Symphony No. 3 in C, Opus 52
A letter from Sibelius dated September 21, 1904, closes with the remark, “Have begun my third symphony.” Sibelius finished it in summer 1907 and conducted the premiere in Helsinki on September 26. Serge Koussevitzky led the first Boston Symphony Orchestra performances in November 1928. The Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra gave the first Tanglewood performance, led by Alan Gilbert in the Shed on August 2, 2021.
Salome and the Symphonia domestica of Richard Strauss, Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso and his Introduction and Allegro, Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande, Scriabin’s Divine Poem, Debussy’s La Mer and first book of Images for piano, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony and Kindertotenlieder, the first books of Iberia by Albéniz, Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Invisible City of Kitezh, Rachmaninoff’s Opus 23 Preludes, Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for Strings, The Kingdom, and the fourth of his Pomp and Circumstance marches, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly—that was new and recent music in 1907. How fascinating the stubborn anti-Romanticism of the new Sibelius Third Symphony must have been to the audiences that first heard it in Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Birmingham, and London. To many it must have been puzzling and annoying. After all, even Sibelius’s own recent music—the Symphony No. 2, first heard in 1902 and now beginning to make a reputation for its composer throughout Europe; the Violin Concerto, launched in its final form in Berlin, 1905, with Carl Halir as soloist and Richard Strauss conducting; Pohjola’s Daughter, first played in St. Petersburg in 1906—had been lush in sound and grand in rhetoric. During the next decade, many composers would hear a voice summoning them to a leaner life. Sibelius had heard it sooner. The Third Symphony is the work in which we meet Sibelius most engaged in the pleasure of making music. The symphony’s chief traits are modesty and energy. The orchestration, for 1907, is unassuming. The basic, very “classical” sonority is that of strings and woodwinds, and one seems to hear more of the soft-edged flutes and clarinets than of the sharper double reeds. The horns and drums are busy, but the trumpets and trombones intervene rarely and economically. The first movement has not a half-dozen measures of fortissimo, the second none at all, and the third only two measures before the last minute of peroration.
The first movement throws a heap of material at you in rapid succession, the subterranean march of cellos and basses, the swingingly syncopated contribution of the violins, and the jaunty woodwind tune whose sixteenth-notes will dominate the movement more than any other single element. In his program note on this symphony, Donald Francis Tovey writes that “a very typical feature of Sibelius’s style is the emergence of a long-drawn melody from a sustained note that began no one can say exactly when.” Such a melody soon provides contrast after the propulsive vigor of the first half-dozen pages and it offers, as well, fascinating tension between its expansive- ness (it unfolds for fifteen measures before dissolving into scurrying sixteenth-notes) and the rigorous economy that keeps it circulating about just four notes through most of its length. The coda is a surprise, and I shall not describe it except to comment that the final “Amen” cadence—plain forte, not emphatic enough for fortissimo, nor ready for the pathos of piano—is especially characteristic of this symphony.
There is no real slow movement, though the second movement functions as a place of contrast and repose. Its key, G-sharp minor, is fresh, and remote from any of the places the first movement has visited. In character, the music suggests one of those wistful Schumann or Brahms intermezzi that are neither slow nor quick. Sibelius plays enchantingly with the metrical ambiguity of his melody. After the two-note upbeat, are the six beats in each measure to be heard as 3x2 (ONE two THREE four FIVE six) or as 2x3 (ONE two three FOUR five six)? As so often with what seem to be either/or questions, the answer is both. Not only can you reverse your own hearing of the melody much as you can make the tick-tock of a clock change step, but Sibelius also calls in the basses ever so softly to contradict the flutes and clarinets or the violins in their rhythmic reading. And those basses, though they hardly ever rise above mezzoforte, want very much to be heard.
Which brings me to another aspect of Sibelius’s classical symphonic style. There is no imagery and no drama for you to lose yourself in except that of the musical events themselves. This is like Haydn: you can’t do anything with it except listen to it, and it is meant for people who really listen. Just before the end of this second movement, and just for a moment, the conflict of two-against-three becomes troubling rather than charming, and this ambiguous, discreetly mysterious movement ends on a curiously inconclusive note.
The finale is restless. The tempo changes all the time, sometimes abruptly, sometimes gradually. At certain moments, Sibelius can hardly crowd as many notes as he would like into each measure; at others he will take time to stand still on a single note, or a pair, or a trill, or an intricately figured chord. Fragments whisk by, some so fast we can hardly apprehend them. Bits of the first two movements whir across the landscape. Shadow becomes substance. Again I quote Tovey: “Then comes the one and all sufficing climax. All threads are gathered up in one tune that pounds its way to the end with the strokes of Thor’s hammer.”
MICHAEL STEINBERG
Michael Steinberg was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1976 to 1979, and after that of the San Francisco Symphony and New York Philharmonic. Oxford University Press has published three compilation volumes of his program notes, devoted to symphonies, concertos, and the great works for chorus and orchestra.