Sibelius’ brilliant yet interrupted career

It’s a bit startling to realize that Jean Sibelius has been dead for only 50 years, for he is a figure who seems like part of a deeper past. To put it in stark perspective, he was born in the year (1865) the Civil War ended and “Tristan and Isolde” was first heard, and he survived well into the second year (1957) of Elvis Presley’s heyday and just two weeks short of the launch of Sputnik.

Indeed, of all of the great composers born in the middle third of the 19th century (among them Mahler, Richard Strauss and Puccini), Sibelius is both the closest to us chronologically and perhaps the most difficult to place in time.

He was the quintessential outsider -- from a country, Finland, that was not only not a country yet but that had never placed a composer on the world stage. He was not quite a Romantic in a Romantic age, a modernist who was not considered a modernist, a contemporary composer who received extravagant acclaim in his maturity only to watch it wither away in his extreme old age.

Starting with his second and biggest orchestral work, the “Kullervo” Symphony -- actually a massive five-movement tone poem -- Sibelius practically invented a Finnish national idiom grounded in ancient runic songs and in German and Russian music. Then, from the Third Symphony onward, he broke with nationalism altogether. But unlike other ex-nationalist composers who gravitated toward the international mainstream, Sibelius continued to go his own way, paring down and concentrating his rhetoric, bending symphonic form into new shapes while still unmistakably conveying the atmosphere of the North.

His is a lonely music at its core -- brooding, propulsive, obsessively repeating and evolving, abruptly cutting off, at times terrifying in its elemental power. Even when his later music rises in exultation, it is the triumph of a lone individual, beholden to no one, spawning few followers.

Los Angeles will have a rare chance to experience the sweep of Sibelius in October when his countryman Esa-Pekka Salonen will lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Salonen’s first complete cycle of the seven numbered symphonies at Walt Disney Concert Hall. In November, they will take the whole package to London’s Barbican Centre. And today and Saturday, the orchestra’s new assistant conductor, Lionel Bringuier, will be on the podium at Disney Hall for a program of Sibelius selections.

Alas, we won’t be hearing the symphonic cycle in order, so we could follow Sibelius’ extraordinary evolution from the Tchaikovsky-tinged sprawl of the First Symphony to the compact Seventh, in which all four movements flow in one miraculously fused continuum. But you can get to know the symphonies chronologically at home; this is music that is often best to commune with alone. (For a splendidly penetrating, well-recorded cycle at a low price, get Colin Davis and the Boston Symphony on a pair of Philips double-disc sets).

Sibelius mania

Sibelius was once one of the most lauded composers on Earth. According to a poll of New York Philharmonic concertgoers in 1935, at the height of the Sibelius boom, he was the most popular composer of all time. His tone poem “Finlandia” was the international rallying cry for Finland; early in the 20th century, it was considered so politically incendiary that it could not be played under its rightful name in some countries so as not to offend Russia (which controlled Finland). Instead, it was disguised under inoffensive titles such as “La Patrie.”

The young record critic David Hall thought the Seventh Symphony was the greatest contribution to the symphonic literature since Beethoven’s “Eroica,” and his powerful older colleague at the New York Times, Olin Downes, called the composer “the last of the heroes.” Many leading podium personalities -- Leopold Stokowski, Thomas Beecham, Serge Koussevitzky -- fought for Sibelius’ approval and the first performance rights to his magnum-opus-in-progress, the Eighth Symphony.

Unfortunately, all this praise may have been one reason that Sibelius withdrew into his shell for the last 30 years of his life, releasing nothing new. His pathologically self-critical nature rivaled that of Brahms. Masterworks such as “En Saga,” the Violin Concerto and the Symphony No. 5 were withdrawn after their first performances and reworked and reworked until he was satisfied, barely (the originals, which surfaced in the 1990s, make clear that his revisions were always improvements). The older he grew, the more self-critical he became, and the more hosannas he received, the greater were the expectations he placed upon himself. So the Eighth Symphony, completed or not, wound up in the fireplace unheard.

The Sibelius backlash that came after his reputation peaked around 1940 may have frightened him more. Suddenly he was old hat, a stern, shaved-headed, granite-like relic from the North waving the Finnish flag and competing hopelessly with Beethoven. Orchestras reduced the programming of his music to small doses. New Sibelius recordings went out of print with depressing speed. Even David Hall recanted somewhat.

But the wheel has turned again in Sibelius’ favor, though not to where it was in the 1930s. Not so long ago, if you were into new music, professing a liking for Sibelius would have gotten you drummed out of composition classes. Yet it has become ever clearer that Sibelius was quietly laying part of the foundation for the future of music.

As early as the 1970s, Sibelius could be seen -- if anyone cared to look -- as one of the unsung prophets of Minimalism. The repetitive string figurations and pedal-points that undergird many of his orchestral works clearly point the way to the early music of John Adams (who indeed listened hard to Sibelius when he was young and, according to a recent interview, is now revisiting the music of his old hero). The quietly bustling perpetual-motion strings in the first work that brought Adams into the spotlight, “Shaker Loops,” definitely spring from similar passages in Sibelius’ Fourth and Fifth symphonies. Sibelius also infiltrated Philip Glass; in “Floe” (from the “Glassworks” album), Glass explicitly paraphrases the big swaying tune for the horns in the third movement of the Fifth Symphony as the basis for the piece’s climax.

Further, Sibelius’ still, tremulous wind-scapes can be seen as a precedent for the drifting clusters of Ligeti, and the wildly surging chromatic storms he churns up in “Tapiola” and the prelude to “The Tempest” can amaze even the most shock-proof new-music audiences. Examples such as these raise questions anew as to who should be considered progressive and who gets to decide.

On another front, although Sibelius has always been seen as the decisive starting point for Finnish music, few could have predicted how extensively the seeds that he planted would spread. With all-out support from the Finnish government, the Sibelius Academy (known as the Helsinki Music Institute when he studied there) produced one generation of composers and performers after another, each wave rippling farther than the previous one. The latest has taken over a good portion of today’s new-music scene -- Kaija Saariaho, Jouni Kaipainen, Magnus Lindberg, Salonen himself. Their triumph can also be seen as Sibelius’ ironic posthumous triumph, his musical great-grandchildren who once disdained him now reclaiming Finland’s leadership role.

Entering his world

There are a couple of newly released DVDs that take us into Sibelius’ world -- his dark, woodsy home, Ainola, in Järvenpää and its wintry surroundings. One, the fourth episode from the high-toned 13-part travelogue “Classical Destinations” (EMI Classics), offers a fascinating tour inside Ainola; reminiscences by Sibelius’ granddaughter; and a brief tribute from composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, though not much of Sibelius’ own music.

Christopher Nupen’s 1984 documentary, “Jean Sibelius” (Allegro), probes far more profoundly into the subject, lingering lovingly over still and panned visions of the Finnish forests and lakes while the soundtrack pulsates with plenty of highly charged Sibelius performances from Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Swedish Radio Symphony. Nupen’s film accurately captures the solitary essence of Sibelius in its mix of sound and vision -- and it triggered thoughts of my own most memorable Sibelius experience.

It happened on an airplane trip from Germany to New York toward the close of winter. From a window seat, I could stare at the white, apparently barren coast of Labrador, quickly giving way to the ice-choked mouth of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the snow-blanketed Gaspé Peninsula of Quebec. Wearing those tinny headsets that the airlines provide, I could just make out over the jet noise a thrilling recording of Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra playing Sibelius’ “Lemminkainen’s Homeward Journey.”

It was a journey like no other I have experienced, the fast-tracking music hurtling through the icy wastes, perfectly evoking the arctic landscape below that in turn made the music even more powerful. The forbidding winter-scape reinforced and amplified the images and feelings that I had always perceived in his music -- the rugged chill, the sense of isolation, the sturdy drive of an iconoclast who always charted his own path.

Sibelius was still out of fashion at the time (1984), and his reputation would not be on the rise again until the next decade. But at 37,000 feet, he couldn’t have been more timely -- and timeless.

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Los Angeles Philharmonic

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 12:30 p.m. today

Price: Free

Contact: (213) 850-2000 or www.grandavenuefestival.com

Also

When: 11 a.m. Saturday

Price: $18

When: 8 p.m. Oct. 12; 2 p.m. Oct. 14 and 15; 8 p.m. Oct. 18; 11 a.m. Oct. 19; 8 p.m. Oct. 20; 2 p.m. Oct. 21; 8 p.m. Oct. 25 and 26

Price: $40 to $142

Contact: (213) 850-2000 or www.laphil.org