As part of a series of composer studies published in conjunction with the Bard Music Festival, the title of this volume is easily explained. For Sibelius scholars though, it has a further resonance given the famous exchange between Sibelius and Mahler in 1907: ‘When our conversation touched on the essence of symphony, I said that I admired its severity and style and the profound logic that created an inner connection between all the motives. Mahler's opinion was just the reverse: “No, the symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything” ’.Footnote ¹ So is this anthology of some ten individual essays plus a collection of five primary documents a work of ‘profound logic’? Does it aim to forge ‘inner connections’ between its component parts? Or is it simply a world of knowledge that tries to be all-embracing? Given that Sibelius is its subject, we might expect something of a symposium rather than a miscellany in a book such as this: a volume that amounts to somewhat more than the sum of its component parts.

Indeed, this quotation appears in Chapter 2 where Timo Virtanen shows how the study of Sibelius's manuscripts and sketch materials can shed light on his compositional process. Consequently, a rather different interpretation emerges: ‘while notions of compositional logic and profundity might seem hard to sustain in our current critical environment, the phrase could perhaps be understood not in terms of creating larger organisms from smaller motivic cells, but rather as the way in which such “profound logic” manifests itself in assembling a sense of continuity from a rich variety of ideas’ (p. 70). Carefully documented evidence overturns any received wisdom that Sibelius presented motivic shapes first as fragments and then re-worked them into themes; his compositional process was not the straightforward linear or goal-directed progression that many scholars have traditionally discerned.

Yet Paul Russ Bullock does still seem to adhere to that view, as he draws upon that very feature in the previous chapter, ‘Sibelius and the Russian Tradition’. He cites Cecil Gray's comments on this issue, alongside those of Gerald Abraham, to make a case that Sibelius's thematic process (of starting with fragments) is essentially Russian in its origins (p. 27).Footnote ² Virtanen, a chapter later and seemingly a world away, not only quotes Sibelius himself (as recorded by Levas) – ‘It is not true at all. I do not build my themes from fragments’ (p. 69) – but evidences this claim through studies of the composer's own sketches. More positively though, the desire to assimilate Sibelius's music within the European mainstream has tended to come at the expense of a wider viewpoint that embraces a significant Russian influence; Bullock's historical survey of the social, political and artistic connections between Finland and is eastern neighbour redresses that balance. What emerges here is that some of the most strikingly characteristic features of the composer's style – such as the idea of ‘symphonic fantasy’ (a unique blend of symphony and tone poem), formal processes, extended tonality (octatonicism and whole-tone organization for instance) – owe much to the fact that Finland stands at a cultural crossroads between Russia and the West.

Eclecticism is often viewed as a Russian characteristic, but it finds favour in the world view of Sibelius that is assembled here. ‘The Melodramatic Lizard’ is the evocative subtitle of Jeffrey Kallberg's chapter on Sibelius's music to accompany staged productions. The theatrical Sibelius often is sidelined in favour of his symphonies and tone poems, and the focus here is on Ődlan, which does not even exist in a concert suite arrangement. The composer's creative use of both stasis and silence, emanating here from a dramatic context, is particularly interesting; such devices were to have significance consequences in other genres, where their symbolism is deployed to telling effect. Moving from reptiles to insects brings us to Tomi Mäkelä's complex deliberations about Sibelius and modernism, initially evoking a striking metaphor: the wings of a butterfly. ‘Compositions are like butterflies: touch them once and the dust is gone – they may be able to fly but they are no longer so wonderful’ was Sibelius's aphorism (p. 90). This initiates a debate about the value and relevance of analysis, with sweeping claims that any rationalization of art and its creation was foreign to the composer. Yet this is the same composer who frequently revised his scores, in acts of creative rationalization that are highly analytical. Consider the original version of the Fifth Symphony, for instance; it was extensively revised, and only when the dust had settled could a truly wonderful piece finally take flight.

In a section entitled ‘Sibelius the Progressive’ (and I take imitation to be a sincere form of flattery, even when not acknowledged)Footnote ³ Mäkelä makes a plea that ‘analytical approaches still need to be developed that fit both his modernist and earlier more traditional pieces’ (p. 94); his omission of any reference to writings that address such issues is a limitation here, as is his modest attention to detail. For instance, a densely descriptive account of the opening of the Fourth Symphony (one that ignores a number of highly perceptive existing analyses), states: ‘the point where the tones A, C and E sound for the first time over a bass F♯ (measure 7) creates a diminished seventh’ (p. 102). Actually it doesn't, given an E♮ (rather than the requisite E♭); indeed, this easily audible sonority is a Sibelian favourite: a Tristan Chord no less. Moreover, since Sibelius deploys this harmonic device in a highly original manner – as a composer who challenges tradition (as we might expect a modernist to do) – Mäkelä's modernist butterfly seems to defy evolution and degenerates into a caterpillar.

Aspects of Sibelius's ‘reception’ underpin the next two essays that take a cross-Atlantic perspective by focusing on Britain and America. Byron Adams's survey of Sibelius criticism comments perceptively on writers like Cecil Gray, Constant Lambert, Ernest Newman and Donald Tovey, who did much to promote Sibelius's music in a manner that resonated with British sensibilities of the time. Their particular perspective is here brought up-to-date when viewed through the lens of new musicology, with special attention to issues of ‘masculinity’: a kind of gender agenda, if you will. The significant impact of Sibelius – both the man and his music – in the USA is outlined by Glenda Dawn Goss in the next chapter, which serves as a counterbalance to more usual assertions that his most significant connections were with the Austro-German world. When we enter that arena, with Max Paddison's contribution ‘Art and the Ideology of Nature: Sibelius, Hamsun, Adorno’, reception of a rather different kind emerges. The exaggerated hero-worship of Sibelius by the British, was countered by its even-more exaggerated denigration in Adorno's ‘Gloss on Sibelius’ (1938); it is immensely useful to have a translation of this article as one of the documents at the end of this volume.Footnote ⁴ A perceived retreat from modernity into the myth of nature, viewed in the context of the corresponding political rise of authoritarianism, offers a striking insight into Adorno's motivation – though any concept of the ‘sublime’, to which the ideology of nature subscribes, is somewhat countered by some of Adorno's comments on the music (which, quite frankly, are ridiculous).

Elements of the natural world, underpin Daniel Grimley's considerations of Sibelius's late style, particularly in relation to contemplations about landscape – a favourite trope for this author. Focusing on music for The Tempest (1926), itself seen as something of a release for a composer wrestling with the problems of symphonic writing, Grimley's conclusions are telling. ‘We are shaped by the meteorological environment just as much as we seek to control the elements around us. Sibelius seems to have shared precisely this perception in his recurrent crises of confidence and moments of self-doubt and creative angst, and in his repeated descriptions of the natural world and his fascination with landscape’ (pp. 220–21). Grimley's outline definitions of ‘late style’, in terms of both engaging with a past critical legacy and also a ‘new creative space’ (see p. 187), form part of a number of polarities explored here, especially in relation to modernism. Discussions of ‘The Rainbow’ (No. 23) reveal structural concerns that typify Sibelius's late style, notably in ‘the tension between such apparently intuitive structures and their carefully calibrated musical design’; this he clearly identifies as being one of Sibelius's most powerfully modernist characteristics (p. 210).

Musical design and ideas about architecture emerge from comparative studies of Sibelius and Alvar Aalto in Sarah Menin's essay, which is built on the structural pillars of two Finnish pavilions: one at the 1900 Paris World's Fair and the other, some 40 years later, at the New York World's Fair. Each occurred at historically significant moments for Finland, the first with regard to Finland's cultural distance from Russia (leading to political independence in 1917) and the second in relation to Soviet intentions to annex Finnish territory in 1939. Aalto's architectural scheme for the New York Pavilion and Sibelius's compositional process are brought into close relationship: ‘both the pavilion and Tapiola became experiences of mediation: the phenomenological evocation of a space within which one may access a personal (inner) reality or gain an externalised representation of Finland’ (p. 250).

Architectural analogies figure predominantly in the final essay of the volume, by Leon Botstein, ‘Old Masters: Jean Sibelius and Richard Strauss in the Twentieth Century’. In plotting the divergent creative paths of these two contemporaries (born a mere 18 months apart), distinctions between a strong visual element within Sibelius's music, in contrast to the linguistic parallels evident in Strauss, come to the fore. Issues of organicism and nature that inform turn-of-the-century architecture in both Finland and America find something of a corollary in Sibelius's musical form as ‘sounding visual shapes and structures’ (p. 272). More specifically, the powerfully simple architectural work of Eliel Saarinen in Finland and that of the American Frank Lloyd Wright (with his ‘organic simplicity’) are evoked as offering meaningful analogies with Sibelius, as in Tapiola ‘where music transforms one's sense of time as conventionally defined’ (p. 273).

Transforming our conventional sense of time is a feature of Sibelius's musical modernism that has been appreciated and documented by a number of scholars writing elsewhere, and a strong body of supporting evidence has been amassed to date. Yet a persistent theme of Jean Sibelius and His World is how still to define this particular brand of modernism that seemingly remains as elusive as ever, resulting in a number of contradictory positions and a degree of semantic posturing. While contradiction may be stimulating, it can undermine the underlying conviction of such adopted positions. Indeed, the reader may feel that this collection of essays is really a miscellany that tries to be all-embracing, rather than a focused symposium that offers a more profound logic. Taken as a whole, the book perhaps does not assemble the sense of continuity from its rich variety of ideas that we might have wished for. Its succession of snapshots certainly reveals the trends and anxieties (indeed the fads and fancies) of current musicological pre-occupations – but ultimately this may tell us rather more about our world than that of Sibelius.