Finland's Finest: The Seven Symphonies Of Jean Sibelius

Sibelius was becoming something of a national hero in Finland when his First Symphony debuted in 1899. He had already racked up a considerable success seven years earlier with Kullervo, an 80-minute symphonic work for chorus and soloists, based on Finland's national folk saga. Although the First Symphony bares traces of Tchaikovsky and Bruckner, Steinberg says the music contains Sibelius' stamp of individuality.

When the Finnish people wanted freedom from Russian rule, Sibelius urged them on, and they loved him for it. He wrote outwardly patriotic music, anthems for the cause, but that's not really what his symphonies were about. Yet people looked for innate patriotism and sometimes thought they found it. That was the case with the Symphony No. 2. Steinberg says he can hear why some Finns felt the music told the story of their lives.

There's a famous quote by Gustav Mahler that says, "A symphony must be like the world; it must embrace everything." Mahler came up with that creed after a conversation with Sibelius, who told Mahler what he preferred in a symphony was "a severity of form" and an inner connection among the motifs. In other words, Sibelius didn't care about what the music said about the world, he wanted it to make sense as music. The Symphony No. 3 is quite different from its two predecessors, and when audiences first heard it in 1907, Steinberg says, they apparently didn't take too well to it.

When Sibelius was in his mid-40s, he thought he was going to die. His doctors had found a growth in his throat and after several operations his prognosis was still not good. He was a hard-living, hard-drinking cigar smoker. For a time, he gave it all up and wrote his dark, inward-looking, modern-sounding Symphony No. 4, a work that baffled not only many listeners but conductors as well.

In 1915, on his 50th birthday, Sibelius was an acknowledged national hero of Finland. And on that night he conducted a new symphony, his Fifth, which in its final movement contains a vision of swans in flight over his country home — and one of the oddest of all symphonic endings.

In talking about Sibelius' Sixth Symphony, Steinberg says, "It is as strange a symphony as I know and there are few after Schubert I love so much." Along with its "mysterious buzzings and silences," Steinberg points to the opening of the work, which unfolds like a piece of Renaissance choral music.

One of the ideals of the Romantic era in classical music was to achieve unity, and it's been said that the Symphony No. 7 by Sibelius, first heard in 1924, consummates the 19th-century search for symphonic unity. It's in just one movement, shifting from tempo to tempo, idea to idea. Musicologist Donald Tovey wrote, "Sibelius has achieved the power of moving like aircraft." Steinberg says the conclusion of the Seventh Symphony, despite the fact Sibelius had composed an Eighth, seems to say, "The End."