Sibelius Beyond the 'Finnish Forest': Symphony No.5

Jean Sibelius is usually introduced as "Finland's national composer." Or he is described with phrases like "the harsh nature of the North," "the myths of the Kalevala (the Finnish national epic)," or "the sound of a cold, clear land."

These descriptions are not wrong. But it would be a shame to stop there—and, in all likelihood, it isn't how Sibelius himself would have wanted to be received.

This article first looks at how Sibelius himself responded to these two labels—"the Finnish composer" and "Nordic nature"—before moving beyond them to what made him genuinely original.

The Nationalist Label

Sibelius's biographer Glenda Dawn Goss writes:

Jean Sibelius has long served as an icon of Finnish national consciousness, with his music coming to symbolize Finland's resistance to Russian domination. But this nationalistic lens has tended to obscure the real Sibelius.

— Glenda Dawn Goss, Sibelius: A Composer's Life and the Awakening of Finland (2009)

There is indeed a gap between "the nationalistic lens" and "the real Sibelius." Let's look at this gap first from the outside (the facts of how he was received), then from the inside (how he saw himself).

Sibelius and the State

Sibelius was a state-sanctioned composer from the earliest stage of his career.

According to the English music critic Lyle (1927), around 1890—just after his return from his studies in Berlin, and even before his breakthrough work Kullervo (1892)—Sibelius had already been granted an annuity by the authorities. (Lyle does not specify which body granted it, but since Finland at the time was an autonomous Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire, it was presumably some Finnish public institution.)

Soon after returning from Berlin, Sibelius was acclaimed by his fellow-countrymen as a composer uniquely capable of expressing their national qualities through his music. "Those in authority" formally acknowledged this by granting him an annuity, enabling him to dedicate himself to composition without financial concerns.

— Watson Lyle, "The Nationalism of Sibelius" (1927)

This pension was increased over time. On his fiftieth birthday (1915), the Finnish Diet awarded him a pension, and his Fifth Symphony was premiered that day as a national celebration. On his sixtieth birthday (1925), the President of the Republic awarded him the Grand Cross of the Order of the White Rose of Finland, and the Diet increased the pension by a further 50,000 marks, bringing the total to 100,000. Lyle (1927) also records, without specifying the date, that on a separate occasion a national collection raised 270,000 marks "from all classes" (of which 150,000 was given for Sibelius's immediate use).

Sibelius was treated as a symbol of nationalism by both the state and the public from a young age, and he never clearly refused this role. In fact, he was willing to play along with being received as a nationalist composer. In later years, he told the following story about Finlandia: under Russian Imperial censorship, the piece was performed under fake titles—"Suomi," "Vaterland," "La Patrie," "Impromptu"—in various places (Scandinavia, German towns, Paris, Reval, Riga; summer 1904) to evade the authorities (Bullock 2011).

But this account has been disputed. The researcher Harold Johnson points out that the story was told by Sibelius decades after the fact, and that it does not match the historical record: Helsinki newspapers were already routinely listing the piece as "Finlandia" from November 1901 onward, while Finland was still part of the Russian Empire (Johnson's argument is summarized in Bullock 2011). According to Johnson, the censorship story may have been dramatically embellished after the fact.

In other words, Sibelius accepted his reception as a "nationalist composer" from the earliest stage, and may also have continued to perform that role himself in later years.

Distance from the Nationalist Movement

If we stopped here, we might conclude "so he really was a nationalist composer after all." But tracing Sibelius's own words and actions reveals another side.

Sibelius's mother tongue was Swedish (Bullock 2011). In the nineteenth-century Grand Duchy of Finland, the political and cultural upper class was made up of Swedish speakers, and Sibelius came from that upper class. His wife Aino, on the other hand, came from the Järnefelt family, a prominent Fennoman (Finnish-language nationalist) family. But Sibelius himself was an outsider to that movement.

According to Bullock (2011), Sibelius "harbored considerable skepticism about key elements of the Finnish nationalist project." In his 1910 diary he wrote:

Looked at the Kalevala and it struck me—how I have grown away from this naïve poetry.

— Philip Ross Bullock, Sibelius and the Russian Traditions (2011)

He was someone who continued to draw on the Kalevala throughout his life, in works such as Kullervo, the Lemminkäinen Suite, Pohjola's Daughter, and Tapiola. But it is worth noting that Bullock cites this 1910 remark as an example of Sibelius's "skepticism about key elements of the Finnish nationalist project." In other words, what he was taking distance from was not the Kalevala itself so much as the contemporary nationalist way of treating it—elevating it as a sacred text of the people. In fact, on the eve of the First World War (around 1914), he openly expressed a preference for the Swedish-speaking population over Finns (Bullock 2011).

In an interview with his early biographer Karl Ekman, Sibelius is reported to have said:

Politics in itself never interested me. I always hated empty talk and amateurish politicizing, preferring to make my contribution in other ways.

— Karl Ekman, Jean Sibelius (cited in Bullock 2011)

When his friend, the conductor Robert Kajanus, interpreted the Second Symphony as a narrative of anti-Russian Finnish self-realization, Sibelius explicitly rejected that reading. Bullock (2011) takes this rejection as evidence of "Sibelius's acute sensitivity to being caught up in contentious topics, and of the absolute primacy of artistic creativity in his emotional life."

After his Paris tour of 1900, Sibelius began to question the image of himself as a nationalist composer. He wanted to be recognized in Germany as a serious symphonist. But his efforts from the early 1900s onward to develop a more abstract and universal musical language were perceived, by Finnish critics, as an affront to his Finnish patriotism (Bullock 2011). German critics, meanwhile, reduced him to "merely a nationalist," "an epigone of Tchaikovsky and the Russians," or "an exotic composer of the cold North" (Bullock 2011). Neither side received him on the terms he wanted.

Goss (2009) gives one striking emblem of the gap between Sibelius's own intentions and how the public received his music. The short string quartet Andante festivo, composed in 1922, was conceived by Sibelius as "a sophisticated and intimate" chamber piece. But it was later "used endlessly as the predictable opening at state and ritual occasions."

A contemporary critic also pointed out this same gap. In 1927, the English critic Watson Lyle praised Sibelius's later works for their "poetic imagination and delicate scoring" while dismissing his earlier "aggressively folk-songish works" as relying on "pedestrian mannerisms." Lyle (1927) argued that Sibelius's "truest metier" was as a Romantic composer, and that his free, spontaneous Romantic works would outlast the more "popular compositions" once those eventually "dated" and "fell into oblivion." Even at the time, critics could see that reducing Sibelius to a nationalist composer missed the point.

Ambivalence

Sibelius neither fully accepted nor fully rejected nationalism. He accepted being treated as a state-sanctioned symbol, and at times actively performed the role himself. At the same time, he carried a discomfort with being understood only in those terms, and wanted to be evaluated as a more universal musician. The "nationalist composer" label cannot show this ambivalence.

The "Nordic Nature" Label

Alongside nationalism, the other label that often attaches to Sibelius is "Nordic nature." This too was something he received with mixed feelings.

There is no doubt that he was deeply influenced by the nature around him. He built his home, Ainola, in the forest outside Helsinki (completed 1904), and spent most of his life there. His diaries are full of passages that show how strongly he drew inspiration from nature, and the atmosphere of his music itself confirms it.

But it helps to know how the label "Northern" actually functioned in the Europe of his time.

In 1917, the German critic Walter Niemann dismissed Sibelius's symphonies as "merely Northern," lacking "true symphonic creation," and placed Sibelius outside the German tradition: "not one of us" (Hepokoski 1993). For Niemann, Sibelius's music was no more than "Tchaikovsky's Pathétique in a Finnish dialect."

In German-speaking musical circles of the time, "Northern" carried the connotation of "something peripheral to the mainstream of European music." When we today praise a piece for "evoking the cold lands of the North," what sounds like a compliment was, in the musical culture of Sibelius's time, also a label that—often half-consciously—placed a composer at the periphery.

Sibelius resisted being received this way. In May 1901, on his way home from Italy and after meeting Dvořák, he wrote to his friend Axel Carpelan:

Verdi managed to be at once national and European. Grieg is little more than a "local dialect."

— Sibelius to Axel Carpelan (1901), cited in Bullock (2011)

"A local dialect"—Sibelius did not want to be treated that way. His efforts from the 1900s onward to develop "a more abstract and universal musical language" (Bullock 2011) were not an attempt to abandon Finland or the North, but an attempt to be received in the way Verdi had been—at once national and European. He did not want to leave nature behind; he wanted to speak what he received from nature in the language of European music.

In fact, Sibelius was not an isolated composer of the North but stood within the broader European current of Symbolism (which we'll touch on briefly in the next section). According to Goss (2009), Sibelius's works of the 1890s—his attempted opera The Building of the Boat, songs expressing longing for distant places, and new works based on the Kalevala—were all closely tied to Symbolist thought. As a concrete example, the sketch for the overture to Karelia still shows traces of Sibelius's own red-pencil annotation: he originally wrote "A soul seeking peace," then changed it to "A soul seeking happiness." Even Karelia, known as one of his most nationalist works, contained Symbolist undercurrents.

Lyle (1927) makes an interesting observation about Finlandia along the same lines. Sibelius's most "Finnish" piece, he writes, uses folk-song-type material, but "its instrumental manner and emotional content are distinctly Teutonic," and "Finlandia spread beyond Finland's borders thanks precisely to that Teutonic idiom." Even the international success of his most "Finnish" work, it turns out, was carried by the grammar of European music underneath.

A Map of Early-Twentieth-Century Music

A brief sketch of the period may help.

When Sibelius was working on his Fifth Symphony (1914–1919), European music was pulling in several directions at once.

For readers less familiar with the period: the nineteenth century in European music is broadly known as the Romantic era. From Beethoven through Schumann, Brahms, and Wagner, composers wrote large-scale orchestral music that conveyed strong emotional sweep and narrative. The music was written within the framework of tonality: there was a central pitch (the tonic) and a central chord, and the listener could feel a sense of resolution when the music returned "home."

In the twentieth century, composers split over what to do with this Romantic inheritance.

On one side were the heirs of late Romanticism. Composers like Richard Strauss and Mahler extended the Romantic legacy with vast orchestras and densely chromatic harmony. On the other side were the avant-gardists like Schoenberg and Stravinsky, who dissolved tonality itself (giving up the central pitch as the organizing axis) and tried to rewrite the grammar of music from the ground up.

Running in parallel to all of this, there was a major current in the other arts. Centered on literature and painting, and originating in Brussels and Paris, this was Symbolism. Against the realism that tried to depict the world as it appeared, Symbolism sought to express what lay beneath—myth, dream, the unconscious, the inner life of nature—through suggestion and symbol. It spread across Europe from the end of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth, blending with each local tradition as it went. Goss (2009) notes that Sibelius's engagement with the Kalevala belonged to this Symbolist current as well.

What both musical camps shared was the same underlying question: what to do with the symphonic tradition of Beethoven—the form in which a theme (a short melody at the core of a piece) is presented, developed, and recapitulated. Continue it, or destroy it.

Sibelius did not belong fully to either side.

On 10 November 1911, in a letter to his wife Aino, he formally renounced any ambition to compete as a "progressive modernist" on the continental scene.

Let the world go its own way. Leave the competition to the others. I will hold on to our art with a tremendous grip.

— Sibelius to Aino Sibelius (10 November 1911), cited in Hepokoski (1993)

By 1914, he was describing his own path as "less pretentiously contrived" and "less artificial" than the prevailing trends (Hepokoski 1993). Later, he is reported to have told his secretary Santeri Levas:

The essence of music is not form but content. The music itself determines its external structure.

— Sibelius's remark to Santeri Levas, cited in Hepokoski (1993)

The Fifth Symphony: Music in Which Themes Grow

Among Sibelius's symphonies, the Fourth (1911) and the Fifth (1915–19) are often paired and contrasted.

The Fourth is conspicuously experimental for him, dark, and demanding of the listener. Sibelius himself called it "a sharp protest against the current compositional fashion." According to Hepokoski (1993), what he had in mind was the inflated style that was popular in Germany at the time—an "enormous mechanical apparatus" that, in his view, concealed inner emptiness. He called it "musical civil-engineering," and said of his own Fourth Symphony that it had "nothing, absolutely nothing of the circus about it."

What unsettled the audience of the Fourth was its severe austerity. According to Barnett (2007), the whole work is dominated by the tritone—the unstable, dissonant interval that medieval theory called the "diabolus in musica." Even the brooding opening motif played by horns and bassoons (C–D–F♯–E) contains this tritone, and Sibelius himself said it should sound "as harsh as fate." For an audience accustomed to a late-Romantic symphony built on resolving harmonies and emotional narrative, the Fourth's uncomfortable, ascetic sound world was disorienting. The premiere left listeners confused, and the reviews were divided.

A few years later came the Fifth Symphony, ending grandly in E-flat major. On the surface it sounded "easier to listen to." For that reason, the standard story is that "having pushed into the avant-garde with the Fourth, Sibelius made a conservative retreat with the Fifth."

In broad terms, that is not wrong. The Fifth can certainly be understood within the inherited frame of the Beethoven-derived symphony. But if you look inside the score, something else is going on.

The Fifth Symphony does not work in the usual way—a fully formed theme is presented, then developed.

Take the opening of the first movement. Hepokoski (1993) analyzes the first several bars in detail. Shortly after the music begins, a short chord-block is repeated four times. But it is never the same: each repetition expands a little in rhythm and shape. Gradually, what started as a chord-block takes on the contours of a theme.

In other words, the listener is hearing the process of a theme being born, in real time.

Hepokoski (1993) calls this rotational form and teleological genesis. The terms sound technical, but the idea is simple: a body of material is run through repeatedly, each time slightly reshaped, and is gradually grown toward a final state.

This principle operates sometimes within a single movement, sometimes across movements. The famous swinging horn theme in the finale of the Fifth—known as the "Swan Hymn"—was not written as a standalone melody. Its rhythm, color, and motivic material are prepared in advance, in the preceding (slow) second movement. They are then carried over into the finale, where, through several stages, they are gathered up into the broad horn theme we know. The second movement functions, in effect, as the place "where a theme is being made ready to take shape."

(Incidentally, the nickname "Swan Hymn" is not Sibelius's own. It comes from a letter of 15 December 1916 from Sibelius's close friend Axel Carpelan, congratulating him on the revised version of the Fifth and calling this theme "a swan hymn beyond compare"; Hepokoski 1993.)

There is also a record of this Swan Hymn being tied to something Sibelius actually experienced in nature. His diary entry of 21 April 1915 reads: "I saw sixteen swans. One of the greatest experiences of my life. Oh God, what beauty!" (Barnett 2007). Even so, the Swan Hymn was not "written down in a single sitting after watching swans fly past." The Fifth Symphony took five years to reach its final form, from 1914 to 1919, and exists in three versions; Sibelius himself later described its compositional process as "wrestling with God" (Hepokoski 1993). The encounter with the swans is one moment within that long struggle, and the design of the music happens somewhere else, over a long stretch of time.

What Made Sibelius Original

There are roughly three angles from which to read Sibelius.

1. "Finland's national composer." The conventional view. This is half true and half a constructed image. Sibelius himself kept some distance from the Finnish nationalist movement, but at the same time he received a state pension as an officially recognized composer from the earliest stage of his career, and to some degree played along with—and perhaps later cultivated—the image of the "nationalist composer."

2. "The composer who sings the Northern landscape." This too works as an entry point. He really did live in the forest outside Helsinki, and was deeply moved by nature; the atmosphere of the music confirms it. But "Northern" was, in the European musical world of the time, also a label that placed a composer at the periphery, and Sibelius wanted, like Verdi, to be received as at once national and European.

3. "The composer who carved out a third path"—his real originality. This is the part that gets obscured by the first two labels. Neither late Romantic nor avant-garde modernist, but his own direction. In broad terms he stands on the line of Romanticism, but what he was attempting was not to impose a form on the music, but to let the music itself find the form it needed to take. In an 1912 diary entry, Sibelius compared a symphony to "a river born from various rivulets that seek each other and proceed powerfully to the sea." Rather than building a "riverbed" (= a predetermined form) and pouring water into it, you let the water itself decide its course (Hepokoski 1993).

The Fifth Symphony is one realization of this. Themes are not presented in finished form at the start; they are grown stage by stage, out of fragments, into their completed shape. According to Hepokoski (1993), Sibelius pushed this idea further—folding several movements seamlessly into a single span—until it crystallized in the single-movement Seventh Symphony (1924) and the tone poem Tapiola (1926).

The first two labels are fine as entry points. But if you stop at the entrance, you don't see the third thing—a composer who discovers form out of sound. Sibelius was a composer of one nation, and at the same time a composer who did not fit cleanly into any of the musical currents of his time.

Fortunately, Sibelius continues to be performed often, and recordings are easy to come by. When you next listen to the Fifth Symphony—or to the Seventh, or to Tapiola—try to hear the small fragments of melody slowly growing, and the moments when a single piece of material returns, changed in shape, in a different place. Beyond the story of Finnish nature or patriotic struggle, another Sibelius is there.

Sources

• Andrew Barnett, Sibelius (Yale University Press, 2007)
• Philip Ross Bullock, Sibelius and the Russian Traditions (2011)
• Karl Ekman, Jean Sibelius (cited in Bullock 2011)
• Glenda Dawn Goss, Sibelius: A Composer's Life and the Awakening of Finland (University of Chicago Press, 2009)
• James Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge Music Handbooks, Cambridge University Press, 1993)
• Watson Lyle, "The Nationalism of Sibelius" (The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 4, Oct. 1927)

Updated: 2026-05-16