Lönnrot and other folklorists believed themselves to be gathering poems handed down from antiquity. Music and art, however, faced more difficulty. As author Juhani Aho (1861–1921) remarked, “. . . [Finnish] art does not have a past: our artists themselves act as the founders of our arts, which ha[ve] no national pedigree.”199 It was the creative
Through the evocation of homeland and history, of poetic landscapes and golden ages, of chosen peoples and heroic sacrifices, intellectuals and artists could represent to their compatriots in words and sound, paint and stone, the continuity of the national community of their imagination and sentiment, and thereby help to create that community out of the heritage of myths, memories, symbols and traditions of the wider population.200
So Anthony D. Smith describes the task that fell to intellectuals and artists in the course of the nineteenth century. In shouldering their responsibility, Finnish visual artists turned to the people and their folkways, finding inspiration in handicrafts, rural buildings, natural surroundings, and the Kalevala. The most outstanding of these artists, Axel Gallén (1865–1931, later known as Akseli Gallen-Kallela, invented a “monumental style for portraying the Finnish people in art.201
198 See Pertti J. Anttonen: Tradition through Modernity: Postmodernism and the Nation-State in Folklore Scholarship. 2005, p. 133–38.
199 Quoted in Janne Gallen-Kallela-Sirén: “Akseli Gallen-Kallela and the Pursuit of New History and New Art: Inventing Finnish Art Nouveau,” in Now the Light Comes from the North: Art Nouveau in Finland. 2002, p. 43.
200 Anthony D. Smith: The Antiquity of Nations. 2004, p. 252.
201 Gallen-Kallela-Sirén: Minä palaan jalanjäljilleni: Akseli Gallen-Kallelan elämä ja taide. 2001, p.148.
Sibelius was not drawn to Finnish peasant life in the same way as Gallén. Nevertheless, on April 28, 1892, as Gallén was creating his colossal Kalevala paintings, Sibelius premièred a monumental Kalevala symphony: Kullervo. Its genre was a stunning surprise, but its spirit was not. Both were fully in tune with the Young Finns’ desire to elevate their rich heritage to high culture.
In some ways Kullervo appeared to fill a Herderian prescription: a work in which native poetry and song were used to build authentic musical expression. “A Symphony for Solo, Chorus, and Orchestra, the text taken from the Kalevala,”202 Kullervo traces the story of a boy forced into slavery when his immediate family is slaughtered by relatives. Possessed of prodigious strength, Kullervo bungles every task, tragically seduces his unrecognized sister, exacts vengeance on the relatives, and eventually takes his own life.
In Sibelius’s hands, Kullervo’s story unfolds through a combination of orchestra, chorus, Finnish poetry, and vocal narrative. For the first-night audience, the most powerful emblem of the “nation” was the unisonous, masculine chorus, comprised mainly of university students. Student men’s choirs, introduced into Finland via Sweden, had been championed by the Turku Romantics as a means of giving the collective community a folktune, Tuomen juurella, which Sibelius knew well: he had quoted it along with another folk melody in a brass septet written in 1889 for a national competition requiring submissions based on native folksongs or dances.204 Even more strongly evocative of the folk was Kullervo’s second movement, a lullaby that begins in monotonous, Alla recitativo style and proceeds with regular phrasing and underlying drones. Yet the most intriguing folkish theme appeared in Movement IV (bars 142–147); its similarity to the Russian Dance in Petrushka (1911) triggered later speculation that Jean Sibelius and Igor Stravinsky had used the same folksong.
In the Autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire, common sources were ready to hand. Richard Taruskin has identified Petrushka’s source as A Linden Tree Is in the Field, published in the celebrated Collection of Russian Folk Songs by Nikolai Lvov and Ivan Prach (1790); from “Lvov-Prach” Nicholas Rimsky-Korsakov took up the tune, transcribed and their appearance in the septet shown in facsimile.
incorporating it into his anthology of 100 Russian Folk Songs in 1877 and his opera Snow Maiden.205
In the shared use of that tune, Kullervo as a “textbook example” of Finnish nationalism suddenly turns complicated. The fact was, in 1892, territorially speaking, the folksongs of Finland were also the folksongs of Russia. Ironically, it was the Russian Emperors who were encouraging their new subjects to cultivate their Finnish identity, believing that so doing would distance the Finns from their former rulers, the Swedes.206 Finnish nationalism, musical and otherwise, was being shaped by the push and pull of the Swedish and Russian giants on either side of the land.
One of the most significant things about Kullervo is that, even though it appeared at a time of heightened national enthusiasm, it demonstrated clearly that Sibelius’s ideas about nationalism were not restricted to a Herderian ethnic and genetic homogeneity.
Kullervo’s men’s chorus may have represented “a raw Finnish mob”,207 but the work’s overall design was derived from the Germanic symphonic tradition: separate movements (five in all) related by themes and keys; Movement I structured as a sonata form;
Movement II, as a lullaby with variations; Movement IV, a march. The unusually clear evidence for Sibelius’s symphonic intentions and Kullervo’s compositional genesis have been fully set forth in my Introduction to the Kullervo critical edition; what is important here is that the composer unmistakably embraced the cultural diversity that was also part of his heritage. In so doing, he found the means to elevate Finland’s artistic traditions to the status of high culture as he heard it defined abroad, specifically in Austro-German lands.
A further strand in the pluralistic weave emerges in the way Sibelius interpreted the myth.
Rather than creating a spectacular vengeance scene where Kullervo swears retribution for the many injustices visited upon him, Sibelius highlighted the myth’s Freudian aspects:
the symphony’s central and longest movement is the incestuous encounter between Kullervo and his sister. Although such emphasis grated against nationalist ideology (the founding fathers promoted a God-fearing, hardworking, obedient Finnish stereotype), it put Kullervo squarely in line with modernist European trends. These points have been made before,208 but in a discussion of Sibelius’s Kullervo and nationalism, they are key factors illustrating the dynamic interplay between the musically national, narrowly defined, and music and cultural issues in a wider, European sense.
205 Richard Taruskin: Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through Mavra.
1996, volume I, p. 695–717. For comparative transcriptions of the tune’s different uses, see Glenda Dawn Goss: “Jean Sibelius’s Choral Symphony Kullervo”, in Choral Journal. February 2007, p. 20.
206 Matti Klinge: Let Us Be Finns–Essays on History. 1990, p. 80–81.
207 As Sibelius once described it to Adolf Paul, in a letter of 20 September 1892, Helsinki University Library Collection 206.62.
208 In my articles “A Backdrop for Young Sibelius: The Intellectual Genesis of the Kullervo Symphony”, in 19th Century Music 27. 2003, p. 48–75; and “Wien und die Entstehung von Sibelius’ Kullervo” in Hartmut Krones (ed.): Jean Sibelius und Wien: Wiener Schriften zur Stilkunde und Aufführungspraxis, Sonderband 4. 2003, p. 79–
97.
Not least, Kullervo’s première soundly established the idea of national concerts in Finland. Important components, such as an orchestra, were already in place. Where others had failed, Robert Kajanus (1856–1933) had succeeded, establishing a viable ensemble in Helsinki that had functioned since 1882. Its musicians were now put at Sibelius’s disposal. Helsinki also had musically educated critics such as Karl Flodin and Oskar Merikanto writing for the national press. Still, there was no guarantee that there would be an audience for a work like Kullervo, a high-status amalgam of European and ethnic elements. So Finnish leaders went into action. Even before the first performance, Merikanto was whetting public appetite for a huge, “native” composition whose music
“… caresses our ears with Finnish tones which we recognize as our own, even though we had never heard them before.”209 The idea that “Finnish tones” pre-existed and that the young composer had magically “found” them arose from the same belief that the Finnish nation pre-existed and through some teleological process would be re-born.
Sibelius too acted with forethought for his audience. He insisted on programs with the symphony’s Kalevala texts in both national languages, Finnish and Swedish. The point may seem trivial, yet it marked the first time that Finnish audiences, most of whom were Swedish speaking, had in hand programs in the Finnish language. The composer further accentuated the occasion’s sanctity by insisting on special absorbent paper for those programs: no sound of turning pages should disturb the music.
With Kullervo Finnish national concerts were effectively instituted.210 Robert Kajanus confirmed it when he presented the composer a giant laurel wreath. Imprinted on its ribbons – in the national colors, blue-and-white – were words from the national epic, the Kalevala:
That way now will run the future, On the new course cleared and ready.211