Symphony No. 7

Quick Facts

• Composer's life: Born December 8, 1865, at Tavastehus (Hämeenlinna), Finland; died September 20, 1957, at Järvenpää, near Helsinki
• Year completed: 1924
• First performance: March 24, 1924, in Stockholm, Jean Sibelius conducting
• First BSO performances: December 1926, Serge Koussevitzky conducting
• Approximate duration: 20 minutes

The score of the Seventh Symphony calls for 2 each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).

Sibelius’s affinity for his country’s land and folklore is apparent in his music from the start. His earliest piece, for violin and cello pizzicato, was called Waterdrops. As a young violin student, he would spend hours improvising on the instrument while wandering in the woods or by the lake near his family’s quiet home in Finland’s interior. Years later, as he observed in his diaries, the beauties of the land near his country estate in Järvenpää, the small country village, northeast of Helsinki, to which he moved in 1904, helped distract him from the atrocities of civil war that ravaged Finland in the final phase of its struggle against Russia at the close of World War I. Perhaps it is the elemental nature of his music that explains the composer’s international popularity even during his own lifetime: the basic impulse strikes home entirely without our needing to analyze his achievement.

In the spring of 1889, in his last days as a student at the Helsinki Conservatory, Sibelius was named “foremost amongst those who have been entrusted with bearing the banner of Finnish music” by the influential Finnish critic Karl Flodin. On April 28, 1892, the first performance of the twenty-six-year-old composer’s eighty-minute-long symphonic poem Kullervo for soloists, male chorus, and orchestra proved something of a national event. Soon after this came the symphonic poem En Saga, written for Robert Kajanus, conductor of the Finnish National Orchestra. Shortly after that, Sibelius wrote the Karelia Suite for an historical pageant at the University of Helsingfors. Other tone poems would include the four episodes of the Lemminkäinen Suite (begun in 1895; The Swan of Tuonela is the third of these), Finlandia (1900), Pohjola’s Daughter (1906, based on the same segment of the Kalevala that inspired an aborted operatic project about ten years earlier), and, much later, Tapiola (1926), the only major orchestral work to follow his last symphony, No. 7 (1924).

At the same time, a sense of geography informs the symphonies: Sibelius’s writing for the strings can be biting and jagged on the one hand, open and ethereal on the other. Woodwinds frequently undulate in pairs, birdlike. Groundswells of brass and drums, rocking figures throughout the orchestra, somehow seem relevant to the Nordic land- and seascape. Bengt de Torne, one of Sibelius’s biographers, recalled that “One day I mentioned the impression which always takes hold of me when returning to Finland across the Baltic, the first forebodings of our country being given us by low, reddish granite rocks emerging from the pale blue sea, solitary islands of a hard, archaic beauty, inhabited by hundreds of white sea-gulls. And I concluded by saying that this landscape many centuries ago was the cradle of the Vikings. ‘Yes,’ Sibelius answered eagerly, and his eyes flashed, ‘and when we see those granite rocks we know why we are able to treat the orchestra as we do!’”

The essential background to Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony is simply enough set out, and tied to that of the Fifth and Sixth symphonies. On his fiftieth birthday, December 8, 1915—celebrated as a national holiday—Sibelius conducted the premiere of his Fifth Symphony in Helsinki. He had subjected the score to last-minute alterations even at the final rehearsal and, despite its success, was not satisfied. He introduced a revised version a year later, in December 1916, but still continued to work on the score, finishing only several years later and presenting that version to the public in November 1919. Meanwhile, however, ideas for two more symphonies had begun to germinate: in May 1918, Sibelius wrote that he “might come out with all three symphonies [i.e., the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh] at the same time” and even offered general descriptions of the two new works. The Seventh was to be “in three movements—the last an Hellenic rondo.” As it happened, Sibelius did not finish all three works at once: the Sixth was completed in January 1923, the Seventh, as he noted in his diary, “on the second of March 1924, at night.”

Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony would be his last. The year 1925 saw the completion of his symphonic poem Tapiola, but then, aside from some minor works and revisions to earlier ones, the final three decades of the composer’s life were marked by musical silence, the so-called “silence from Järvenpää”—described by one writer as “perhaps the most profound silence in musical history.” For a long time there were rumors of an Eighth Symphony, and it was even announced for presentation on several occasions—one of them the first-ever Sibelius symphony cycle, given by Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra during the 1932-33 season. Sibelius himself seems to have confirmed the score’s existence on several occasions; perhaps it was destroyed after his death in accordance with his own wishes. Confronted with the Seventh Symphony, one is tempted to wonder whether Sibelius could have produced a satisfactory Eighth, one that could have satisfied him at all: the Seventh is absolutely breathtaking in its individuality and achievement. But we know from the succession of his earlier works that Sibelius was a composer capable of enormous strides when he moved from one work to the next, so we are left without a satisfactory answer. We have only the Seventh as his last word on the subject of the symphony.

The Seventh did not turn out, as projected, in three movements, but as a single movement, and it was called on the occasion of its premiere not a “symphony” but a “symphonic fantasia.” The music is continuous, but there are divisions that help us know where we are as the music proceeds. Following the printed score, we have this sequence of tempo markings (underlinings mine):

Adagio—Vivacissimo—Adagio—
Allegro molto moderato—Allegro moderato—
Vivace—Presto—Adagio—
Largamente molto—Affettuoso—Tempo I

But we do not hear all these changes as they happen and should not try to do so during the course of a performance. However, three of the divisions—and perhaps this reflects something of Sibelius’s original three-movement intent after all—are large enough that they shape our sense of the symphony’s overall structure: the opening Adagio, which, at about eight minutes, takes a bit more than one-third of the symphony’s total playing time; the scherzo-like Vivacissimo, whose material returns briefly following its associated Adagio; and the Allegro moderato, which has two themes and which behaves in outline almost like a “normal” symphonic movement. We can hear the material from the Presto onward as a coda to and reflection upon the whole.

Operating at another level of activity, and clearly audible, is a very specific bit of musical material that serves to herald our arrival at important junctures: a solemn incantation for solo trombone, which grows almost mystically from the opening Adagio, shapes the brass-dominated character of the second Adagio (midway through, following the Vivacissimo), and then returns near the end to restore the atmosphere of awe and nature-awareness that characterizes the beginning and serves to frame the work in its entirety.

The symphony begins with a call to attention from the timpanist (whose contribution to this piece must be one of the most extraordinary in the entire musical literature), strings rising slowly from the depths, a curiously-hued chord for strings, drum, winds, and horns, and woodwinds fluttering like birds against an ocean backdrop. Then, richly colored by the violas, music, for divided strings, of an awe-inspired reverence. Slowly, the entire orchestra adds to the texture, and from this full sound, to which the individual sonorities of strings, winds, brass, and drums each make their particular contribution, as they will throughout the symphony, the trombone incantation sounds apart, summoning our attention and drawing us into the proceedings, preparing us for all that is to follow. Now, everything that happens—from the rushing strings and chattering woodwinds of the Vivacissimo, to the brass-subdued tidewaters of the second Adagio, to the near dancelike simplicity (at least at its start) of the Allegro, to the echoes, in the closing pages, of the beginning, and that final chord of barely relieved tension—happens logically and inevitably.

Our sense of “inevitability in music” can serve with reference to specific elements of the music itself—rhythm, motivic construction, thematic relationships—and the way these elements work together to determine the course of the music’s progress. This holds for the music of Sibelius, but there is also something more—the inevitability of nature. Sibelius, from his childhood, cherished a continued awareness of the world around him; he was awed by those forces that would exercise their control for centuries to come. And through his music we sense that, for Sibelius, “those granite rocks” of the Baltic seascape were but the smallest physical embodiment of nature’s powers.

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.