Two Symphonies by Sibelius

Posted on September 3, 2002 in Imagination

If I were damned to be inanimate, I would like to be one of the symphonies of Jean Sibelius. Were this flesh sack to disintegrate, I would enjoy my energies being reincarnated as the pleasant ripples that spring from the dragging of a rosined bow across steel strings or from the shivering of a reed or other mouthpiece through a brass or wooden tube. Yea, I would travel through the air until I reached your ears, tickling your tymphanum with my quavers and sending off shoots of imaginative imagery from there to the most intimate corners of your brain.

I bought a CD of the Fourth and the Fifth the other day. The Fourth begins abruptly, like waking up to oppressive heat in the early morning. It pushes you, harries you slowly. It is not without happy moments. At several points it does rise and dance about, but always with reserve. Nagging thoughts pierce the joy and whisper dire certainties. The final movement, which begins in lively triumph, ends in despair. I recall from it one string part that suddenly springs from a closet and introduces a tragic motif in mid-surge. Then comes panic and finally a hard battered resignation as the joy ends and so does the symphony in a sussurant whimper.

The Fourth Symphony is depression. The Fifth sings of pastoral joy. The dire whines squeal, but they don’t get enough energy to kill souls. The music repeatedly rises above the tragedy, giving one the satisfaction of having arrived at new levels of understanding and resolve. It ends abruptly with several blares from the brass, but the final mood suggests satisfaction and a singing of life that is well accomplished.

To listen to a Sibelius symphony, I feel, is to drink a strong distillation of feelings. My first love was the Second, whose second movement presages the brittle darkness of the Fourth. I remember listening to it for the first time: I immediately grasped three of the movements, but the second mystified me. I did not recognize it as music. The instruments crashed against one another and the melodic line fell in pieces. I learned, with more exposure, that the beauty of the second was akin to the joy of unearthing glazed pottery fragments. You drew your delight from looking at the individual parts. And with more exposure, I realized that far from being a ruin, the second movement was a complete vase, unshattered though painted in shocking colors. The gloom prepares you for the excitement of the third movement as it rises, without pause, in the utter triumph and rapture of the last.

If I were damned to be inanimate, yes, I should love to be such a symphony or a movement in one of them. I should hope not to be as the Fourth. Still, if that is what I am written as, there is beauty in being it.