About this Piece

While this work in E minor is the first of Sibelius’ numbered symphonies, it was preceded in his oeuvre by Kullervo (1892), a vast cantata-symphony employing vocal soloists, a male chorus, and a large orchestra. All those remarks about “youthful self-indulgence” that were once employed to describe the yearning E-minor Symphony are more appropriately applied to Kullervo. In comparison, the canonic First Symphony is a relatively spare creation, in construction at any rate—notwithstanding its heart-on-sleeve emotionalism.

By 1899 Sibelius had added two more to his collection of tautly dramatic, masterful tone poems—En Saga and Lemminkäinen, the latter, like Kullervo, illustrating episodes from the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic.

With the appearance of the E-minor Symphony that year (the composer-led premiere took place in Helsinki on April 26, 1899), it became clear that the 33-year-old Sibelius had in the seven years since writing Kullervo learned to order his materials without a corresponding loss in vitality.

Written in the traditional four-movement structure of the Romantic symphony, the First indicates an affection for Tchaikovsky’s melos, with touches of the more robust, nationalistic style of Alexander Borodin—when it is not being wholly itself. And that self is asserted at the outset: The long, brooding clarinet solo sounds like no one but the fabulous Finn and leads without obvious transition into the boldly dramatic opening theme. The slow movement and the cymbals-inflected finale are where Tchaikovsky is most apparent, but the third movement is a singular and thrilling creation, quite on a level with the hammering scherzos of Bruckner.

Although the First Symphony was well-received at its debut, another work on the program aroused the greatest enthusiasm: a now-forgotten choral piece called Song of the Athenians that sent as clear a nationalist message to its audience as did Verdi’s chorus “Va, pensiero” from his opera Nabucco to those attending its premiere in Austrian-occupied Lombardy a half-century earlier. Sibelius’ work represented a protest against Tsar Nicholas II’s recent curtailing of constitutional rights in Finland, a putatively autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire, which was becoming increasingly restive under the harsh rule of its Russian governors.

The symphony, too, made its mark at home and brought the composer’s name to the attention of the world when it was performed during the Helsinki Orchestra’s first international tour shortly after the Finnish premiere. The E-minor Symphony was heard—in each instance under the composer’s direction—in Stockholm, Christiania (as Oslo was then called), Hamburg, Amsterdam, and at the 1900 Paris World Exhibition. —Herbert Glass