Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Síða 214

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LE NORD
and suggestive content. But at the same time his store of artistic
mediums of expression was enriched, and his individual Sibelius-
style was stabilized. When he resumed his composition of absolute
music he departed from a new basis. Chamber-music receded to
the background, he found his instrument in the orchestra, to which
from now on he entrusts his most personal and individual visions.
He still composed different kinds of works, but the highest goal
of his production is obviously symphony, the most sublime ex-
pression of pure music. Therefore his symphonies form the actual
signposts of his production — they are confessions which faith-
fully reflect his inner world at different periods. His develop-
ment as a composer did not stop with his first successes, but con-
tinued through spiritual conflict, having as its leading star the
truth of his artistic calling. Every one of his symphonies has its
own individual nature, which extends even to the details of the
orchestration. His first symphony with its nobly ascending final
hymn is closely related to his other compositions of the period
1890—1900. His second symphony is the most powerful in con-
tent and makes the most vigorous use of the means of orchestral
expression. It is of a combative, victorious nature and it obvi-
ously marks an important turning-point in his individual develop-
ment as a composer. It seems that after this it became of greater
importance than before to the composer to devote a longer time
to the ripening, thorough revising and perfecting his melodic
thought. There was a gradual transition from the style of his
youth, in which he paints with bold strokes of the brush, to a
style in which details are finished off after careful consideration,
which is characterized by a refined wealth of rhythm, and which
at the same time more and more obviously approaches perfected
clarity of form. The outward gestures of his music become calmer,
the orchestral machinery becomes smaller, and the melodic
language acquires an ever more introspective and more deeply
personal nature; this is also reflected in the form of the sympho-
nies, which in the first two is in keeping with traditional construc-
tion, but in the following ones becomes more and more individual.
The fourth symphony shows us the composer when he has de-
parted farthest from all the usual forms and is listening to melo-
dies welling from his innermost being. In general his later sym-
phonic compositions move in a spiritual, abstract plane; in these
melodies ideas rather than images are rendered. It may be said,
that his later sympnonies are phenomena that stand alone in