Music has forever been a movement "up to nature," and
Schoenberg's motto is but the precision of a motive that has governed
all composers. But Sibelius has written music that seems to come as the
very answer to the call, and to be the North indeed.
Such a discovery of nature was necessarily a part of his
self-revelation. For Sibelius is essentially the Norseman. For all his
personal accomplishment, his cultural position, he is still the Finnish
peasant, preserving intact within himself the racial inheritance. Other
musicians, having found life still a grim brief welter of bloody combats
and the straining of high, unyielding hearts and the falling of sure
inalienable doom, have fancied themselves the successors of the Skalds,
and dreamt themselves within the gray primeval North. But, in the
presence of Sibelius, they seem only too evidently men of a gentler,
later generation. Beside his, their music appears swathed in romantic
glamour. For there are times when he comes into the concert-room like
some man of a former age, like some spare, knotted barbarian from the
world of the sagas. There are times when he comes amongst us like one
who might quite conceivably have been comrade to pelted warriors who
fought with clubs and hammers, like one who might have beaten out a
rude music by black, smoking hearthsides quite as readily as made
tone-poems for the modern concert-room.
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