Symphony No. 5

First performance: December 8, 1915, Sibelius conducting (first version); December 14, 1916, Sibelius conducting (revised version); November 24, 1919, Helsinki, Sibelius conducting (final version). First BSO performance: April 1922, Pierre Monteux cond. First Tanglewood performance: August 5, 1939, Serge Koussevitzky conducting. 

Sibelius celebrated his fiftieth birthday on December 8, 1915, with the first performance of his Fifth Symphony. The Finnish composer had completed his First Symphony in 1899, Finlandia in 1900, and the Second Symphony in 1902. Already in the spring of 1889, in his last days as a conservatory student, he was hailed by the influential Finnish critic Karl Flodin as “foremost amongst those who have been entrusted with bearing the banner of Finnish music.” On April 28, 1892, the first performance of the twenty-six-year-old composer’s eighty-minute symphonic poem Kullervo for soloists, male chorus, and orchestra had proved something of a national event. The Violin Concerto—the spelling-out of Sibelius’s never-realized hopes of becoming a concert virtuoso—was composed 1903 and revised 1905. The Third and Fourth symphonies were written in 1907 and 1911, respectively. 

Professionally Sibelius was secure, with international recognition constantly growing, and even reaching across the ocean: he received an honorary doctorate from Yale University in 1914, the same year of his only visit to America, and he conducted his newly composed tone poem, The Oceanides, in Norfolk, Connecticut. He was offered the directorship of the Eastman School of Music after the war but never returned to America, despite his popularity there. At the same time, however, his financial situation was and would for a while longer remain precarious, even with the establishment already in 1897 of the state pension for life that was meant to free him from teaching, and from churning out minor works simply to pay the bills. In any event, Sibelius’s fiftieth birthday found him, in Harold Johnson’s words, “unchallenged as his country’s greatest composer.” The date was celebrated as a national holiday. 

Sibelius was hard pressed to finish the Fifth Symphony and made last-minute changes during the final rehearsal. Though the public responded favorably, he remained dissatisfied and withdrew the work, introducing a second, much-revised version a year later, on December 14, 1916. Still dissatisfied with what he hoped would be its “definitive form,” he withdrew it yet again. At this point the composition of the Fifth becomes intertwined with that of his Sixth and Seventh, the composer observing in a letter of May 20, 1918: “it looks as if I may come out with all three symphonies at the same time.” Actually, the Sixth appeared in 1923, the Seventh in 1924; but regarding the Fifth, the composer continued: “The Fifth Symphony in a new form—practically composed anew—I work at it daily….The whole, if I may say so, a vital climax to the end. Triumphal.” 

In its original form, in its revised version of 1916, and even as late as May 1918, the symphony had four separate movements. It is unclear just when Sibelius decided to combine the original first two movements into the single movement we know today, but what happens in the music we know is that a scherzo-like dance movement short-circuits the first-movement sonata-form scheme one might have expected, and moves through several faster tempos to a final climax serving as recapitulation for the whole. In short, Sibelius has taken his original two movements and reworked them into a single structure whose thematic content is organically related. 

In this final version, the symphony had to wait for its premiere until after the brutal civil war that kept Finland from political stability until the spring of 1919. It was given on November 24, 1919, and Sibelius must finally have been deeply satisfied, especially if he recalled the words he had entered into his notebook five years earlier, in late September 1914: “In a deep dell again. But I already begin to see dimly the mountain that I shall certainly ascend….God opens his door for a moment and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony.” 

At the beginning of the Sibelius Fifth, the ear recognizes the various contributions to the orchestral texture without at first consciously thinking to isolate the individual sounds. Events proceed naturally and logically, each instrument adding to the total effect. The music expands into and through a varied statement of the opening materials, after which the texture thins out for a mysterious, fugue-like string passage. Over this, a solo bassoon paves the way for a development-like section with a climax of its own, but which then turns into something rather unexpected: an Allegro moderato whose dancelike character stands in sharp contrast to what has gone before, even though its thematic materials are clearly derived from what we have already heard.  

Of the Andante, Donald Francis Tovey writes that this “little middle movement…produces the effect of a primitive set of variations….But it produces this effect in a paradoxical way, inasmuch as it is not a theme preserving its identity…through variations, but a rhythm…built up into a number of by no means identical tunes.” The movement starts as a simple idyll, the strings’ material initially changing character from subdued to animated over long-held notes in the woodwinds. A lively middle section is filled with ominous undercurrents. 

The finale begins with a rush of violins and violas to which woodwinds soon add their chatter. Once this subsides, a bell-like tolling figure emerges in the horns—or, to quote Tovey once more: “The bustling introduction…provides a rushing wind, through which Thor can enjoy swinging his hammer.” As the movement proceeds, these materials are shared by the other members of the orchestra. Following the Misterioso repetition of the agitated opening material (the tolling figure now being heard in tremolo violins and cellos), a woodwind phrase from very near the beginning blossoms into the most overtly emotional material of the entire score. Trumpets take up the tolling motif. The texture thickens, filled with dissonance and accents placed at odds with each other. The final resolution—four chords and two unisons introduced after a sudden silence—is startling in its simplicity and spareness: “triumphal,” perhaps, but at the same time demanding an acceptance of forces not always within our control.  

MARC MANDEL 

Marc Mandel joined the staff of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1978 and managed the BSO’s program book from 1979 until his retirement as Director of Program Publications in 2020.