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The movement is the march, the oncoming rush, of vast formless hordes, the passage of unnamed millions that surge for an instant with their cries and banners, and vanish into nothingness. It is possible that Sibelius will create another work similarly naked and intense. More definitive, it cannot be. Loeffler
This afternoon I went to say good-bye; I told her we were leaving "shortly," and she gently reproved me for disobeying the order which forbids discussion of movements, but I could see she was not greatly displeased. After tea she played to me, music of the modern Russian school Arensky, Sibelius and Pilsuki; a storm was brewing and we both felt sad.
There are certain works that are touchstones, and make apparent what is original and virtuous in all the rest of the labors of their creator, and give his personality a unique and irrefragable position. The Fourth Symphony of Sibelius is such a composition.
And so Sibelius, in the search for the expression of his own personality, so much at one with that of his fellows, was traveling in the common way. The word that he was seeking, the word that should bring fulfilment to his proper soul, was deeply needed by his fellows. Inarticulate thousands, unaware though they were of his existence, awaited his work, wanted the sustenance it could give.
"Yet I remember having many recalls at El Paso, Texas, once, after playing the first movement of the Sibelius concerto. It is one of those compositions which if played too literally leaves an audience quite cold; it must be rendered temperamentally, the big climaxing effects built up, its Northern spirit brought out, though I admit that even then it is not altogether easy to grasp.
Other musicians, having found life still a grim brief welter of bloody combats and the straining of high, unyielding hearts and the falling of sure inalienable doom, have fancied themselves the successors of the Skalds, and dreamt themselves within the gray primeval North. But, in the presence of Sibelius, they seem only too evidently men of a gentler, later generation.
It is as if Sibelius had come upon himself, and so been able to rid his work of all superfluity and indecision. And, curiously, through speaking his own language in all its homeliness and peasant flavor, he seems to have moved more closely to his land. The work, his "pastoral" symphony, for all its absolute and formal character, reflects a landscape.
It is probable that his later music, the music of his puzzling "third period," will shortly come to be considered as simply a part of his unique course of instruction. Sibelius Others have brought the North into houses, and there transmuted it to music. And their art is dependent on the shelter, and removed from it, dwindles.
It is as though Sibelius were so sensible to the quality of his native earth that he knows precisely in what black and massive chords of the piano, say, lie the silence of rocks and clouds, precisely what manner of resistance between chant and piano can make human song ring as in the open.
Music has forever been a movement "up to nature," and Schoenberg's motto is but the precision of a motive that has governed all composers. But Sibelius has written music that seems to come as the very answer to the call, and to be the North indeed. Such a discovery of nature was necessarily a part of his self-revelation. For Sibelius is essentially the Norseman.
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