ONLY THE LOGOS:

Apart from the Finnish mythological figures of the Kalevala with whom Sibelius deals in his tone poems, there are no people in his music. This not so much limits Sibelius's music as defines it. Imagine one of the breathtaking nature portraits from the Hudson River Valley School of painting that depicts a stupendous mountain range. It matters very much if there are tiny human figures in the foreground of the painting. Such figures may provide a sense of scale, but an audience inside the painting also changes the relationship of what is depicted to the audience outside. They are distracted from the main event. With Sibelius, there are no people interposing themselves between what he portrays and you, the listener. There is nothing there to distract from the solitary grandeur and mystery of nature. Its impact is direct and overwhelming.

Because he composed such stirring tonal music with nature as its subject, Sibelius has often, and I believe mistakenly, been labeled a Romantic. He is certainly not one in the conventional sense. The late Glenn Gould described Sibelius's music as "passionate but anti-sensuous." Sibelius is uninterested in letting us know how he feels about the mountain. He wants to show the mountain itself. His music is not autobiographical. The sensibility behind, for example, Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life) is completely foreign to him. So is Mahler's self-indulgence. If anything, Sibelius's music was, in part, a reaction against this kind of late Romanticism. Sibelius's attitude toward nature is worth exploring because it may have something to do with the ups and downs of his reputation.

Sibelius said, "There is music in the whole universe." He believed in the "Music of the Spheres," the classical Greek view that held that the mathematical relationships among the heavenly bodies are the same as those of music. The heavens are literally harmonious. He said, "I believe that there are musical notes and harmonies on all planets." This included planet earth. Sibelius's experience of the world was essentially musical. He was one of those extraordinary individuals gifted with perfect pitch. He not only noted the key and character in which various birds sang, but experienced the most commonplace, everyday sounds in musical terms. Once, when a repairman was hammering away on the veranda, Sibelius observed, "The man is all the time hitting a g that is about a quarter-tone out of tune." Sibelius also experienced colors musically, and often whole visual scenes resolved themselves into musical forms for him. As a young boy, he sat at the piano and tried to play the colors he saw in the parlor carpet. His favorite, a clear green, he said, was "somewhere between d and e flat." When he first heard the sounds of orchestral instruments, they seemed at once familiar to him. Sibelius never wrote in short score. He heard his music orchestrally; each sound came to him instrumentally--as it were, without intermediaries.

Sibelius saw the larger significance of the musical harmony of the world, and it is the key to the meaning and power of his music. One day, Sibelius spoke to his personal secretary Santeri Levas about the astonishing sense of law in the universe, and an almost inconceivable harmony that makes every human effort seem tiny and senseless. This realization did not induce in him a sense of futility, but of humility. "That," Sibelius concluded, "is what I call God."

Though Sibelius was not religious in a conventional sense, he was a deep believer. "The essence of man's being," he said, "is his striving after God." He saw art as hieratic and composition as a vocation. In words that could hardly go more directly to the heart of the matter, he said, "It [composition] is brought to life by means of the Logos, the divine in art. That is the only thing that really has significance."

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