Jean Sibelius / The Swan of Tuonela

Music and myth converge in a haunting portrait of solitude.

After three years of living in the Twin Cities, I finally had the chance last month to experience the natural beauty of Minnesota's forested north, where cabin culture around its 10,000 lakes reigns supreme. After a summer plagued by triple-digit temperatures, extreme drought, and a steady stream of smoke from the Canadian wildfires, I longed for a week of quiet delights surrounded by a vast natural landscape.

My adopted home state didn't let me down. The cabin was quaint — just the right mix of rustic and modern, with a dock that served as the perfect spot for morning meditation, surrounded by lightly lapping waves tickling the shoreline. The air was crisp, the nighttime sky densely packed with stars, and on a hike through one of the area's many state parks, I laid eyes on leaves already taking on their golden autumnal glow. 

And then there was this view from the cabin's front porch:

Although the main objective for the week was a reprieve from searing city streets, I was also eager to experience the traditions of Nordic cabin life so beloved by Minnesotans — that same slice of pastoral living that fueled one of my favorite composers, Jean Sibelius.

The Finnish countryside served as an enormous point of inspiration for Sibelius. He grew up in a small town near Finland's southern coast, where the sight of cranes, geese, and swans soaring above nearby lakes sowed the seeds of his lifelong fascination with nature. Later in life, Sibelius and his family moved to a lakeside villa not far from the cultural capital of Helsinki, which they named Ainola (after Sibelius's wife, Aino). Easy access to nature was of paramount importance to Sibelius, whose biographer, Erik W. Tawaststjerna, wrote:

"Even by Nordic standards, Sibelius responded with exceptional intensity to the moods of nature and the changes in the seasons: He scanned the skies with his binoculars for the geese flying over the lake ice, listened to the screech of the cranes, and heard the cries of the curlew echo over the marshy grounds just below Ainola. He savoured the spring blossoms every bit as much as he did autumnal scents and colours."

Jean Sibelius and wife Aino read in the dining room at Ainola. Photo by Eric Sundström / WikiCommons

It was at Ainola that Sibelius composed many of the works frequently performed around the world today — the most enduring being his seven symphonies and numerous tone poems based on scenes from the Kalevala, Finland's national epic. Compiled and published three decades before Sibelius's birth, the 50 stories of the Kalevala served as evidence of the long cultural history of the Finnish people, who in the 19th century were eager to assert a national identity after a long period of cultural domination by Sweden and a tenuous relationship with Imperial Russia.

The Kalevala became an obsession for Sibelius, one that resulted in a four-decade quest to manifest in musical form its tales of gods and goddesses, heroes and knaves, magical realms and enchanted spirits. One of the composer's first major works exploring these epic tales, Lemminkäinen Suite: Four Legends from the Kalevala, recalls a quartet of scenes from the life of the roguish hero Lemminkäinen. 

After courting the maidens of his village, Lemminkäinen has chosen a bride. But he must complete three tasks before the marriage can take place. The last of those tasks: Murder the Swan of Tuonela, the solitary figure who guards the inky waters of the River of Death separating the land of the living from Tuonela, the land of the dead. Lemminkäinen fails in his mission. Just as he's aiming his bow and arrow at the Swan, he's shot by a herdsman who later chops the hero's body into pieces and submerges them in the river. (Luckily, Lemminkäinen's mother, fearing harm has come to her son, retrieves his body from the water and helps to realize his resurrection.)

Akseli Gallen-Kallela (Finnish, 1865–1931). Lemminkäinen's Mother, 1897. Tempera on canvas. Ateneum Art Museum, Antell Collections / The solitary Swan of Tuonela takes in the scene from the upper-left corner of the canvas.

The second movement of Sibelius's Lemminkäinen Suite is a rhapsodic portrait of the Swan, whose melancholy songs guide the souls of the recently deceased to Tuonela's shores. But rather than compose a realist, narrative-driven depiction of the scene, Sibelius instead writes a character piece suffused with a dark atmosphere familiar to the people of Finland, where parts of the country spend nearly two winter months cloaked in perpetual darkness. No need for costumes, lighting, or stagecraft — Sibelius needs only music to conjure his vivid vision of Tuonela.

In a truly hair-raising opening passage, Sibelius sets the scene by evoking the mists rising from the mythic black river. A single minor chord slowly ascends in spectral fashion, from the shadowy depths of the orchestra's cellos and basses to the icy sonorities of the muted violins. Throughout the work, Sibelius divides the string section, normally consisting of five lines of music, into as many as 17 individual parts that form an expanse of hazy sound. It's through this wall of orchestral vapor that the Swan first emerges, its voice intoned by the English horn.

A deeper cousin to the oboe's bright soprano, the English horn's alto is a burnished sound of incredible beauty, which Sibelius uses to move from hushed mourning to powerful moments of ecstasy and back again. Each verse of the Swan's melancholy song is separated by sighing melodies in the strings and ominous rumbles in the bass drum, a juxtaposition of mighty ancestral trees shivering in the icy winds while the earth below them trembles with fear.

A glimpse of heavenly moonlight momentarily illuminates the scene, with cascading figures in the harp bringing shimmer to the river's black waters as a quartet of hunting horns echo in a distant forest. But this radiance quickly recedes, making way for music of profound desolation. A throbbing, insistent drumbeat emerges in the low brass and timpani, summoning the slow procession of lost souls in search of eternal rest. Over this shattering pulse the string section — no longer divided into 17 distinct voices — now emerges as one unified line, singing a melody of grief and despair Sibelius dictates should be performed con gran suono, "with great sound." 

The Swan now takes up this grief-stricken melody, accompanied by a new orchestral texture. Below the English horn, a solo harp alternates between the minor chord introduced by the low brass and another chord of sinister dissonance, while the strings tremor using the wooden edges of their bows, an eerie quiver that heightens the music's intensity. And as the Swan's final phrase fades into silence, the figure that opened the work — those divided string lines rising from the depths of the orchestra — emerges once again as the scene fades to black. The Swan inches toward a distant horizon, continuing its solitary, eternal journey through the River of Death.

Sibelius would come to identify with Tuonela's lonely swan later in his life. Despite a thriving career and his stature as Finland's most beloved composer — his tone poem Finlandia became a national anthem following his country's independence from Russia in 1917 — Sibelius increasingly saw himself and his music as relics of a time gone by. His adherence to the ideals of Romanticism, the 19th-century artistic movement that championed nature, enlightenment, and extroverted expressions of emotion, had become passé by the late 1920s, replaced by the cerebral, mathematical approach to music that arose in Europe following the First World War. 

So beginning in 1929, Sibelius set aside his powers as a composer and embarked on a 28-year voyage of musical silence until his death in 1957 at the age of 91. A pair of orchestral suites derived from music he had composed for Shakespeare's The Tempest were the final creations Sibelius would release into the world. An Eighth Symphony he wrestled with for nearly 10 years never saw the light of day, the manuscript lost forever after Sibelius incinerated its pages in his dining room stove at Ainola.

Perhaps the pressure to constantly produce, to find an audience for his lush symphonies — which he called his "confessions of faith" — amidst the pointillistic modernism of Europe's avant-garde was too much for the composer to bear. He wrote in his diary: 

"Isolation and loneliness are driving me to despair. … Not everyone can be an 'innovating genius.' As a personality and an apparition from the woods, you will have your small, modest place." 

Like all artists, Sibelius wasn't an adequate judge of his work, and the bleak future he envisioned for his music would be proved wrong by the Finnish people. Instead of being relegated to a "small, modest place" in history, he became a national treasure: His visage printed on Finland's currency, a national monument erected to his legacy in Helsinki. Even the country's premier music conservatory bears his name today. 

But in Sibelius's mind, he remained, like the mythical Swan of his beloved Kalevala, a figure caught between two worlds. One can't help but see the woods around Ainola to which the composer retreated, literally and metaphorically, in the same vein as the Swan of Tuonela's solitary journeys across its dark river, surrounded by shivering trees and moonlit mists.

Sibelius on the 100 Finnish mark banknote | Photo © Suomen Pankki / WikiCommons

---

Take a listen …

When it comes to Sibelius's music, you can't go wrong with a recording from the Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä and the Lahti Symphony. Here, Vänskä expertly manifests The Swan of Tuonela's nocturnal atmosphere with a slower, steadier tempo than most conductors take, which to me only heightens the magic of the music. (And bravo to the orchestra's stellar English horn player, Jukka Hirvikangas.)

For those interested in watching a live performance of the work, be sure to check out this video from the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, featuring conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste and English hornist Michael Höfele.

---

I'd love to hear about your experience traversing the mists and darkness of Sibelius's Tuonela. Let me know in the comments.

And if you enjoyed your time here at Shades of Blue, how about tapping that little heart below? 👇🏼