Scored for solo voices, male chorus and orchestra, this monumental five-movement canvass is part symphony, part tone-poem, part dramatic cantata-the third movement, ‘Kullervo and his sister’, ends in something close to an operatic scena. The first work Sibelius actually called a ‘symphony’, Kullervo (1892), is a gigantic hybrid, its embrace almost as wide as in Mahler’s contemporary Resurrection Symphony. Sibelius on the other hand had recently finished his Third Symphony, barely a third of the length of Mahler’s Eighth, using a small, severely classical orchestra-no words, no descriptive programme, only his typically energetic and imaginative musical logic to sustain interest.īut go back to the beginning of Sibelius’s career and things look very different. This so-called ‘Symphony of a Thousand’, for vast vocal and colour-enhanced orchestral forces, begins with an invocation to the Holy Spirit and ends with Goethe’s Faust, embodiment of striving humanity, presented at the throne the Queen of Heaven. Mahler had just completed his most extravagant, ambitious symphony, No 8. Firstly, we have to remember the date of that meeting: 1907: at this point the two composers couldn’t have been much further apart in terms of their ideals. The contrast seems dazzlingly clear: Mahler is the self-confessed magpie genius, drawing everything he sees and hears into his teeming, visionary symphonic collages Sibelius is the ruthlessly abstract organic logician, in pursuit of ever-greater ‘inner connection’. Sibelius remarked that he ‘admired its severity and style and the profound logic that created an inner connection between the motifs.’ Mahler disagreed strongly: ‘No, the symphony must be like the world.
On a walk together they discussed the essence of the symphony. In 1907 the two men met in Helsinki during one of Mahler’s conducting tours. There is an oft-repeated story about Jean Sibelius and his great contemporary Gustav Mahler.
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