Sibelius as a nineteenth-century and post-nineteenth-century composer

Sibelius's historical position is tricky to define. He continued the tradition of harmonic tonality well into the 1920s, but in a way that was far removed from the neo-tonalities of Stravinsky, Hindemith or Les Six. When reading historical accounts of Sibelius's music, it is easy to recognise a sense of embarrassment with regard to Sibelius's work. He is sometimes compared with Beethoven, and sometimes included in the same category as modernist composers such as Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf, and Max Reger. The comparison with Strauss is not an implausible one. Both composers approached atonality around 1910: Strauss in Salome (1903/1905) and Elektra (1909) and Sibelius in his Fourth Symphony (1911) and Luonnotar (1912). Neither composer, however, followed Schoenberg's line of development, but turned instead to a more tonal musical style. For Strauss the turning point was Der Rosenkavalier (1911), and for Sibelius The Oceanides (1914) and the Fifth Symphony (1914–19). Thus, the idea of placing Sibelius in the same historical category as Mahler and Strauss can be defended from the point of view of technical musical details such as tonality, but if ideological and cultural factors are considered, a more elastic categorisation is needed.