![]() ![]() Overcome by the strain, the composer promptly took himself off for a fortnight in Rome, where he visited art galleries and listened to Palestrina masses: he had effectively abandoned his long-suffering but loyal wife, Aino, and left her alone to nurse the stricken child back to health. Worse still, history repeated itself: his six-year-old daughter Ruth also contracted typhus. Initially unsure of his next step, however, Sibelius flirted with various projects, among them works inspired by Pushkin’s drama The Stone Guest (based on the Spanish legend of Don Juan) and the Divine Comedy of Dante, as well as a tone poem in four movements labelled Festivals. During the late winter and spring of 1901, Sibelius rented a villa in Rapallo on the Bay of Genoa, and it was there that the seeds were sown for what was to become the Second Symphony. A far from wealthy yet extraordinarily persuasive patron of the arts, Carpelan (who was to become a trusted friend and influential mentor) had gathered together sufficient funds to free the composer from his teaching commitments and to enable him to take his family to Italy. After all, recall what Italy meant to the development of Tchaikovsky and to Richard Strauss.’ It was not long before the author identified himself as Baron Axel Carpelan. You will spend the late autumn and winter in Italy, a land where one can learn about cantabile, proportion and harmony, the plastic arts and the symmetry of lines, where everything is beautiful-even that which is ugly. Then, in June 1900, a letter arrived from an anonymous admirer: ‘It is time you travelled. Nonetheless, the composer himself remained sunk in despondency: marriage-and money-worries were exacerbated by frequent alcoholic binges in Helsinki and the death in February 1900 of his ‘radiant’ 15-month-old daughter Kirsti (victim of an outbreak of typhus in southern Finland) had been a devastating blow. Across the Atlantic too, the concert halls of New York, Chicago and Cincinnati were beginning to resound to Sibelius’s music. Both The Swan of Tuonela and Lemminkäinen’s Return (the second and last of the Four Legends) had been given in Berlin by Felix Weingartner while in England, Henry Wood had programmed the delectable King Christian II suite in one of his promenade concerts. More, he was slowly beginning to make a name for himself in musical circles on the European mainland. By the end of the old (nineteenth) century, Jean Sibelius was basking in the recent successes of his big-hearted, opulent First Symphony and stirring Finlandia.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |