Strictures on Sibelius
To a person who
grew up in the German or Austrian musical sphere Sibelius’s name
doesn’t mean much.
If such a person doesn’t confuse him geographically with Sinding or phonetically
with Delius, he is aware of him as the composer of the Valse triste, a
harmless salon
piece; at the concert hall he has had one-off encounters with such
program-fillers as The Oceanides and The Swan of Tuonela—fairly brief, rather
physiognomically
vague pieces of program music about which it is difficult to recollect
anything.
If
one comes to England or even to America, his name begins to swell to inordinate
proportions. It is mentioned as often as
that of a make of car. Radios and
concerts reverberate with Finish notes.
Toscanini’s programs find room for Sibelius. In lengthy essays larded with musical
illustrations he is extolled as the most significant composer of the present,
as an authentic symphonist, as timelessly old-fashioned, and virtually as a
kind of Beethoven. There is a Sibelius
Society that subserves his fame and makes sure that the man himself receives
gramophone recordings of his oeuvre.
One becomes curious
and listens to a few of the principal works; say, the Fourth and Fifth
Symphonies. One studies the scores
beforehand. They look paltry and
Boeotian, and one surmises that their secret can be revealed only via the
corporeal act of hearing. But the sound
doesn’t change the picture in the slightest.
This is what it
looks like: what are deployed as “themes” are haphazard sequences, sequences
that are trivial and utterly lacking in plasticity; for the most part they are
not even fully harmonized but rather written as unisons with pedal points,
static harmonies, and whatever else the five lines of the staff afford to
someone trying to avoid a logical chordal progression.
Quite early on
these sequences suffer a misfortune, a bit like a suckling babe that falls from
the table and injures its spine. They
can’t walk properly. They get
stuck. At an unforeseen point the
rhythmic movement breaks off: the progression becomes unintelligible. Then the simple sequences return, displaced
and distorted, without being able to budge so much as an inch. In the eyes of his apologists, these episodes
count as Beethovenesque: they fashion a world out of the insignificant, out of
the null and void. But this world is
worthy of the one in which we live: it is raw and at the same time mysterious,
shopworn and riddled with contradiction, long-familiar and impenetrable. Again
the apologists say that this attests to the incommensurability of the
form-fashioning Master, who will have no truck with cookie-cutters of any
sort. But we cannot believe in
incommensurable forms that are manifestly incapable of measuring out a
four-voiced passage: his consistent use of schoolboyish material inclines us to
believe not that he is superior to the established school but merely that he
does not know how to follow its rules.
His is the originality of helpless incompetence, in the tradition of
those amateurs who refrain from taking composition lessons for fear of losing
their distinctiveness, which itself is nothing but the disorganized residue of
what came before them.
As a composer
Sibelius is worth as few words as such amateurs. He may have garnered considerable kudos for
musically colonizing his homeland. It is
quite easy to imagine that when he returned there after his composition studies
in Germany he quite rightly felt a sense of his own inferiority, that he was
then probably conscious of the fact that he had not been vouchsafed the ability
either to offer up a chorale or to write correct counterpoint, that he had buried
himself in the land of a thousand lakes in order to remain safely hidden from
the eyes of his schoolmasters. Probably
nobody was more surprised than he was to discover that his failure was being
interpreted as success, his incapacity as an imperative. In the end he probably believed it himself and
then brooded for decades over his Eighth Symphony as though it were the Ninth.
The effect is of
interest. How is it possible for a
composer to attain worldwide fame and, by whatever manipulative process, the
status of a classic, a composer who has not merely lagged drastically behind
the technical standards of his time—for this is actually regarded as a virtue
in him—but rather who is showing himself to be utterly inadequate by his own
standards and making shaky and indeed downright bungling use of his traditional
means, from the basic building materials to the large-scale construction? Sibelius’s success is a symptom of a
disturbance in the musical consciousness.
The earthquake that found its expression in the dissonances of the great
works of the new music has not spared minor old-fashioned music. It has become cracked and lopsided. But in fleeing from the dissonances, it has taken
refuge in false triads. Stravinsky has
taken the false triads as far as they can go in composition. Via superimposed wrong notes he has
demonstrated how wrong the right notes have become. In Sibelius’s music pure notes already sound
wrong. He is a Stravinsky against his
will. But he has less talent.
His devotees don’t
want to hear any of this. Their song
hearkens to the refrain, “Everything is nature; everything is nature.” The great god Pan, with blood and soil in tow
as needed, promptly makes an appearance. Triviality counts as originality,
inarticulacy as the sound of insentient creation.
Categories of this
sort elude criticism. That nature’s mood
is bound to reverential silence is their cardinal conviction. But if the concept of nature’s mood might
not even be unquestionably operative in reality, it is certainly not operative
in works of art. Symphonies are not a
thousand lakes, even if they are pitted with a thousand holes.
Music has
cultivated a technical canon for the depiction of nature’s moods—that of
impressionism. In the wake of French
painting of the nineteenth century, Debussy developed compositional methods for
salvaging the expressiveness and the expressionlessness, the light and the
shade, the bright and the fading colors of the visible world in sounds behind
which the poetic word still lingers.
These methods are alien to Sibelius.
Car nous voulons la nuance encore—this
sounds like mockery of his dull, stiff, and accidental orchestral
complexion. His is nothing like music en plain air. It is music evocative of a rough-and-tumble schoolroom
where during recess the youngsters showcase their genius by emptying their
inkwells. There is no palette: it’s all
just ink.
This is also turned
into a virtue by his admirers. His
Nordic depth is said to be intimately involved with insentient nature but to
refrain from enjoying her charms. His is an inhibited promiscuity in the
darkness. His asceticism of impotence is
celebrated as creative self-discipline.
When he has relations with nature they are purely internal. His kingdom is not of this world. It is the kingdom of the emotions. Once one has reached it, all one’s other
debts are cleared. If the content of the
emotions is as little ascertainable as their basis in the musical events
themselves, this is regarded as proof of their depth.
It is nothing of
the kind. The emotions are
ascertainable. Admittedly not in the way
they might like; namely, in terms of their metaphysical and existential
substance. They have as little of this
as do Sibelius’s scores. It is the configuration
of the banal and the absurd. In
isolation everything sounds workaday and familiar. The motifs are fragments of the cursive
script-scape of tonality. One has heard
them so often that one thinks one understands them. But they are combined into a meaningless
nexus: it is as if nouns like filling
station, lunch, death, Greta, and ploughshare
are being haphazardly coupled with verbs and particles. An incomprehensible assemblage of the most
trivial details produces a mirage of the unfathomable. One is delighted at being able to comprehend
everything uninterruptedly, and delighted with a clear conscience even as one
realizes one actually comprehends nothing.
Or, rather: the complete lack of comprehension that constitutes the
current musical consciousness finds its ideological justification in the
semblance of comprehensibility elicited by Sibelius’s vocables.
In the
manifestations of resistance to progressive new music, in the attitude of
sneering detestation with which it is defamed, resounds not the mere
traditional and general aversion to the new, but rather the specific intuition
that the old means no longer suffice.
Not that they have been “exhausted”: mathematically speaking, the
diatonic chords still afford countless new combinations. But they have become specious and
inauthentic: they serve only to transfigure a world that is no longer
transfigurable, and no music that does not potentially further the critical
assault on the existent down to its innermost procedural cells has any longer any
right to be written. People are hoping
to use Sibelius to evade this intuition.
This is the secret of his success.
Absurdity, which
the genuinely depraved means of traditional post-Romantic music in his work
embrace as a given thanks to their inadequate management, seems to hoist that
music aloft of its own degeneration. The
possibility of composing music that is fundamentally old-fashioned and yet entirely
new: that is the triumph inaugurated by conformism under the aegis of
Sibelius. His success is equivalent to
the yearning for the world to be cured of its exigencies and conflicts, for it
to be “renewed,” while still allowing the yearner to hold on to his worldly
possessions. What such fantasies of
renewal as well as Sibelius’s originality really have to offer is nevertheless
revealed by their meaninglessness. This
meaninglessness is no more merely technical in character than a sentence devoid
of meaning is only “technically” devoid of meaning. It sounds absurd because the attempt to
express something new with old and dilapidated means is itself absurd. Nothing whatsoever is expressed.
It is as if all the arguments that have
characterized the reaction against musical cultural Bolshevism have found their
justification in the rock-ribbed Finn.
If reactionaries fancy that the new music owes its mode of existence to
an insufficient command of the material of the old music, this insufficiency is
nowhere more apparent than in Sibelius, who clings to the old. His music is in a certain sense the only
“subversive” music of our time. But not
in the sense of the destruction of the status quo; rather, in that of the
Calibanesque destruction of all the musical results of the mastery of nature
that humankind purchased at an expensive enough cost in the course of
familiarizing itself with the equal-tempered scale.
If
Sibelius is good, then the perennial criteria of musical quality from Bach to
Schoenberg—the criteria of evocativeness, of articulateness, of oneness in
multifariousness, of diversity in unity–are now null and void. All of this is betrayed by Sibelius to a
nature that is no such thing, but rather the shabby photographic paraphernalia
of our parents’ sitting rooms. He is self-interestedly
contributing to the great attritional selling out of serious music, even if he
is easily outbidden as a seller by industrialized light music. But such destruction in his symphonies is
masked as creation. Theirs is a
dangerous influence.
1938
THE END
Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2018 by Douglas Robertson
Source: Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte
Werke, Rolf Tiedemann, ed. in collaboration
with Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am
Main, 1986; Directmedia: Berlin, 2003), Vol. 17, p. 247.