Sibelius' First Symphony

Otto Tausk
Conductor

Otto Tausk is the Music Director of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and Artistic Advisor of the VSO School of Music, where he has successfully raised the orchestra’s profile by launching a digital performances series and introducing Canadian contemporary music.

Tausk’s musical expertise ranges from Mozart and Beethoven to the early 20th century scores of Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Strauss, and to new works by today’s composers. In the 2023/24 season he performs masterpieces by Mahler, Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich as well as Verdi’s Requiem and Haydn’s Creation, and gives the world premiere performance of a new work by British Columbian composer Nicholas Ryan Kelly.

He has appeared with the Concertgebouworkest, Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre National de Belgique, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Norwegian Radio Orchestra, Lahti Symphony Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia, Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and BBC National Orchestra of Wales, with whom he made his BBC Proms debut in August 2018.

In 2011 he received the prestigious ‘De Olifant’ prize recognising his contribution to the Arts in the Netherlands.

Johan Wagenaar
(1862-1941)

Cyrano de Bergerac Overture, Op.23

In The Musical Quarterly in 1955 Alexander Ringer wrote that:

Dutch music might well have continued along the road of pleasant mediocrity had it not been for the sudden emergence of two genuinely artistic and intellectual personalties contemporaries of Strauss and Wagner and in terms of personal philosophy their close kinsmen.

The two composers were the French-influenced Alphons Diepenbrock, and Johan Wagenaar who ‘broke precedent in his country by poking musical fun’.
Wagenaar was born, the illegitimate son of a Dutch nobleman, in Utrecht in 1862. He studied at the Utrecht School of Music and on graduating joined the teaching staff while also working as an organist at Utrecht Cathedral. He spent a year studying in Berlin in 1892, and became director of the Utrecht School of Music in 1896; from 1919 to 1837 he was Director of the Royal Dutch Conservatory in The Hague.

Possibly as a result of the Calvinist Reformed Church’s attitude to music, to say nothing of several drawn-out wars, there had been a hiatus in locally composed music in the Netherlands since the crop of great composers like Ockeghem, Willaert and Orlando di Lasso in the 15th and 16th centuries, though as a centre for performance and publication the country had acted as a magnet to the likes of Vivaldi and the Mozart family. In the late 19th century the Netherlands, like many smaller European countries, was subject to a growing sense of national identity; the Dutch both rediscovered the glories of their Renaissance composers’ music and looked ahead by, for instance, building the Royal Concertgebouw and founding its orchestra.

Wagenaar, as Ringer put it, ‘poked fun’. Discussing Wagenaar’s humour, scholar Jos Wouters has argued that:

The shallow sentiments so frequently encountered in Italian and French opera dating from the beginning of the last century, led to his writing a number of ‘period’ pieces. In these, through exaggerated effects, he succeeded in turning the undesirable elements to ridicule.

In this respect he does indeed resemble Richard Strauss in certain works, and the concert overture Cyrano de Bergerac
(1905) is in many respects a tone-poem along the lines of Till Eulenspiegel. The central character in Rostand’s play – who sacrifices his own chance of happiness for that of his best friend, Christian, and his cousin, Roxane, with whom they are both in love – is, as Wouters puts it, described by seven of his attributes ‘valour (fanfare), love, poetry (string orchestra after fanfare), merriness, chivalry, humour and satire’.

Gordon Kerry ©2006

First performance:
2 November 1905 Amsterdam, composer conducting.

First WASO Performance:
This is the first performance by WASO.

Instrumentation:
two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets and two bassoons; four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba; timpani and strings.

Jean Sibelius
(1865-1957)

Symphony No.1 in E minor, Op.39

Andante, ma non troppo – Allegro energico
Andante (ma non troppo lento)
Scherzo (Allegro)
Finale (Andante – Allegro molto)

Who is the real Sibelius? Is he the passionate creature of the First and Second Symphonies; the lofty, clear-thinking classicist of the Third and Sixth Symphonies; the dark nay-sayer of the Fourth or the creator of those epics of intensity, the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies? This very unknowability is what makes him a fascinating figure. As the years progressed, Sibelius’ imagination revolved increasingly around the idea of music itself as drama, the unfolding of musical events as a universe of narrative, parallel to our own.

It is tempting to talk of the first numbered symphony entirely from the perspective of Sibelius’ later music, to emphasise what is prophetic and play down whatever is not. There is much in the piece that foretells of his later achievements. However it is also the work of a man still in his early 30s, immensely gifted and skilful, but still coming to terms with many of the musical influences around him.

The feature of the work that immediately marks it out as ‘Sibelian’ is the modal inflection of the long, winding tune which opens the first movement. Although Sibelius’ modal writing was to change character as he developed, it was never to leave him. This opening melody is characteristically Sibelian, too, in its economy of means: a solo clarinet over a timpani roll is all he needs to suggest something ancient, eternal, bard-like. As he grew older, the modesty of his instrumental forces stood in great contrast to the lavish orchestras called for by Strauss, Scriabin and many of his other contemporaries.

The manner in which Sibelius puts his material together in this movement tells us a lot about the consistency of his principles of musical organisation. It is possible to write in terms of conventional analysis, but the music comes to the listener more organically and intuitively than that. Notice, for example, how the second major theme, a dancing idea first heard on the flutes, becomes broader and more lyrical when it passes to the oboe and how it is, in any case, clearly derived from the solo clarinet theme that sets the symphony in motion.

As the tempo of the movement quickens the musical undergrowth grows thicker, combining the melodic ideas together in an ingeniously devised musical tempest, at the other end of which a ringing transformation of the main theme on the brass announces that we are in a mood of summary and conclusion. This technique of gradual crescendo and pulse-quickening; a short, bracing survey of the vista from the summit; then an abbreviated rounding-off, would become a vital part of Sibelius’ musical personality.

The slow movement reminds us that, however subtly he organises his material, he is still, in this work, captivated by the rhetoric of the Romantic symphony. The warm, tender opening tune is the seed from which all else in the movement derives. In the course of the movement this song-like theme takes on many guises but the overall effect is neither intricate nor fussy but passionate and intense. The many sustained long-held notes (pedal points) Sibelius uses to intensify feeling – again, integral to his composing style –are particularly evident here.

The short scherzo is notable for its integration of the timpani into the main melodic material. The pastoral trio which follows suggests a bucolic calm that would be unusual in Sibelius’ later music, while the gradually quickening pace of the foreshortened reprise gives the final minutes an air of hectic excitement.

Sibelius’ admiration for Tchaikovsky is most evident in the finale. The very opening is a good example. The tune with which the symphony began is presented afresh in a highly impassioned, Tchaikovskian manner by the strings, with brass declamations. The ferocity of the tune’s subsequent development also bears some resemblance to the spirit of Tchaikovsky’s more rousing symphonic moments. On the other hand, the arioso-like quality of the big tune which comes to dominate the second half of this movement is essentially operatic: after all, Sibelius had not altogether abandoned the idea of writing a major work for the lyric stage. The work’s final pages are more equivocal and the symphony ends, like the first movement, with two pizzicato chords. The emotional ambivalence of this conclusion tells us how enigmatic so much of his music could be.

Abridged from a note by Phillip Sametz ©
2004/2006

This work, published by Breitkopf & Härtel, has been supplied by Clear Music Australia Pty Ltd as hire agents for Breitkopf & Härtel in Australia.

First performance:
18 July 1900, Berlin. Robert Kajanus conducting.

Most recent WASO performance:
14-15 June 2013. Arvo Volmer, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two each of flutes (both also piccolo), oboes, clarinets, bassoons; four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba; timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, harp and strings.