Жан Сибелиус симфониясының жоғалған нұсқасы

Abandoned symphony by Jean Sibelius

The Symphony No. 8, JS 190, was the final major compositional project of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, occupying him intermittently from the mid 1920s until around 1938, though he never published it. During this time Sibelius was at the peak of his fame, a national figure in his native Finland and a composer of international stature. A fair copy of at least the first movement was made, but how much of the Eighth Symphony was completed is unknown. Sibelius repeatedly refused to release it for performance, though he continued to assert that he was working on it even after he had, according to later reports from his family, burned the score and associated material, probably in 1945. Much of Sibelius's reputation, during his lifetime and subsequently, derived from his work as a symphonist. His Seventh Symphony of 1924 has been widely recognised as a landmark in the development of symphonic form, and at the time there was no reason to suppose that the flow of innovative orchestral works would not continue. However, after the symphonic poem Tapiola, completed in 1926, his output was confined to relatively minor pieces and revisions to earlier works. During the 1930s the Eighth Symphony's premiere was promised to Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra on several occasions, but as each scheduled date approached Sibelius demurred, claiming that the work was not ready for performance. Similar promises made to the British conductor Basil Cameron and to the Finnish Georg Schnéevoigt likewise proved illusory. It is thought that Sibelius's perfectionism and exalted reputation prevented him ever completing the symphony to his satisfaction; he wanted it to be even better than his Seventh. After Sibelius's death in 1957, news of the Eighth Symphony's destruction was made public, and it was assumed that the work had disappeared forever. But in the 1990s, when the composer's many notebooks and sketches were being catalogued, scholars first raised the possibility that fragments of the music for the lost symphony might have survived. Since then, several short manuscript sketches have been tentatively identified with the Eighth, three of which (comprising less than three minutes of music) were recorded by the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra in 2011. While a few musicologists have speculated that, if further fragments can be identified, it may be possible to reconstruct the entire work, others have suggested that this is unlikely given the ambiguity of the extant material. The propriety of publicly performing music that Sibelius himself had rejected has also been questioned.

Jean Sibelius was born in 1865 in Finland, since 1809 an autonomous grand duchy within the Russian Empire having earlier been under Swedish control for many centuries. The country remained divided between a culturally dominant Swedish speaking minority, to which the Sibelius family belonged, and a more nationalistically minded Finnish speaking, or "Fennoman" majority. In about 1889 Sibelius met his future wife, Aino Järnefelt, who came from a staunch Fennoman family. Sibelius's association with the Järnefelts helped to awaken and develop his own nationalism; in 1892, the year of his marriage to Aino, he completed his first overtly nationalistic work, the symphonic suite Kullervo. Through the 1890s, as Russian control over the duchy grew increasingly oppressive, Sibelius produced a series of works reflecting Finnish resistance to foreign rule, culminating in the tone poem Finlandia. Sibelius's national stature was recognised in 1897 when he was awarded a state pension to enable him to spend more time composing. In 1904 he and Aino settled in Ainola, a country residence he built on the shores of Lake Tuusula in Järvenpää, where they lived for the remainder of their lives. Although life at Ainola was not always calm and carefree—Sibelius was often in debt and prone to bouts of heavy drinking—he managed over the following 20 years to produce a large output of orchestral works, chamber music, piano pieces and songs, as well as lighter music. His popularity spread across Europe to the United States where, during a triumphant tour in 1914, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Yale University. At home his status was such that his 50th birthday celebrations in 1915 were a national event, the centrepiece of which was the Helsinki premiere of his Fifth Symphony. By the mid 1920s Sibelius had acquired the status of a living national monument and was the principal cultural ambassador of his country, independent since 1917. According to his biographer Guy Rickards, he invested "his most crucial inspiration" into the seven symphonies he composed between 1898 and 1924. The Sibelius scholar James Hepokoski considers the compact, single movement Seventh Symphony, which Sibelius completed in 1924, to be the composer's most remarkable symphonic achievement, "the consummate realization of his late style rethinking of form".

The first reference to the Eighth Symphony in Sibelius's diary is an undated entry from September 1926: "I offered to create something for America." However, some of the initial ideas for the new symphony were almost certainly set down earlier, since it was Sibelius's compositional habit to set aside themes and motifs for use in later projects. Thus, one of the extant sketches for his Seventh Symphony, on which he was engaged in 1923–24, contains a ringed motif marked "VIII". By the autumn of 1927 Sibelius was able to inform the New York Times music critic Olin Downes—one of his greatest admirers—that he had set down two movements of the Eighth on paper and had composed the rest in his head. Early in 1928 Sibelius made one of his regular visits to Berlin, to imbibe the city's musical life and to compose. He sent positive work in progress reports to Aino: the symphony, he said, will be "wonderful". In December 1928, however, when his Danish publisher Wilhelm Hansen asked him how the work was developing, Sibelius was less forthcoming; the symphony existed, he said, only in his head. Thereafter Sibelius's reports of the symphony's progress became equivocal, sometimes contradictory, and difficult to follow. In the summer of 1931 Sibelius told Downes that not only was the Eighth Symphony almost ready for the printers, he also had several other new works pending. Thus encouraged, in December 1931 Koussevitzky used the Boston Evening Transcript to announce the work for the orchestra's 1931–32 season. This brought a swift telegram from Sibelius, to the effect that the symphony would not, after all, be ready for that season. These arrangements were, however, subject to the illusory Boston premiere, and thus were stillborn. During his procrastinations with Koussevitzky, Sibelius continued to work on the symphony. In 1931 he again spent time in Berlin, writing to Aino in May 1931 that "the symphony is advancing with rapid strides". Progress was interrupted by illness, but towards the end of the year Sibelius was confidently asserting that "I am writing my eighth symphony and I am full of youth. How can this be explained?" In May 1933, as he continued to deny Koussevitzky, Sibelius wrote in his diary that he was deeply immersed in composition: "It is as if I had come home  I'm taking everything in another way, more deeply. A gypsy within me. Romantic." Various reports appeared to confirm that the symphony's release was imminent. The Finnish composer Leevi Madetoja mentioned in 1934 that the work was virtually complete; an article by the Swedish journalist Kurt Nordfors indicated that two movements were complete and the rest sketched out. However, when The Timess correspondent asked for details of the work's progress Sibelius became irritated. He was furious when Downes continued to pester him for information, on one occasion shouting "Ich kann nicht!" ("I cannot!"). A receipt found among Sibelius's papers refers to a "Symphonie" being bound by the firm of Weilin & Göös in August 1938. While it is not established that this transaction related to the Eighth, the Sibelius scholar Kari Kilpeläinen points out that none of the earlier symphony scores carry the unnumbered heading "Symphonie", and asks: "Could he have omitted the number to prevent news of the now completed Eighth from spreading? Or did he not give the work a number at all, because he was not satisfied with it?"

Back in Ainola, Sibelius busied himself by making new arrangements of old songs. However, his mind returned frequently to the now apparently moribund symphony. In February 1943 he told his secretary, Santeri Levas, that he hoped to complete a "great work" before he died, but blamed the war for his inability to make progress: "I cannot sleep at nights when I think about it." Sibelius and Aino together burned a large number of the composer's manuscripts on the stove in the dining room at Ainola. There is no record of what was burned; while most commentators assume that the Eighth Symphony was among the works destroyed, Kilpeläinen observes that there had been at least two manuscripts of the work—the original and Voigt's copy—as well as sketches and fragments of earlier versions. It is possible, says Kilpeläinen, that Sibelius may not have burned them all. The most optimistic interpretation of his action, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer's music critic David Patrick Stearns, is that he got rid of old drafts of the symphony to clear his mind for a fresh start. As late as 1953 he told his secretary Levas that he was working on the symphony "in his mind"; only in 1954 did he admit, in a letter to the widow of his friend Adolf Paul, that it would never be completed. Sibelius died on 20 September 1957; the next day his daughter Eva Paloheimo announced publicly that the Eighth Symphony did not exist. The burning of the manuscript became generally known later, when Aino revealed the fact to the composer's biographer Erik W. Tawaststjerna. Critics and commentators have pondered the reasons why Sibelius finally abandoned the symphony. Throughout his life he was prone to depression and often suffered crises of self confidence. Alex Ross, in The New Yorker, quotes an entry from the composer's 1927 diary, when the Eighth Symphony was allegedly under way:

"This loneliness is driving me crazy To be able to live in the first place, I must have alcohol. Wine or whisky. That's the matter. Abused, alone, and all my real friends are dead. My current prestige here at home is rock bottom. Impossible to work. If only there were a solution." Writers have pointed to the hand tremor that made writing difficult and to the alcoholism that afflicted him at numerous stages of his life. The historian Mark McKenna agrees that Sibelius became stifled by a combination of perfectionism and increasing self doubt. The myth, sustained for more than 15 years, that Sibelius was still working on the symphony was, according to McKenna, a deliberate fiction: "To admit that he had stopped completely would be to admit the unthinkable—that he was no longer a composer". René Leibowitz, a proponent of the music of Arnold Schoenberg, published a pamphlet describing Sibelius as "the worst composer in the world"; others dismissed him as irrelevant in what was perceived for a time as an irresistible movement towards atonality. This climate diminished curiosity about the existence of material from a possible Sibelius Eighth, until late in the 20th century, when critical interest in the composer revived. In 1995 Kilpeläinen, who had published a survey of the Sibelius manuscripts held in the Helsinki University Library, wrote that all that could definitely be connected to the Eighth Symphony were a single page from a draft score and the ringed melody fragment marked "VIII" within the Seventh Symphony sketches. He added, however, that the library contained further Sibelius sketches from the late 1920s and early 1930s, some of which are akin to the ringed fragment and which could conceivably have been intended for the Eighth Symphony. Kilpeläinen also revealed that "[j]ust recently various documents have come to light which no one dreamt even existed. Maybe there are still some clues to the 8th Symphony hidden away and just waiting for some scholar to discover them." Despite his reservations, in October 2011 Virtanen cooperated with another scholar, Vesa Sirén, to prepare three of the more developed fragments for performance. The sketches were copied and tidied, but nothing not written by Sibelius was added to the material. Permission from the Sibelius Rights Holders was secured, and John Storgårds, chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic, agreed to play and record these excerpts at the orchestra's rehearsal session on 30 October 2011. The pieces comprise an opening segment of about a minute's duration, an eight second fragment that might be part of a scherzo, and a final scrap of orchestral music again lasting roughly a minute. Sirén describes the music as "strange, powerful, and with daring, spicy harmonies—a step into the new even after Tapiola and the music for The Tempest". Stearns gives a more detailed insight: "The first excerpt is classic Sibelian announcement of a first movement. There's a genteel orchestral thunderclap that throws open the door to a harmonic world that is Sibelius' alone, but has strange dissonances unlike any other work. Another glimpse sounds like the beginning of a scherzo, surprisingly spring like with a buoyant flute solo. Another snippet has a classic Sibelian bassoon solo, the sort that speaks of primal things and goes to a dark, wintry underworld."

Although only the first movement, copied by Voigt, is fully accepted as having been completed, the intended scale and general character of the Eighth Symphony may be inferred from several sources. Sibelius's correspondence with Voigt and with his binders, in 1933 and 1938 respectively, indicates the possibility of a notably large scale work. From the available fragments of music, both Virtanen and Andrew Mellor of Gramophone detect hints of Tapiola, particularly in the first of the three extracts.