The following year Sibelius was again travelling in Karelia acting as a guide to his friend, Rosa Newmarch, who later recalled Sibelius straining his to hear the pedal points in the roar of the rapids. The trip had other objectives. On his return, Sibelius wanted to develop his counterpoint, since "the harmony is largely dependent on the purely musical patterning, its polyphony." His observations contained many ideas on the need for harmonic continuity. Because the orchestra lacked the pedal of the piano, Sibelius wanted to compensate for this with skillful orchestration. Another phenomenon of nature, a storm, was needed to start the symphony.
In November 1910 he was writing the symphony while working on music for Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven, and although The Raven was never completed, its atmosphere had an effect on the Fourth symphony.
The symphony was performed for the first time on 3rd April 1911, in Helsinki. Its tone was both modern and introspective, and it confused the audience so much that the applause was subdued. "Evasive glances, shakes of the head, embarrassed or secretly ironic smiles. Not many came to the dressing room to deliver their congratulations," Aino Sibelius recollected later. The newspaper critics, too, were at a loss. "Everything was so strange," was how Heikki Klemetti described the atmosphere. In the subsequent years, audiences worldwide reacted similarly.
Yet Sibelius was pleased with the symphony and the public response to its first performance; after the first public performance he prepared it for publication. The fourth symphony is now recognized as a great masterpiece of the 20th century and one of Sibelius's most magnificent achievements. It was, after all, contemporary music of the utmost modernity, a work from which all traces of contrived artificiality had been eliminated.
The atmosphere of the work varies from joyfulness to austere expressionism. Every movement fades into silence. We are as far as we could be from the joyful finales of the second and third symphonies.
The fourth symphony truly has a shocking quality all its own, and the analytical approach turns into philosophizing, as if Sibelius were tearing into life's existential center, exposing the roots of existence, with nothing resembling any sort of consolation. Sibelius had felt close to death a few years earlier, before a tumor had been removed from his throat in an operation.
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Some of the insights about this symphony are quoted here chronologically: [it is interesting to see as the modern era progressed, critics (and particularly conductors!) have perceived the psychoanalytic nature of this symphony, as if the world at large were increasingly able to catch up with this composition]
"The motif of the symphony is a journey to the famous mountain Koli, which rises 252 meters above the level of Lake Pielisjà ¤rvi. [As regards the] magnificent connection which Sibelius has previously made with our people and its national epic and which has made him so strong and great, this bond is lacking in the fourth symphony." ---critic Karl Fredrik Wasenius in Hufvudstadsbladet, 1911
"The assumptions of the pseudonymous Bis concerning the program of my new symphony are incorrect. I guess that they have to do with the topographical report which I presented to a few friends on 1stApril."----Jean Sibelius in Hufvudstadsbladet, 1911
"The future will decide whether in the melodic structure of some the themes the composer has crossed the boundary that healthy natural musicality instinctively sets for the play of intervals in a melody." ----Heikki Klemetti, critic, 1911
"A declaration of war against that superficiality, admiration of outward devices, empty grandiloquence and overwhelming materialism which is swallowing up modern music."---Evert Katila, critic in the newspaper Uusi Suomi, 1911
"I feel as if entirely new worlds were now opening for Sibelius as a composer of symphonies, worlds which have not been shown to others and which he, with his astonishingly highly developed sense of color and melody, can see and describe to others."---Oskar Merikanto, critic in the newspaper Tampereen Sanomat, 1911
"We have very good reasons to call the style of the fourth symphony expressionism. This is because the line has a dominant position in the work. The fourth symphony exerts a healthy influence. It involves a quiet protest against all hollow impressionism, tasteless instrumentation and low naturalism.---Erik Furuhjelm, scholar, 1916
One early Finnish critic dubbed the work the Barkbrà ¶d symphony, referring to the famine in the previous century during which starving Scandinavians had had to eat bark bread to survive. ---Elmer Diktonius
According to one important Sibelius biographer: the Symphony reflects the psychoanalytical and introspective era when Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson stressed the meaning of the unconscious, and he calls the Fourth Symphony "one of the most remarkable documents of the psychoanalytical era. ---Erik W. Tawaststjerna
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