Recordings of early versions of several of Sibelius's orchestral works have been available for over a decade, giving an aural impression of a process on the way to the finished products.Footnote ¹ Now, some of these pieces have appeared in print for the first time as part of the complete critical edition Jean Sibelius Works (JSW), offering insight into stages of composition as the notoriously self-critical composer strove to improve his work.

The tone poems Aallottaret [Okeanides] and Tapiola, edited by Kari Kilpeläinen with Nors S. Josephson in vol. I/16, have little in common chronologically: the former dates from 1914, before the protracted struggle that would produce the three versions of the Fifth Symphony, while the latter, written in 1926, post-dates the publication of the Seventh Symphony and, as Sibelius's last major symphonic work, ushers in the so-called ‘silence from Järvenpää’.Footnote ² Rather, geography is the element linking the pieces together, for both works originated as American commissions and received their first performance in that country. Another shared factor lies in Sibelius's propensity to revise his works; often, such action stems from his dissatisfaction upon hearing a premiere, but in the case of these two compositions, the impetus followed closely upon the period of gestation, before the composer ever heard a note in rehearsal, let alone performance. Sibelius was satisfied enough with Aallottaret by 3 April 1914 to send the finished manuscript to Carl Stoeckel (1858–1925), for performance at the Norfolk Music Festival, though he was not yet quite certain of the title, narrowly choosing Aallottaret (‘nymphs of the waves’) over his earlier working title of Rondeau der Wellen. (In the end, he would add the explanatory German translation Die Okeaniden alongside the Finnish title.) A scant nine days later, having received and accepted an unexpected invitation to travel to America in order to conduct the piece in person, Sibelius decided to carry out a major revision of what he had only recently referred to in his diary as one of his ‘best compositions’.Footnote ³ Kilpeläinen draws the reasonable conclusion that the prospect of presiding over the premiere caused the composer to reconsider the piece in its entirety, particularly with respect to certain rhythmic difficulties and choice of key area. Time was short; new parts had to be copied in haste immediately before Sibelius's departure in mid-May, leaving the composer to proofread the parts aboard ship en route to New York. The first version of the score and parts remained, unperformed, in Stoeckel's possession and now reside at Yale University. Fortunately for posterity, Stoeckel's express wishes that neither score nor parts ‘are ever to be used or printed under any circumstances’ (I/16, p. 177) have given way of late, first to Osmo Vänska's world premiere (2002) and subsequent recording with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra,Footnote ⁴ and now the score has been printed for the first time in JSW.

Given the significant differences between the early and final versions of Aallottaret, the omission of any sort of analytic comparison – other than a footnote that refers to the original key of D-flat major without naming the new key of D major (I/16, p. XV) – in the introduction to this volume is surprising. According to Stoeckel, Sibelius said ‘he had written it really twice’, with an additional round of revisions during the rehearsal process in America.Footnote ⁵ Vänskä's parallel recordings underscore this point: the final version (10:03) is one-third longer than the ‘Yale version’ (7:25). When Stoeckel witnessed the first rehearsal at Carnegie Hall, the piece he heard was quite different than anything he may have studied in the advance copy of the manuscript he had been sent; a vocabulary of familiar motives and gestures informs both versions, but each is realized with a striking degree of independence. As a case in point, the original introductions show little direct borrowing, other than extended timpani rolls, and the material which is shared most closely in common, a jaunty semiquaver-and-triplet rhythm in the clarinets and flutes, is reduced in altered form to flutes only in the final version; furthermore, metre changes are flattened out to common time, causing motifs to be reimagined in context with new barlines – see especially the flutes in bars 12–13 (p. 5) and bars 11–12 (pp. 57–8), respectively. Logistically, flipping back and forth to compare passages from the two versions in a single volume is not user friendly; a summary of the nature of shared material between the two versions, for example, would greatly assist the reader who wishes to trace the developmental stages of the piece. In this respect, Andrew Barnett's brief article ‘Oceanides: The Whole Story’ is a useful starting point, with its general observations that the Yale manuscript contains several motifs not present in the final version and that much of the material that is present in both versions appears in a different order. As it turns out, the Yale version was preceded by an earlier piece, the third movement of a projected suite for orchestra, which Sibelius reworked (partly by adding new themes and reordering existing ones) to form the tone poem he sent to Stoeckel. Accounts of the genesis of Aallottaret do not specify whether Sibelius had kept a copy of the Yale version from which to make his last-minute revision. The ‘strikingly close correlation’, as Barnett puts it,Footnote ⁶ between the nature and order of themes in the pre- and post-Yale versions raises the possibility that the composer may have been working from memory, along with his first version of the piece (incidentally, in E-flat), which would explain the vast differences between the two later scores. To borrow and expand upon a comparison made by Vänska, the Yale version is a large lake to the mighty ocean of the final version, yet this newly published volume shows the ‘lake’ to be well worthy of a visit.Footnote ⁷

With Tapiola, Sibelius again envisioned a last-minute revision prior to the premiere, this time complicated by the addition of a publisher into the mix. The composer received and accepted a commission from Walter Damrosch, conductor of the Symphonic Society of New York, in January 1926, for performance later that year. In April, Breitkopf & Härtel agreed to publish the forthcoming tone poem, which by September had progressed as far as an engraved score and nearly complete set of orchestral parts. Suddenly – perhaps, Kilpeläinen speculates, because the work was to be published before the composer was able to hear it – Sibelius demanded a hiatus in the publication process in order to allow for significant revision. Unfortunately, the autograph fair copy does not survive, but it seems as if, in the end, Sibelius submitted smaller changes to the publisher and did not undertake the ‘long leap’ (‘grosser Sprung’) of change he had originally proposed in a telegram to Breitkopf & Härtel.

Early reception being a particular concern of the JSW, Kilpeläinen's introduction carefully distinguishes between critical remarks from the American and Finnish premieres (December 1926 and April 1927, respectively). A survey of writings in a variety of journals shows that critics in America concerned themselves above all with construction, particularly the way in which a single motif provides the material from which all else is derived, and largely agreed about the nature of the resulting piece, describing it variously as ‘monotonous’,’ ‘without distinction’, and ‘lack[ing] a definite character’ (I/16, XIII). In stark contrast, Finnish critics felt a much stronger connection to the abstractly programmatic portrayal of the realm of the forest god, Tapio, finding in the tone poem ‘unforgettable poetry’,’ ‘characteristically Finnish coloring’, and ‘scintillating orchestral power outbursts’ (I/16, XIV).

Lemminkäinen dates from both a much earlier and later time in Sibelius's career: after premiering in 1896 and undergoing a revision for a further performance in 1897, two movements, Tuonela joutsen (The Swan of Tuonela) and Lemminkäinen palaa kotitienoille (Lemminkäinen's Return), were soon published and gained widespread recognition in concert halls, while the other two were withdrawn. No further performance of Lemminkäinen ja saaren neidot (Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of the Island) and Lemminkäinen Tuonelassa (Lemminkäinen in Tuonela) is known before 1935, after which the movements were revised in 1939 for publication that was delayed until 1954.Footnote ⁸ Thus, each movement of Lemminkäinen was heard in two early versions (1896 and 1897) before eventual publication. During this process, passages in both score and parts were variously crossed out, hidden under correction slips, or even, in extreme cases, completely excised and replaced with new paper, making it difficult or even impossible to discern material from a previous version. Furthermore, due to historical attrition, the surviving sources documenting material from the early versions is distributed unevenly across the four movements, as Tuija Wicklund explains in her introduction to vol. 1/12a. The original orchestral parts to Lemminkäinen palaa kotitienoille are complete enough to recreate the 1897 version in its entirety, along with several reconstructions showing the differences between the 1896 and 1897 versions. Indeed, in the case of Lemminkäinen Tuonelassa, the completeness of the 1897 version exceeds that of the 1896 to such a degree that the later version, Sibelius's second attempt, has been chosen across the board for all three movements printed in their entirety in 1/12a.

In an ironic twist, Tuonelan joutsen, the most well-known movement today, survives only in the form of a pair of first violin parts; it is unknown whether these belong to the original version or the first revision, but the seven pages of desk 1 prove natural candidates for inclusion among the facsimile reproductions at the back of the volume, a welcome feature of this series. It should be noted that Wicklund's work has been preceded by at least one earlier reconstruction, that prepared by Sir Colin Davis, excerpts of which appear in his discussion of harmonic and formal consequences of different versions.Footnote ⁹ Davis concludes with a plea for further research into the development of Sibelius's compositional process by means of investigating revisions that took place at a distance of over 40 years, an exciting task for which Wicklund's volume, along with its companion volume of final versions of the Lemminkäinen Suite (I/12b), will prove invaluable.

Visually, these volumes are appealing and accessible. The presence of abbreviations for instrumentation and bar numbers on each page simplifies navigation in these works for full orchestra. (The addition of a simple running title header would make finding a specific passage in a given movement even easier.) The layout of the Critical Remarks is clear, with a font slightly smaller than that of the Introduction but still fully legible. Remarks are as extensive as one might expect of such a project: in the early version of Aallottaret, which exists in a single manuscript plus a complete set of parts, only 8 of 125 bars are unambiguous enough to escape editorial comment. Tapiola required consulting six surviving primary sources, including excerpts from the composer's correspondence, along with notes, a study score, and monograph by his son-in-law Jussi Jalas with additional insight into the piece. To compound matters, the autograph fair copy does not survive, making it difficult to know precisely which dynamic markings come from Sibelius and which come from a middleman editor, Carl Ettler, whose participation in the revision process was a necessary step in order to make the piece eligible for copyright protection in the United States.

The fastidious, systematic nature of this complete works edition is evident in the decision to adopt titles as they appear in Fabian Dahlström's Jean Sibelius: Thematisch-bibliographisches Verzeichnis seiner Werke (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2003), to the surprising extent that nowhere in vol. I/12a are English translations provided for the Finnish titles. The section of the Introduction dedicated to ‘Titles and Kalevala Texts’ gives the titles in both Finnish and Swedish, along with a discussion of a few ambiguities and discrepancies in the original Finnish, but the English speaker is left to fend for herself.Footnote ¹⁰ With respect to the Kalevala texts, an appendix reprints the brief passages given to the audience at the performance in 1896, again in Finnish only. Since the predominant language of the JSW is English, with introductions also printed in German, a translation of Finnish passages into one or both of these languages would help scholar and performer alike, an important goal of the series.

With the arrival of these volumes, nos. 20 and 21 of a projected 52-volume collection, the JSW continues its laudable progress towards providing a complete, accurate, historically informed edition of all surviving works of Jean Sibelius, including early versions where possible. After all, these long-forgotten versions represent what Sibelius once considered finished pieces, whether for a few days or for a few decades, until the mighty urge to revise caused him to take up his pen once more.