Ghostly strands search for a way forward and drift into silence. In the third movement ( Il tempo largo), a theme emerges gradually out of disparate, halting fragments. The movement fades away abruptly with three quiet timpani taps. The tonal center disintegrates into an amorphous sea. The tritone rises out of the shadows like a snarling ghost. Again, we get the sense of a gradual faltering and slowing of momentum. What was at first an innocent waltz turns into a demonic scherzo. The second movement ( Allegro molto vivace) begins as a frolicking and seemingly carefree dance, set in the Lydian mode. Vague echoes of the third movement of Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastiquecan be heard in the pastoral oboe and the distant thunder of the timpani. Perhaps they contain a spiritual pull similar to what Sibelius felt when he visited the mighty Finnish peak, Koli, in 1909 and listened to the “sighing of the winds and the roar of the storms.” As the first movement unfolds, we encounter hushed, shivering string tremolo and ghostly cries in the woodwinds. There is the sensation of gradual forward motion, but we end up going nowhere. Climactic moments of arrival embody the timeless majesty and permanence of a towering mountain. As one faltering phrase leads to the next, we find ourselves drifting through a bleak and barren landscape. This disintegrating, failed thematic statement opens the door to the forlorn voice of the solo cello. It’s as if a foreign body were exerting gravitational force on the music, slowing it down. Meanwhile, the durations of the notes lengthen by degrees, from quarter notes to dotted quarters and then to half notes. The first few bars of the symphony extrapolate a new dimension in musical time… feels like the beginning of a major thematic statement, but it gets stuck on the notes F-sharp and E, which oscillate and fade away. This dissonant interval pervades the entire symphony, soon returning as an icy flash in the horns. These pitches outline a fragment of the whole-tone scale, reordered to hint at a searing tritone (the “devil’s interval”). In the opening bars of the first movement ( Tempo molto moderato, quasi adagio), the pitches C, D, F-sharp, and E emerge out of the depths of the orchestra (cellos, basses, and bassoons) with a brusque growl. This gives me strength and satisfaction.” Not many people came backstage to the artists’ room to pay their respects.” Yet, the critic Oskar Merikanto wrote, “I feel as if entirely new worlds were now opening for Sibelius as a composer of symphonies, worlds which have not been shown to others and which he, with his astonishingly highly developed sense of colour and melody, can see and describe to others.” Sibelius stood by his vision with intense conviction, commenting in the 1940s, “I cannot find a single note in it that I could remove, nor can I find anything to add. Their smiles were embarrassed, furtive or ironic. According to the composer’s wife, “People avoided our eyes, shook their heads. “Everything was so strange,” one reviewer wrote. The austerity of the music earned it the nickname, Barkbröd (“Bark-bread”), a reference to the nineteenth century Scandinavian famine during which time the people resorted to eating tree bark. The Appremiere in Helsinki was met with confusion and hostility.
It has absolutely nothing of the circus about it.” His diary entries from the time speak of “dark shadows.” Artistically, he felt increasingly alienated from the stylistic trends of music written by his Central European contemporaries, and wrote to a friend that the Fourth Symphony “stands as a protest against present-day music. In 1908, the composer had confronted his own mortality with the removal of a cancerous tumor from his throat. Completed in 1911 as Europe teetered on the brink of the First World War, its atmosphere was once summed up by Sibelius with a gloomy quote by the playwright, August Strindberg: “Det är synd om människorna” (“One feels pity for human beings”). Sibelius called the Fourth “a psychological symphony.” It is the stuff of Expressionism, murky dreams, and Sigmund Freud’s excursions into the unconscious. Yet, upon entering this forbidding territory, we are rewarded with glimpses of rugged beauty and awe-inspiring power. Its four movements probe frigid, mysterious depths. At first listen, it is undoubtedly the strangest and most unsettling of Sibelius’ seven symphonies.
4 in A minor enters a dark, austere, and occasionally terrifying sonic landscape.
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