The German Expressionists

The cultural ties between Germany and Finland had been strong ever since the time of the Reformation. Mikael Agricola studied theology in Wittenberg in the sixteenth century, and Leipzig and Berlin had been natural educational destinations for Finnish musicians throughout the nineteenth century. Sibelius’s years abroad in Berlin (1889–90) and Vienna (1890–91) laid the foundation for his lifelong interest in German culture. German was Sibelius’s first “foreign” language and Germany was the country he visited most frequently during his life. His early friends Ferruccio Busoni and Adolf Paul resided in Berlin, and he used every opportunity to visit them and follow the concert life of the big city. Between 1889 and 1931 Sibelius visited Berlin thirty-six times.

In his ambitions to promote his international career and with the help of his friends Busoni and Paul, Sibelius established relationships with the leading German publishing houses, Lienau and, above all, Breitkopf & Härtel, in Leipzig. The monstruous inflation that followed the war years of 1914–18, and fraught attitudes toward the defeated nation, created disturbance in his connections to Germany. A portion of Sibelius’s slowly accumulating royalties was almost nullified, and Sibelius turned to other publishers.

Recent scholars have scrutinized Sibelius’s relationship to Nazi Germany, mainly because of his nomination to the Reichsmusikkammer and his decoration with the Goethe Medal. Without any taint of entartete Kunst (degenerate art), Sibelius’s persona (at least the official side) perfectly fit the ideal of the healthy, strong and nature-loving musician from the North, an early image created by Walter Niemann. In relation to the Third Reich, Sibelius acted with a similar balance as he had done in Finland’s domestic language and political issues. He behaved discreetly and diplomatically: he neither resisted nominations nor returned medals, but he never became an active participant in the Third Reich’s organizations.

Sibelius set nine texts in German. His setting of Ohqvist’s Segelfahrt was discussed in the previous chapter. Sibelius’s most ambitious endeavor in setting German lyrics was op. 50; this had been the initiative of the publisher Robert Lienau, who asked the composer to write songs in German for the European market, and sent him an anthology, Deutsche Lyrik seit Liliencron (German Poetry since Liliencron), from which to choose texts.