Sibelius, master of the cold

The Finnish composer’s orchestral masterpieces conjure up wild, wintry landscapes that both chill and thrill in equal measure, explains Tom Service

It’s cold outside: those vistas of hoar-covered sward and spinney, the wintry floes of sea-ice hugging the shore when the tide recedes, the frost-flowers on the windowpane…

In fact, it’s probably a dreary grey drizzle wherever you’re reading this, as global warming erodes the difference between the seasons, each as weirdly mild yet completely unpredictable as the last. But let’s say you wanted a music to remind you of the really chilly seasons of aeons past, what would choose to accompany your winter daydreams?

Probably not Tchaikovsky, although that symphony – ‘Winter Daydreams’, his First – is one of the most underrated pieces of 19th-century orchestral music. More likely, I suspect, you’d choose the great Finnish composer whom Tchaikovsky influenced, and who turned nature into a well-spring of lifelong inspiration: Jean Sibelius.

There is so much of the natural world in Sibelius’s music, isn’t there? Those Finnish forest gods and folk tales, those swans and tides, those creation-myths of the celestial firmament – it’s all there as the obvious inspiration for his symphonies and tone-poems, from Tapiola to the Fifth Symphony, Oceanides to Luonnotar.

But Sibelius’s music is doing something considerably more powerful than merely depicting nature or telling bardic tales in sound. Instead, it creates wild musical places. His orchestral works aren’t prettified illustrations of landscape or sea-storm or Finnish-forested tundra. Far from it, in fact.

Rather, they reveal how music can be a force of nature in its own right.

The brilliant nature writer Jay Griffiths has defined wild places as ‘self-willed landscapes’, and that’s what Sibelius’s music feels like to me – his pieces are self-willed musical landscapes

Sibelius’s works reveal how music can be a force of nature in its own right

that put us in the teeth of a musical storm, that lose us in a symphonic forest.

Which is why programme notes and guides to Sibelius’s music are a kind of betrayal of the power of pieces like the Fifth Symphony or Tapiola. At the centre of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony is music that puts us in a hall of mirrors: after a seemingly solid major-key climax, the music reduces in sound and scale to pianissimo, circling semitones, in which we’re lost in a symphonic space that seems to have no shape and no time. It’s as disorienting as being lost in the woods for the first time when you were a child.

The climax of Tapiola is a storm that starts as a shimmering, semitone-obsessed swarm in the strings but which gathers an uncanny momentum and erupts in screams in the brass and woodwind. This isn’t the logical highpoint of a human-made drama or story, but the unpredictable fury of a blizzard. Sibelius’s orchestra doesn’t offer cultural comfort, but climatic confrontation.

It may be cold outside - but it’s even colder inside. Rewild your listening with Sibelius’s music… if you dare.