Symphony No. 5 in E flat, Op. 82
- Tempo molto moderato – Allegro moderato
- Andante mosso, quasi allegretto
- Allegro molto
When Sibelius completed his Fourth Symphony and began making sketches for his fifth in 1911, Finland was a duchy under the control of the Tsarist Russia on the edge of a Europe whose politics was dominated by Imperial Power. By the time the Fifth Symphony reached its final form eight tortuous years later, war and revolution had torn Europe and its old certainties apart, and Finland found itself finally the master of its own destiny as an independent state.
The early years of the twentieth century were a time of convulsive change in artistic as well as political ways. Sibelius was part of a generation including Strauss, Mahler, Elgar, Nielsen and Debussy, born around 1860, who were trailblazers of post-Wagnerian modernism and reached their peak in the first decade of the twentieth century. By 1910 however, change was in the air. Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony was an austere, radical work that in some ways represents his attempt to engage with the musical landscape that was being reworked by the younger generation of Stravinsky, Schoenberg and their followers. On the surface the Fifth represents a retreat from this to a more conventional soundworld. In fact, a closer hearing reveals a piece profoundly affected by the experiments of its predecessor: while it adopts a superficially more conservative language, it is at a deeper level an extraordinarily radical, groundbreaking work. Content neither to chase his younger contemporaries nor to settle into easy routines and familiarities, Sibelius here strikes out on an utterly individual path. To describe it as either progressive or conservative is redundant: it exists beyond such concerns.
Sibelius worked in earnest on the symphony from autumn 1914 to June the next year: it was now intended as the centrepiece of his forthcoming 50th birthday celebrations. His diary entries from the time reveal a man deeply immersed in nature: “There is warmth in the air and winter is in transmigration. At last it is mild, and radiates youth and adventure,” he wrote on 10 April 1915. A few days later, he noted. “Walked in the cold spring sun. Memories of old affronts and humiliations came back. Had powerful visions of the Fifth Symphony, the new one.”
Successive diary entries display a bewildering and disturbing vacillating of his mood. On 21 April, he wrote, “Just before ten-to-eleven saw sixteen swans. One of the greatest experiences in life! Oh God, what beauty! They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the hazy sun like a silver ribbon, which glittered from time to time. Their cries...A low suppressed memory of a small child’s cry. Nature’s mystery and life’s melancholy! The Fifth Symphony’s finale theme. The trumpet will bind it together... That this should now come to me which has so long resonated in the air. Have been transported today.” A day later, he had fallen from this elation to the depths of despair: “Working at the symphony which is further than ever from its final form.” He was intimidated by the intense spiritual experience that he was trying to shape into music, but these mood swings may also reflect the fact that after a period of abstention, he had begun to drink heavily again, a problem that he struggled with throughout his life.
The symphony was premiered on his 50th birthday, 8 December 1915, and was well received. Almost immediately however, Sibelius felt unsatisfied and began to rewrite it. He produced a completely new score in 1916 but still felt that the piece had eluded him and continued working on it for another three years. Finally in 1919 the Fifth Symphony reached its final form.The most obvious change was the first two movements, which he joined together as a single entity which begins as a gentle moderato movement and transforms into an energetic scherzo. So convincing is the final structure and so effortlessly does it appear to proceed that it is difficult to conceive the difficulty he experienced in reaching the final form. The opening indicates that his obsession with the swans goes far beyond the theme that appears in the finale: it uses a motif that he had originally written as part of his incidental music for Strindberg’s play Swanwhite.
The central movement is in some respects a moment of relief: a much simpler piece that is not so much a set of variations on a theme as a series of altering perspectives on a rhythmic idea. Beneath the surface however, hints of something larger emerging can be heard.
The finale pulls off the same trick as the first movement the other way around: it begins as an energetic scurry, which gradually transforms into something more stately as the rising and falling intervals from the preceding movement emerge transformed into Sibelius’s “Swan Hymn”. This is no mere nature painting though: it has a transcendent fervour about it.The ecstatic joy is tempered by an increasingly melancholic streak however, at the climax of which the swan hymn undergoes a tortuous transformation, stretched and distorted in an extraordinary dissonant passage until it reaches its final transformation, and the vision dissolves into the glare of the sun. If there is undoubtedly heroism in the final six hammer blows that bring the symphony to an end, it is not triumph so much as acquiescence to fate, and a reflection of his belief that “a symphony is not just a composition in the ordinary sense of the word. It is more a confession of faith at different stages of one's life.”
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