Sibelius Symphony No 2

One morning in the summer of 1900, Sibelius received a letter from someone calling themselves ‘X’. ‘You have been sitting at home for quite a while, Mr. Sibelius, it is high time for you to travel. You will spend the winter in Italy, a country where one learns cantabile, balance and harmony, plasticity and symmetry of lines, a country where everything is beautiful – even the ugly.’ This slightly presumptuous message was written by Baron Axel Carpelan, an amateur musician and Sibelius’ number one fan. Despite being penniless, Carpelan’s aristocratic connections enabled him to raise the money to fund the trip and so it was that in the winter of 1901 Sibelius found himself sketching ideas for his Second Symphony at a villa in Rapallo, close to the Italian Riviera. He completed the work on returning to his native Finland, the result being a symphony of both Italianate warmth and Scandinavian intensity. It is a thrilling combination that honours the dedicatee of the work, Mr X himself, Axel Carpelan.

The first movement begins with sunny geniality. A gentle string melody, ascending just three notes, calmly comes to rest. The woodwinds contradict the strings with a descending phrase and the horns conclude the opening exchanges with an unanswered question. Which is it to be? Are we going to rise or fall? The whole movement wrestles with this uncertainty, never quite staying in one place long enough to come to any conclusions.

Whilst in Rapallo, Sibelius wrote on a piece of paper: ‘Don Juan: I was sitting in the dark in my castle when a stranger entered. I asked who he could be – but there was no answer. I tried to make him laugh but he remained silent. At last the stranger began to sing – then Don Juan knew who it was. It was death.’ On the same page, he scribbled the bassoon theme that opens this symphony’s second movement. Two months later, in Florence, he drafted its second theme and over the top of that wrote the word ‘Christus.’ The juxtaposition of death and resurrection asks the same question as the previous movement. Are we heading for defeat or triumph?

The third movement is equally unsure. A frenetic and desperate scherzo with extreme dynamic contrasts frames a lyrical trio in which the oboe wonders what all the fuss is about. But even this pastoral melody fails to rise more than three notes, and the sense of enclosed captivity remains. Nevertheless, it is the oboe’s music that urges the symphony forward, and a struggling transition eventually succeeds in breaking through into a supremely sunlit finale. The triumph, however, sounds insincere. As glorious as this music is, the tune is still not capable of rising more than three notes before falling downwards again. It has a bridled quality and numerous attempts to throw off the reins are thwarted. It is only on the very last page of the score, at what sounds like one final push, does the music break the barriers that had enclosed it and the three note rising melody that we have been listening to for so long finally rises up one more tone, thanks to the resplendent power of the brass. Only now does the triumph sound real and it is all the more rewarding because it had been so long in coming.

After a hugely successful first performance, there was no shortage of people wanting to link the emotional journey of the piece with the contemporary clamour for Finnish independence. Russia had been ruling over Finland for almost a hundred years and around the time of the symphony’s premiere, had decreed that not only should Finns serve in the Russian army but Russian should become one of Finland’s official languages. Many found Sweden’s cultural influence equally threatening. As Sibelius had expressed in his music such a triumphant search for freedom, it is hardly surprising that people were keen to dub the work the ‘Liberation Symphony’.

Sibelius always denied the piece had nationalist associations. For him it was ‘a confession of the soul…a struggle between death and salvation.’ There is no reason why the work cannot be both patriotic and personal, but I suspect it wouldn’t touch us so much if it did not offer a universal view that hard won success is the best success there is. Like all nationalistic composers, they reveal truths about the human spirit that transcend their geographical origins. Sibelius’ optimism reaches out to us all.

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