Symphony No. 5
Malcolm Hayes looks skywards as he listens to the many recordings of this swan-inspired symphony, and names the ones that really take flight
The composer
Though Sibelius lived to the ripe old age of 91 – he was born while Brahms was still working on his First Symphony and died just five years before the Beatles had their first
No. 1 hit – his last 30 years saw him produce next to nothing as a composer. His Fifth Symphony of 1915, then, came comparatively late in his career. Though he completed two further symphonies, in 1923 and ’24 respectively, his Eighth never saw the light of day – according to posthumous accounts by his family, the composer burned its score, along with other work-inprogress, in the mid-1940s.
The work
When the First World War broke out in the autumn of 1914, the consequences for Sibelius were worrying. Finland was then still a ‘grand duchy’ of imperial Russia, so that travel abroad, for years a major stimulus to composing, was now impossible. Worse, the flow of international royalties from his German publishers was cut off. He found himself effectively marooned in Finland, writing innocuous smaller works for local publishers to generate some income – and, probably out of frustration, reverting to his heavy smoking and drinking habits after several years of successful abstinence.
Plans for a new symphony, however, were given focus by his approaching 50th-birthday celebrations in December 1915. There were moments of home-grown inspiration too, as he wrote in his diary in April that year: ‘Just before ten-to-eleven [during a walk] I saw 16 swans. One of the greatest experiences of my life. Oh God, what beauty: they circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the sun like a glittering silver ribbon. Their cries were of the same melancholy timbre as those of cranes, but without any tremolo… Nature’s mystery and life’s melancholy! The Fifth Symphony’s finale theme.’ Written down
Plans for a new symphony were given focus by Sibelius’s approaching 50th birthday
below this entry was the motif for horns that was to become the surging heart of the new work’s closing movement.
The four-movement symphony Sibelius conducted at his 50th-birthday concert in Helsinki was well received, but after two a further performances in early 1916 he decided to withdraw and re-work it. He conducted a first revised version later that year; no score or other material relating to this now survive, apart from a single orchestral double-bass part. This confirms that the symphony’s memorable opening horn-call, absent from the original score, was now present (it was written into the double-bass part as a cue) – and also, crucially, that the symphony now had three movements, with the original first two spliced together.
Still not happy with the result, Sibelius set about revising the work yet more radically. Retaining the three-movement design, he gradually distilled both the
musical material and the orchestration down to their concentrated essence, deploying the main instrumental sections of woodwind, brass and strings in unblended blocks. The new method released a collective orchestral sonority that remarkably combined power and purity: Sibelius was to develop this further in the Sixth Symphony and in his last symphonic poem, Tapiola. (The Seventh Symphony would be to some extent a throwback to his earlier orchestral style.)
Progress on this final version of the
Fifth was held up by the civil war that engulfed post-independence Finland in 1918 after the Russian Revolution. When the revolutionary ‘Reds’ took control around Sibelius’s home north of Helsinki, he decamped with his family to the city, where his brother Christian, a doctor at the mental asylum, managed to put them up. An entertaining story, apparently true, tells of a visiting ‘Red’ official who noticed a strange-looking individual scowling over his manuscript paper amid clouds of cigar smoke, and assumed that Finland’s master-composer was one of the asylum inmates. Food was desperately short: Sibelius lost 20 kilos in weight before the final ‘White’ nationalist victory in 1919 brought slow return to stable conditions, and the Fifth Symphony’s third version could at last be completed and performed.
With hindsight, the realisation that the original version’s first two movements could be joined together is perhaps not so surprising: both are in the same home key of E flat, and are largely based on the same material. That said, the final version’s superlatively executed transition between the two is one of the great moments in Sibelius. The symphony’s overall process of trimming and conflation is equally convincing in the finale, shortened from over 13 minutes to around nine. The original version’s closing ‘swan hymn’ peroration culminates in two hammerstroke chords; the 1919 score expands these to a spectacular sequence of six.
And while the paring-down of the central Andante mosso movement’s material is in line with Sibelius’s similar procedure elsewhere, it’s possible to argue that he here took the process too far: the original version’s greater range of expression and incident has a winsome appeal that, for this reason especially, makes the 1915 score well worth exploring.
Turn the page to discover the best recordings of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony