The Enigma Code

Sibelius’s Sixth Symphony has its passionate admirers, but they are not a large lot. Most listeners come away from hearing it without being able to recall much anything except for the quietly plangent minor chords and the Palestrina-like homophonies of its opening and closing moments. Audiences that I performed it for in Montreal and Pittsburgh last season seemed puzzled by it. Perhaps London audiences, who know and love their Sibelius, will react differently on Sunday when we do it with the LSO at the Barbican Theater.

Until I got serious and really learned the piece last year, I could at best say I “recognized” Sibelius Six but never had a handle on it. It is among the most elusive pieces ever written. Much is made of its Dorian modality, and some writers correctly point out the dubious habit of saying the work is “in D minor”, when at best we ought to say, as Lou Harrison did of one of his symphonies, that it is “on D” rather than “in D”.

But what no one I know has ever mentioned is how critical another chord is in this symphony—the half-diminished seventh (i.e. your fabled “Tristan chord”). It’s the composer’s special way of integrating the melancholy, resigned purity of the Dorian mode with the more emotionally dangerous and mercurial half-diminished chord that gives all late works of Sibelius their eerie moodiness. That is the case with the Seventh Symphony and also with the final tone poem, that most intractable of all his pieces, “Tapiola.”

Arvo Pärt makes use of similar melancholy-saturated minor modes, but it’s Sibelius’s peculiar genius of mixing his with the more chromatically ambiguous diminished triads that makes his music both more evocative and less expressively monochrome.

The Sixth Symphony opens with a simple, sustained counterpoint for strings alone. The first notes are played by the second violins in divisi, marked mezzo forte. That dynamic itself presages the many interpretive problems lying ahead. It would be easier if it were pianissimo or forte—no problem there. But MEZZO forte is so…blegh! What does he mean? And so much of the following music lies in that “mezzo” zone, including the tempi. The first movement is “Allegro molto moderato,” (or “lively but only VERY moderately so). Many of the markings in this symphony are “poco,” or “moderato,” or “mezzo” this or “mezzo” that. The feeling is not unlike visiting a home where everyone talks in a grave, hushed whisper.

The second movement is especially enigmatic in its tempo indication: “Allegretto moderato.” That would be, according to the very few Italian dictionaries that even provide a definition of “allegretto,” “faster than andante, but not as fast as allegro, and moderately so.”

Sibelius offers no metronome markings, so it’s a task for the conductor to intuit the right tempi from the actual nature of the musical ideas. Probably no other work of Sibelius is open to such a diversity of interpretations. Some conductors think they can solve the problems by breezing through the piece at a brisk clip, in other words your by now familar Stairmaster uptempo “historically informed” triple-shot latte way of approaching everything. Such a tactic doesn’t help in this case.

I don’t think it’s a perfect work by any stretch of the imagination. The two inner movements both suffer from strangely incomplete formal designs. The second movement is bizarrely asymmetrical, with a first part given over to a set of variations on the same half-diminished chord/minor triad dichotomy we encounter in the first movement. This goes along for quite a spell, a frozen landscape with only occasional moments of the sun breaking through.

Then follows that magical passage of hushed oscillating triad semiquavers in the violins, interrupted by occasional bird-like fragments in the woodwinds. Finding the right tempo for this passage is essential, but Sibelius makes it difficult to choose, as he marks each 16th note in the strings with a dash over it—usually indicating a longer bow stroke and hence a slower tempo. But it’s also flautando and “poco con moto.” Colin Davis, in a recording with the London Symphony treats the entire movement as a swift allegretto. This means that when he reaches the “poco con moto” he has to go even faster. He also changes the dynamic from Sibelius’s “piano” to a super-hushed “pianissimo.” This indeed makes for a very evocative moment. The down side of this approach, however, is that the movement seems to end much too soon, and overall, we are left with a four-movement symphony with no slow movement. It’s a conundrum—perhaps requiring an Enigma Machine to sort out.

Slow movements are an interesting case study in Sibelius. The first two symphonies have stormy, Romantic slow movements. The Second Symphony in particular, with its hypercharged atmosphere and wrenching climaxes is worthy of a knockdown emotion-baring scene from “Long Days Journey into Night” or “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
The Fourth Symphony’s adagio is a study in bleak, black depression with moments of soaring, yearning lyricism that for me is among his best music. The Third, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies all seems to skirt the issue of a genuine “slow” movement, offering in their place a music with only a moderately ticking pulse. I am in fact slightly restless during the middle movement of the Fifth Symphony and find myself wishing the music shared a level of expressive depth that the outer movements have. But I’m sure anyone could easily explain Sibelius’s design here as providing a counterbalance to the great cathartic moments of the first and last movements.

In any case, so many of these puzzling issues seem to reach a grand solution in the Seventh Symphony, where a genuinely new form is invented. Seen from the prospective of the massively welded-together structure of the Seventh, the Sixth seems, at least from a formal point of view, like a work whose materials are packed into a the template of a four-movement design but that are in fact struggling to find a more radical means of organization, the solution to which wasn’t found til later. Why, after having gone to such an astonishing place in the Seventh, Sibelius could not write another symphony is one of the great mysteries of symphonic thought.