Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 43 

Jean Sibelius

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As the curtain rang down on the nineteenth century, Sibelius produced his Symphony No. 1 - the first of seven powerfully individualistic works that, for all their ties to the Romantic tradition, defy categorization. Sibelius always borrowed from tradition whatever suited him, and no more. He had already made his debut as an orchestral composer in 1892 with a gigantic tone poem, Kullervo, which appeared at the time of the most feverish Finnish nationalism. Exactly ten years later he delivered a Second Symphony, first performed under his direction at Helsinki on March 3, 1902. With this work, the small Northern country, that struggled so hard for freedom from Russian domination, announced a major symphonist of its own. Though Sibelius always repudiated any attempts to attach programs to his symphonies, the Finns have always found the awakening of national feelings in the Symphony No. 2, referring to it as "the patriotic symphony." It is often played on state occasions.

Born into the idyllic world of the mid-nineteenth century, Sibelius lived so long into the twentieth that he might have been dwelling on a different planet. He grew up in the era of the horse cart, when the first railways were being laid across Finland; with his maturity came the automobile, and by the time he died in 1957 … jet travel had arrived. He belongs to the age of Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, Brahms and Mahler, and yet by the time of his passing the avant-garde currents of the century were running strong. In the meantime, Sibelius, who had become something of a national monument, led a quiet, outwardly uninterrupted life. Travels were few, among them a visit to America in 1914, when he briefly taught at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. In the period between the First and Second Symphonies-right at the turn of the century-Sibelius began to broaden his outlook. At the close of 1900, he traveled to Italy by way of Germany, where he was introduced to Dvorak and Richard Strauss. Settling at Rapallo, Italy; in the spring of 1901, he began the Second Symphony. He had been composing for the piano, but he felt lost, he wrote to his brother that winter. "Let's see how the symphonies go. Barking, of course. But perhaps also something good." The new work was ready in less than a year.

Sibelius commentators have exaggerated the imprint of the Italian landscape on this symphony, finding in it a sunny radiance that may escape our ears. True, it is his most pastoral work, but those suggestions in the first movement give way to high drama, and with the finale, as the Finish conductor Simon Parmet has remarked, it culminates in music of "frozen beauty and grandeur.  Geographical associations are risky, and to detect anything but the granitic Northern voice in this sonorous score is like misreading a map. The Sibelian tone is unmistakable, the brass choir sounding mightier than the sum of its rather modest parts (with only an extra trumpet and a tuba). As for the melodies, which Sibelius seems to pluck from the air, some have been mistaken for folk tunes. The composer himself, when he first heard the ancient Finnish tunes sung to the national epic, the Kalevala, was astonished at how closely their contours resembled his own intuitive themes. No, if landscape associations are justified, they have to be Northern ones, and those who know the Arrowhead and Boundary Waters of our wilderness-to the eye, so like the pristine loveliness of his country—will feel at home with any images conjured up by these strains.

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Excerpted from notes written by Mary Ann Feldman for Minnesota Orchestra