress. In some ways, these arguments echoed the war of the romantics that comes up on this show often. It's the same dichotomy, progress versus tradition, conservatism versus progressivism. But as in politics, these black and white dichotomies are

7:38actually not so black and white once you parse them out. Sibelius's music is anything but traditional and is incredibly innovative, just not in the same way as Schoenberg's. But for this so-called sin, not being like Schoenberg essentially, Sibelius's music was viciously criticized by the avant-garde, especially post-World War II, with the theorist, composer, conductor, and polemicist René Leibovitz once writing an article called Sibelius, the worst composer in the world. Theodore Adorno's

8:13criticisms of Sibelius were so culturally powerful that to this day Sibelius's music is not nearly as accepted in the German-speaking world as it is elsewhere. I wanted to add this context because when you listen to Tapiola now, exactly 100 years after it was written, it sounds to me like it could have been written yesterday. But for Sibelius, this pressure and this bizarre mix of adulation and revulsion was paralyzing for him, perhaps paralyzing enough that it silenced him for the last 30 years

8:48of his life. Let's go into the piece now, which begins with the central motivic idea that will define

The Opening Motive and Timpani

8:54the whole piece. As I hope this introduction just showed you, I really do feel like no one has such an individual voice as Sibelius. For me, the moment

9:30this starts, I think, ah, that's Sibelius. Why? Well, since this is a shorter piece than we usually cover on the show, we can go into a lot of detail to find that Sibelius sound. Let's start with the first note, the timpani playing a mezzo forte stroke alone. It's not that radical, but the dynamic of mezzo forte, not too loud, not too soft, that's unusual, and it gets us right into that in-between flavor of Sibelius. Then we have the motive itself. It's tonal, but it's got a lot of

10:06flavor in that tonality. It's an E major seventh chord, which isn't that radical, but it's voiced with the seventh on the bottom, making it extremely unstable. Very few tonal composers would start a piece this way. It immediately takes us to the realm of the unusual, to the mysterious. But with that said, it's also orchestrated very warmly, with the strings

10:36playing in very forgiving and lush registers. There's also a single note, a G sharp, played by the horns, which emerges behind the motif in the strings.

10:55In that E major seventh chord, the G sharp is the third of that chord, but Sibelius is about to radically change the tonality to G sharp minor, with an entrance of the trumpets and then slowly emerging winds.

11:14And then the timpani and strings repeat their same figure with that same E major seventh chord that resolves to G sharp minor. We then hear a kind of improvisation or fantasy-like circling of that G sharp. What is all of this doing? Well, to me, it's really taking us into a very unstable, very windy

11:59world. It's also quite imposing with all those long notes, the timpani stroke, and the declamatory idea in the strings. It's like we are being introduced to Tapio, that forest spirit. And that motif, it's going to shape the entire piece to come. Less than a minute of music that is about to spawn 19 or so more minutes of dramatic action. And in true Sibelius fashion, non-action. Listen to the whole thing again.

12:29J. T. T. T. T. Thank you.

Storms and Silences

13:06Things are about to take a shocking turn. With a violent attack from the brass and timpani, Sibelius whips up some kind of storm. One can create any image they want from this moment, so I won't cloud your own imaginations with my own.

13:35That silence you heard after the theme was heard again was not from me. It was from Sibelius. Silence is going to play a major role in this piece, and this is the first of many silences. He is now going to begin a sequence based on the motive from the opening of the piece. It will pass around the orchestra, but often the statement is punctuated either by complete silence or by a long static chord in the woodwinds.

14:10Sibelius. ORGAN PLAYS

14:45As Jay Goodwin says, quote, Pregnant rests seem to stretch on interminably, and sustained notes in the winds create a static background that is most noticeable only when it suddenly disappears, leaving behind an eerily empty silence.

15:15There is both an epic feeling to this music, in both senses of the term, by the way, epic majesty and also in the sense of an epic myth, and also a strangeness to the harmonic language that is so typical of Sibelius. Here's one of those harmonic shifts from D major

15:47to a very unusual kind of augmented 7th chord on A. Whatever the name of this chord, the change is jarring, like a lens that suddenly becomes blurred. The motive is repeated so many times in so many configurations that it begins to sound almost like a chant, a talisman, but somehow it doesn't feel repetitive. Part of that is the instrumentation changes. Sibelius switches from the woodwinds to a group of violas divided into four parts for the next tableau of this theme,

16:19but he also adds in small rhythmic details that make things feel new. In the viola passage, we hear very softly the basses playing syncopated just before the first beat, almost giving us the sense that the forest itself is breathing.

16:54And finally, the repetitions begin to fade away, and all we are left with is that syncopated breathing and the long notes that have haunted the piece so far. A modest crescendo leads to a new section,

17:27also based on the opening motive, but this time slightly more fragmented and wandering. Time seems to have slowed down to an absolute crawl at this point, and it's up to the conductor and orchestra to make this feel completely intentional.

17:54And now a long, unbelievably long, crescendo begins. And now a long, unbelievably long crescendo begins.

18:25Sibelius is the master of stretching time across huge spaces. I remember vividly an experience I had conducting Sibelius' Fifth Symphony with an orchestra who shall remain nameless, but who had never played Sibelius V before. The final part of the first movement is a legendary accelerando that lasts for nearly five minutes. It is one of the hardest passages in all of symphonic music to manage as a conductor, and takes a huge amount of practice. At our first reading in the movement, it was clear that some of the musicians

18:56were aware of this accelerando, and some weren't. So by the end of the movement, there were several musicians who were about ten bars behind me when we got to the end. A musician earnestly leaned forward and asked me, there's an accelerando marked here, pointing to the beginning of the accelerando, but where does it stop? I said, right at the end of the movement. He said with total earnestness, but that is not possible. I said, welcome to Sibelius.

19:26This mastery of time makes the impossible possible, as Sibelius creates this huge crescendo that tells us that something an imposing, massive, and dramatic is on the way. Sibelius plays softly with the

19:47slumber and But wait, nothing happened. I'll be honest, I tricked you a bit. Sibelius gives us the feeling that something is on the way,

20:18and then just as we're getting to the point of building to it, he turns away. And with ironically cheerful scherzo-like music in the woodwinds, he begins to turn the volume back down again. It's an amazing moment of musical trickery, and it foreshadows events later in the piece.

20:51This huge first section now will come to a close, with another version of the main motive, played first by the clarinets, very low in their registers, followed by a passionate declamation by the cellos.

21:22Sibelius has this group, along with the violas, basses, and bassoons, make a huge crescendo. But that group of musicians, that doesn't make a huge overpowering sound. So again, this idea of delayed gratification, delayed arrival, is palpable. Oh, let's take a deep breath in.

The Second Section Begins

22:09The second section now begins out of nowhere, with a much faster tempo and the feeling that something totally new has begun. The winds and strings pass spirited but very soft triplets back and forth in what feels like a scherzo movement beginning.

22:39But if you listen very closely to the intervals of the triplets, you'll hear something very familiar.

23:09It's okay if you don't catch it, I'll explain. It's the motive from the beginning of the piece sped up. And if you didn't catch it right away, Sibelius makes it clear just a bit later on, when the winds start to play the original motive at a slower tempo as a kind of comment on the triplets. Here we can see that this new music is really just more of a variation on the motive rather than something completely new.

23:40That again is the motivic magic of Sibelius, making the new seem old and the old seem new simultaneously. Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius

24:14Now, though, after another characteristic long-held note, the agitation starts to increase. Once again, we are given the feeling that a storm is afoot. Perhaps here we'll get that arrival we were denied earlier on.

24:44To be continued... In a way, waiting for events in this music is a fool's errand.

25:27Similar to the immovability and essential silence of the forest, it's that non-action that defines this music. An incredibly courageous decision for a composer writing music that is by its nature supposed to go somewhere. This does, but in a completely unique way that feels like immense spaces of time are passing as well as no time at all. Now appears some of the strangest music we have heard so far.

26:14Unstable harmonies form the basis for what should ostensibly be the easiest kind of music to listen to, a chorale in the woodwinds. But that harmonic instability undermines every expectation we could have about music like this. And it makes this music have an unsettled feeling that doesn't leave us as we wander through this thicket of dissonance and unresolved harmonic tension. Unstable harmonies form the basis for what should ostensibly be the easiest kind of music to listen to, a chorale in the woodwinds.

27:08Suddenly we hear what I think is the most extraordinary color of the piece, at least so far. Yet another variation on the main motive appears. How many are we at now? With the cellos divided, not into two parts as they often are in other pieces, but into four. The basses are present too, so we have five distinct lines of harmony. Then the violins and violas enter, also divided. So what is normally five lines of texture becomes twelve. But richness is not what Sibelius is after.

27:41Instead, what we get is a kind of thinning out. An ethereal gulf of registers that creates a sound that truly feels like all of nature is breathing this theme to itself. Sibelius plays an ethereal gulf. ORGAN PLAYS

28:31Can you believe that harmony? Can you believe anyone would have called Sibelius not forward-thinking? That harmony gives me goosebumps on my already existing goosebumps from the previous passage. It is beautiful, tender, and unsettling all at once. Something out of a David Lynch movie, and the atmosphere just continues to deepen in this profoundly enigmatic passage.

29:01Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius

29:31Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius Sibelius But for a moment, suddenly it seems as if it was all a ruse.

Climaxes and Dissonances

30:09In a truly cinematic moment, Sibelius has the brass and timpani come in with a terrifying fortepiano, followed by the first actual extremely loud dynamic in the piece, for a declamation of the motive which feels as final as it was shocking. And yet, we continue on.

30:37Sibelius then changes the tempo to allegro, or fast, but this is not necessarily the perception we have. Because the rhythmic values of most of the notes remain relatively slow, we get a general feeling of agitation rather than something truly violent and stormy like we might expect. The harmonies are also getting stranger again, otherworldly and full of pungent dissonances. This is a new motivic idea with the rising scales, and it will come back in a powerful way later on.

31:07The harmonies In a kind of musical trivia moment, I'm curious what you think this moment sounds like.

31:50Now, you might have wondered why I was talking so much about Rachmaninoff earlier on. Well, it's because this place reminds me vividly of the beginning of Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony.

32:20I really have no idea whether this was an intentional homage on Sibelius's part, and I actually kind of doubt it. But it's a stunning moment nonetheless, where the dissonances suddenly melt away for a kind of Rachmaninoff-like hypertonality.

32:50And then Sibelius reasserts the voice of the forest in the most agitated music we've heard so far. Shocking interjections from all corners of the orchestra start to give us the impression that the forest has come alive, and is now in a state of great tumult. Listen to the way the music seems to be almost exploding with energy.

33:20It's amazing to me that Sibelius can write this music which seems so modern, just after the most tonal moment in the whole piece. This continues to escalate until Sibelius arrives at actually the most rhythmically stable moment of the piece so far,

33:57with tick-tock pizzicato in the strings and a wonderfully strange theme in the winds. This is not the first time scherzo-like music has entered the scene, and this is a reminder that in this forbidding landscape there is also humor and lightness, though of a strange kind. And this is a passage of the 69e spectacle. That's after Icai a story The moment Sorry for the moment There's anything Over the compañ

34:27If comin' Soon You May You And You Then there are what seems like two homages at once. Though once again, I don't really think that's what Sibelius intended. Oscillating chords in the brass which remind me of Saturn from Gustav Holst's The Planets introduced that Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony-like theme in the strings.

35:01The winds take over this theme, and the lasting impression we get from this music is that any agitation from earlier on is now winding down. Perhaps the day is ending, and this long middle section is coming to a close.

35:40And actually, we have arrived at a sort of recap, as the main motive that so dominated the first ten minutes of the piece now returns in a passionate forte dynamic. Once again, Sibelius subverts our expectations.

36:11Thank you so much for watching. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

The Fast Violins and Climax

36:53Now, I intentionally did not want to give that next passage away to you. We've had silence, long notes, and plenty of strange dissonances, along with all the richness and beauty of that big motive. But now, Sibelius, less than four minutes before the end of the piece, practically stops time itself, but using the fastest notes he can. For ten measures, the violins play a single note, very fast, and they get softer and softer.

37:24This is an incredibly long time in the classical music context, and in great performances, especially when the audience is quiet, the music seems to disappear into the texture of the hall. That is, until it finally starts moving, like a gust of wind gathering energy. The strings are once again divided into multiple parts, eight this time, and the music rises and rises in intensity. The strings are once again.

37:55The strings are twice as ты not. The strings are once againés. The strings are once againäs. Thank you.

38:34I don't know of more terrifying music than this in all of classical music. The brass crescendi remind me of a horror movie. Whether this is a literal depiction of the power of a forest spirit, or a simple depiction of an intense gust of wind, or something else, it is absolutely chill-inducing.

39:04This explosive moment dissipates almost as quickly as it appeared, though to me its impact is felt for a long time after the piece is over. But at this moment, many things happen in quick succession, and I'll try to take them apart. The bassoon plays a valedictory version of the opening motive. Then we have a long-held note,

39:48which leads to an appearance of the second, scalar motive in the strings. But this arrival is accompanied by a horror chord of dissonance.

40:09Then a huge scale on the strings leads to a fortissimo version of the main motive. In three events, Sibelius distills the entire piece down into about 45 seconds of music. And we're into the final minute of this piece now.

The Final Minute and Ending Chord

40:51How can Sibelius end this epic tale, told in just 20 minutes of music? He could go for something big and majestic, or something extremely quiet and mysterious. Or maybe something else? What do you think he's going to do? If I had to guess when I first heard this piece, I would have assumed it was going to be something quiet and mysterious. Listen first to the final minute, and then we'll talk about it.

41:21The final minute, and then we'll talk about it.

41:51The final minute, and then we'll talk about it. A huge and terrifying crescendo in the brass, followed by its sudden disappearance,

42:27and then we are left with just this chord.

42:36That's a B and an F sharp. The outline of a B chord, though we don't know if it's major or minor. But then when that D sharp comes in, oh my, what a moment. And the dynamic is interesting too. Sempre mezzo forte. Always mezzo forte. Always medium loud. That middle ground dynamic allows the music to feel present, but not imposing. Again, I have dozens of images in my head for the ending of this piece, but I don't want to cloud your imagination.

43:07As that B major chord fades away, though, I've had the impression that I've spent hours inside of that forest, with all of its terrible beauty. But then I'll see you next time.

Concluding Thoughts on Sibelius

43:27Tapiolla is a piece I've actually never conducted, but it's always been on my list. It's not easy to program since it's about 20 minutes long, and since it's so mysterious in many ways, it's not either a natural concert beginner or concert ender.

44:06But to me, it is one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century, and a perfect distillation of that great Sibelius late style. What we could have been gifted if he had continued composing in the last 30 years of his life, we don't know. But this interminable discussion in the 20th century between modernism and conservatism might very well have consumed him, though of course, we can never know for sure. But in the end, I hear everything in Sibelius's music, and especially in this piece.

44:37Modernism, radicalism, avant-gardism, atonality, tonality, beauty, ugliness. And isn't it glorious to have music by a composer brave enough to throw all of this into a depiction of nature? I'll finish with a great quotation from the American composer Morton Feldman, which I found in Alex Ross's great chapter on Sibelius from his book The Rest is Noise. In 1984, the great American avant-garde composer Morton Feldman gave a lecture at the relentlessly up-to-date Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, Germany.

45:13Feldman said, The people who you think are radicals might really be conservatives. The people who you think are conservative might really be radical. And then he began to hum the Sibelius Fifth.

45:31Thanks so much to Tyler for sponsoring today's episode. This episode was mixed by Charlie Cozella, so a huge thank you to him. We'll have some more exciting stuff for you in a couple of weeks, so don't miss our next episode. If you like what you heard today, please feel free to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

46:02It really helps the show gain more visibility. Please send any questions to stickynotespodcast at gmail.com, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. And if you'd like to support the podcast monetarily, just head over to patreon.com slash stickynotespodcast. Thanks, and I'll talk to you again after a while.

46:27See you again after a while.

46:57I'll see you again after a while.