Bartók was an exception, since he made an attempt to reconcile Schoenberg and Stravinsky, but ‘Edward Elgar’s trumped-up fame seemed to be a local phenomenon and Jean Sibelius’s fame an exceptional instance of critical ignorance.’ įor Adorno, Sibelius was a perfect example of what he called ‘fetish character in music.’ When music became consumer goods, an ‘abyss developed between public taste and compositional quality.’ The consequence was that all kinds of dilettantes were celebrated as great composers, and Sibelius was a dilettante who could neither write a four-part chorale nor work up proper counterpoint. In his Philosophy of Modern Music (1949/2006) that Adorno wrote in American exile during and after World War II and that he called an ‘extended appendix’ to his and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947/1972) Schoenberg stood for ‘Progress’ while Stravinsky represented ‘Restoration.’ In this dialectic picture composers who did not belong to either of these lines were slightly marginalized. ‘If Sibelius is good, then all criteria of musical excellence valid from Bach to Schoenberg, such as complexity, articulation, unity in diversity, multiplicity in oneness, are frail.’ Sibelius’s scores are a ‘configuration of the banal and the absurd ’ all details sound ‘commonplace and familiar,’ but their arrangement is meaningless, ‘as if the words gas station, lunch, death, Greta, plow blade had been arbitrarily put together with verbs and particles.’ He was irritated by the uncritical personality cult in that book, but his actual target was Sibelius. In 1938 he published a review of Bengt de Törne’s book Sibelius: A Close-Up (Faber & Faber, London, 1937). But it must be added that both Mahler and the serialists were backed up by people of considerable influence.
Together they put Sibelius out in the cold, a Baltic hero consigned to the fringe of continental civilization.’ True, this is how the development in the 1950s and 1960s may be seen. In Lebrecht’s analysis, ‘in the second half of the 20 th century, Mahler won the argument for inclusivism while the serialists took over logical purism. Apart from an October symphonic cycle planned in Los Angeles and London by Esa-Pekka Salonen and another in Birmingham, England, by fellow Finn Sakari Oramo, few Sibelius retrospectives have been announced beyond the Baltic,’ he continued. ‘Today, half a century after his death, the commemoration is being marked by virtual silence.
‘Whatever became of Jean Sibelius? For the first half of the 20 th century, the square-headed Finn was the totemic symbol of a heroic nation and the most admired living symphonist,’ wrote Norman Lebrecht in June 2007.
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