This paper will complicate our understanding of the Symposium period by arguing that Sibelius was, in Gallen-Kallela’s art, the supreme exemplar of a particular kind of landscape consumption and utilization in which the painter also participated.
While there is an element of truth to this narrative, it does not account adequately for some of the most important values that linked their processes in the early 1890s, including a new veneration of folk culture and their kindred turn to natural imagery. What accounts there have been of this intriguing episode in the history of musical-artistic exchange traditionally claim that the Symposium years saw Gallen-Kallela’s decisive shift from Realism to Symbolism in the service of nationalist ideology and a parallel move from program music to less overtly “representational” work by Sibelius. This period gave rise to many of their best-known creations, including Sibelius’s choral symphony Kullervo and his Lemminkäinen Suite as well as Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s iconic The Great Black Woodpecker (Wilderness) and his triptych The Aino Myth, among others.
As core participants in a smaller group of young artist-intellectuals that grandiosely called itself “the Symposium,” Gallen-Kallela and Sibelius exchanged ideas about art, music, and nature that shaped both of their work. In a relationship with many turns, the short window from 1891, when Sibelius first came into the orbit of the cultural-nationalist group Nuori Suomi, or Young Finland, of which Gallen-Kallela was a founder-member, until Gallen-Kallela left for Berlin in December of 1894, saw especially regular and productive dialogue between the two men.
#Sibelius 5 showing song range free#
Both men were born to the Swedish-speaking ruling classes of the day and participated in larger currents of the period by adopting the Finnish language and making a deliberate turn to the landscape for source material that they perceived to be free from the taint of centuries of foreign rule. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, the Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela and composer Jean Sibelius enjoyed a complex creative friendship that led each to respond to the other’s work in their medium of choice.
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