And even works
like the "Finlandia" and "Karelia" overtures, for all their generosity
of intention, for all their suggestion of peasant voices lifted in song,
disappoint because of the substitution of a popular lyricism, a certain
easy sweetness, for the high poetry one might have anticipated.
And yet, one has but to turn to the symphonies of Sibelius to encounter
music of another intensity, and gauge the richness of response that, at
times, it is given him to make. It is as if the very dignity and
grandeur of the medium itself sets him free. Just as the form of the
concerto seems to have given his sense of the violin a play apparently
denied it by the smaller mediums, so these larger orchestral forms seem
to have liberated his imagination, his orchestral genius, and made him
poet of his folk indeed. His personal quality, spread more thinly in his
songs and tone-poems, is essentialized and developed in these other
works. The symphonies themselves are in a sense the stages of the
essentialization. In the first of them his language emerges, to an
extent imparting its unmistakable coloration to a matter perhaps not
entirely distinguished. There is a looseness and lushness, a romanticism
and balladry, in the work, that is not quite characteristic.
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