Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Síða 211

JEAN SIBELIUS
By Toivo Haapanen,
Director of music of the Finnish State Radio Service.
THE time about fifty years ago, when Jean Sibelius pre-
sented his first great compositions, was a remarkable one
in the history of Finnish art. An amazingly rapid rise took
place in all branches of it. There appeared a series of splendid
artists in the realms of literature, sculpture and music, who had
in common the originality of creative genius and a vital conscious-
ness of Finnish nationality. The fundamental source of energy
was the national awakening which had aroused the Finnish people
at the beginning of the last century to the awareness of their
being a nation among nations. An explanation for the fact that
this rise was so rapid and reached such heights can undoubtedly
be found in the centuries-long historical development, the old
Scandinavian-Western civilization of Finland, which reaches
back to the Middle Ages as far as art is concerned too. At this
time Finnish men of the Church and school circles represented
high intellectual culture. The end of the eighteenth century was
the first great period of productivity in the field of music. The
aristocratic cultivation of music by the cultured circles, specially
the university people, was on a high level and disclosed active
study of the phenomena of the period. Finland sent her first
famous composer, Bernhard Henrik Crusell, out into the world.
At the same time the ancient Kalevala culture of the Finnish
people came into notice. In the epoch of the Ossianic poems the
first great man in Finnish national science, Henrik Gabriel
Porthan, took an interest in ancient Finnish poetry and music,
and already in the following century Finnish musical culture
drew its energy from two sources — from its historical develop-
ment and from its own spiritual treasures, which had been intro-
duced to the public in the form of Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala and
which acted as an inexhaustible incentive for the imagination in
the fine arts of Finland, just then undergoing a process of develop-
ment. The nineteenth century is a period of idealism, romanticism
and cultural conflict, in the course of which the forms of modern
musical life are built up on a national basis. A German-born com-
poser, Frederik Pacius, who was the leader of Finnish musical
life in the middle of the century, became assimilated by his new
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