Finlandia, Opus 26
Jean (Johan Julius Christian) Sibelius was born at Tavastehus (Hämeenlinna), Finland, on December 8, 1865, and died at Järvenpää, his country home near Helsinki, on September 20, 1957. He composed the music that was to become Finlandia as part of a suite of “Press Celebrations Music” for a series of November 1899 “Press Days,” on their surface organized to fundraise in support of unemployed Finnish journalists. Finlandia was derived from the suite’s finale, “Finland Awakens!” Finlandia in its final state was premiered on July 2, 1900, by the Helsinki Philharmonic Society under Robert Kajanus’s direction.
The score for Finlandia calls for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (triangle, cymbals, bass drum), and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
For most of the 19th century, Finland led a hybrid political existence: it was a territorial division of the Russian Empire, with the Tsar as its head of state, even as it was treated as an autonomous, semi-independent state with some power to determine its own affairs. In early 1899, Tsar Nicholas II disturbed this longstanding arrangement when he announced a policy of “Russification,” the goal of which was to bring Finland’s governmental and civil institutions under more direct Russian control, and in the process, to dilute Finland’s sense of cultural uniqueness. Among the most impactful Russifying measures undertaken by Nicholas II’s Helsinki representative, Governor-General Nikolay Bobrikov, was to curtail the Finnish free press. Bobrikov shut down several periodicals, including the nationalist-leaning newspaper Päivälehti, which had been founded a decade previously by members of the fledgling “Young Finland” (Nuori Suomi) movement. A group of socially progressive artists and intellectuals who sought to advance aesthetic values that would be at once Finnish, modern, and pro-European, “Young Finland” numbered among its members Jean Sibelius, who emerged in the 1890s as one of the leading adherents of “national romanticism” in Finnish music.
In November 1899, nationalist and pro-independence forces organized a series of fundraising events in response to Bobrikov’s directives. Although the stated aim of these “Press Days,” as they were referred to, was to provide support for now unemployed Finnish journalists, their real purpose was to mobilize public sentiment against the Russians and reaffirm the value of freedom of expression. The Press Days featured sporting events, art exhibitions, and elaborate theatrical productions, and one of the high points was a series of tableaux vivants that depicted symbolically weighty moments in Finnish history, with music provided by Sibelius. These included an opening scene centered on Väinämöinen, the god of song and poetry in the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic; an episode celebrating the contributions of Finnish cavalrymen (Hakkapeliitta) during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48); and a depiction of a previous moment of Russian antagonism, the “Great Wrath” of 1714 to 1721, when Peter the Great ransacked Finland. The spectacle’s finale pictured leading 19th-century Finnish intellectuals surrounded, as the script for the tableaux described it, by
symbols of industrially and culturally progressive Finland: the first folk school, where children are being taught to read by their young teacher, the four speakers of each estate from the first diet [Finland’s legislative assembly], and workers who surround a papier-mâché reproduction of the first locomotive engine (the cause of considerable amusement).
Accompanying this scene, which was labeled “Finland Awakens!” was the music that would soon become known as Finlandia. It proved an immediate sensation. Although Sibelius later reworked and published some of the other music he composed for the November 1899 tableaux, it was the “Finland Awakens!” music, which was only slightly revised on the way to becoming Finlandia, that became the most enduring artifact of his participation in the Press Days. So successful was Finlandia as an independent symphonic poem that the initial circumstances for which it was written fast receded into memory. In a way, Sibelius had encouraged this fate: to avoid Russian censorship during some of its earliest performances, the score went by calculatedly neutral titles like Impromptu or Happy Feelings at the Awakening of Finnish Spring (the latter’s impudent doublespeak had plausible deniability). But as the musicologist and Sibelius specialist James Hepokoski argues, Finlandia was not composed—or it was not only composed—as a patriotic “battle piece” in the mold of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which is more or less how the music was understood for the rest of Sibelius’s lifetime, and long afterwards. The music’s political purpose and significance was far more specific in November 1899. In its original Press Days context, Finlandia manifested the values of Finnish social and technological “progress,” as symbolized by the chugging of the onstage locomotive. In 1899, the snarling brass chords with which Finlandia begins would have been heard not as an expression of Russian aggression, then, but rather, as a musical rendering of an engine whistle’s groan.
Like so many tone poems in the mold of Franz Liszt, Finlandia feints at sonata form principles: two contrasting themes, development, recapitulation. In the end, however, it unfolds according to ad hoc principles that arguably presage the forms of organic development Sibelius explored in his later symphonies. The implication seems to be that a Finland free from malign foreign influences would require its own “progressive” musical forms. In an ingenious and compelling interpretation of Finlandia, Hepokoski (in The Cambridge Guide to Sibelius) argues that the music charts a narrative course through the past, present, and future of Finnish history. Set off by the whistle groans, a slow introduction consists of a series of plaintive, somber chorales that capture the hopelessness, mixed with defiance, that characterized Finland’s history of subjugation. A faster, C-minor Allegro moderato section invokes the present circumstances of Russification, extending the snarling whistle-groans and combining them with a martial brass tattoo that seems to say, “Finland, Awake!” Sibelius unexpectedly interrupts this material with a new, even more explicit rendering of train sounds—a five-note ostinato (repeated bass figure) in the bassoons, tuba, and low strings that evokes the ungainly movement of a large motor. The ostinatos now overlaid with cheerful expressions of the “Awake!” tattoo in music that conjures up the “engine” of Finnish historical progress, inexorably propelling Finland’s citizens into a bright future. That future is made concrete in two strains of the now-famous Finlandia “hymn,” which struck such a chord that it later became a kind of alternate national anthem for post-independence Finland. Sibelius concludes Finlandia with a reprise of the “engine” of historical progress music, followed by one last peroration of the hymn and a full-throated “Amen” cadence.
Matthew Mendez
Matthew Mendez is a Palo Alto, California-based musicologist and critic who specializes in 20th- and 21st-century repertoire. He received a Ph.D. in music history from Yale University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Stanford University. Mr. Mendez was the recipient of a 2016 ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award for outstanding music journalism.
The first American performance of Finlandia was given at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City on December 24, 1905, by the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra led by Arturo Vigna.
The first Boston Symphony Orchestra performances of Finlandia were in November 1908 under the direction of Max Fiedler, who performed the piece several times during his tenure as BSO conductor. Finlandia has been performed more than 250 times by the Boston Pops since 1909.
