Sibelius's "Oceanides"

Continuing my series of program notes:

Jan Sibelius (1865-1957)

The Oceanides

Portrait of Sibelius in 1892 by his brother-in-law, Eero Järnefelt

In the ‘teens’ of the 20^th century, it was as if Sibelius was seeking in his music to find the Being of nature behind the acoustic surface of his works. This was not ‘easy’ music. In several works of the period, Sibelius himself struggled through various drafts before arriving at satisfactory results. Not surprisingly, much of this music defied classification into standard classical forms and audiences were puzzled by works such as the Fourth Symphony (1910-11) or Luonnotar (1913).

In many respects, The Oceanides signified emergence from the bleak rigour of this period’s music. The work was commissioned in 1913 by philanthropists Carl Stoeckel and his wife, Ellen Battell-Stoeckel, for the next year’s Norfolk Festival in Connecticut. Sibelius wrote a draft in three movements. At this stage it was called ‘Fragments of a suite for orchestra (Precursor to The Oceanides)’; material that wound up in the final work was recognisable in the second movement. Sibelius then wrote a one-movement version in D flat. By now the work was called not only Oceanides, but Aallotaret, ‘water nymphs’, from the Finnish word ‘aalto’, for wave.

In his programmatic works, Sibelius was often inspired by the scenery and mythology of his native far north (particularly as found in the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala), but he could also be inspired by the south. The ‘oceanides’ themselves were found in Homer, feminine spirits of Oceanus, the great river that encircles the earth.

The sea’s shifting shapes and consistency make a good analogue for the form of the work, which in general consists of waves accumulating to a climax. The temptation to look for conventional form might find encouragement in the fact that at one point in May 1914 the work was temporarily called, in German, Rondeau der Wellen (Rondo of the Waves).

The Oceanides is often described as Sibelius’s most impressionistic work, and it is possible that the original three-movement version was an answer to Debussy’s La Mer. Sibelius champion Cecil Gray described the work as ‘pointillist’, a term from painting that has also been applied to Debussy’s work, but any pointillism in Sibelius serves a different purpose. He is interested in what motives amount to, not in limiting our attention impressionistically to the passing moment.

Sibelius’s sea crossing to America to conduct this work in 1914 led to one of the most rewarding experiences of his life. He visited New York, Boston and Niagara Falls (which moved him profoundly). At Norfolk he was thrilled by the quality of the orchestra – musicians from Boston and New York’s Metropolitan Opera – and even wondered if they may not have coped after all with the more mysterious D flat in which he had written the second draft of The Oceanides.

The reception in America was timely. While Central Europe had recently been coming to terms with the tonal experiments of Schoenberg, Richard Strauss and Mahler, Sibelius was falling out of fashion. It must have been gratifying to find a ready reception among people at the far western perimeter of the Central European tradition.

Gordon Kalton Williams © 2011


This note first appeared in program booklets of orchestras associated with Symphony Services International (http://symphonyinternational.net/). Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:

Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013

Erratum (Fulton's Landing, Brooklyn) and Minneapolis conference

After failing to hold Brooklyn Heights, Washington's army rowed away from this beach on the Brooklyn side of the East River at sundown on 29 August 1776 under cover of fog and moved up Manhattan to Harlem Heights.

Howe later tried to encircle him by landing troops in Westchester county to the north, but Washington got up to White Plains (where Percy Grainger later lived, by the way) where there was a battle, and then into New Jersey.

Went to Minneapolis last week for the League of American Orchestras' conference. Interesting place, Minneapolis. It's probably more my size of city, but I wonder about the emptiness in the downtown streets. Is it a hangover from the many days of snow? Probably the most striking feature are the skyways that connect the city buildings. Without street corners to orient me in this aerial path through city buildings, I ended up back at the Hilton ballroom (site of the conference) with no idea how I got there. It's better, of course, than getting lost. The day I arrived, it was 101F. It was probably nostalgic for the populations of Ethiopians and Somalians (and Hmong) who now live there, but a bit of a shock given it's not what we normally think of as Minnesotan weather.

Highlights of the conference included the concert with the Minnesota Orchestra's performance under Vanska of Sibelius' Second Symphony. You could almost imagine this music being in the bones of Minnesota's Scandinavian descendants and for the first time I understood that description you often find of Sibelius' many perspectives; that it's like sunlight falling in different ways through thick forest. I do wonder about Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto though. The first movement still sounds like written-out extemporization, which it was (Beethoven hadn't written down the piano part by the time of the first performance), and I have always found it slightly odd that people play it as if it were set in stone. Why not treat the orchestral part as a paradigm, and play with this part a bit? But would that be acceptable? The catch word at the conference was 'innovation' but is everything up for grabs?

Last night we went to a night of African-American monodramas at the Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, subjects like Harriet Tubman, texts by people like Langston Hughes, and beautiful singers. Full-blown song is what got the audience most going. (I am really starting to wonder about atonality's artful evasion of cadence, its refusal to set foot on an 'earth'; it often sounds to me like not getting to the point. It may be enjoyable to perform, intellectually fun to keep off the tonic, but somehow failing to give listeners emotional payoff.)

We pinch ourselves to think that we travel so far to go to things here. Inwood to High Street, Brooklyn would be 13 miles.Yet we jump on trains that come every five minutes, think nothing of travelling this distance to see a show, but in Sydney terms it's Sydney to Parramatta and we wouldn't just blithely jump on a train to do this in Sydney. The way regular trains eat up such distances here is a sign of the energy of the city, I think.