“Aha!” you might think, “it is a sonata allegro, and we’ve just had the exposition! Lucky us, we know where this is going!” Over a long D pedal, Sibelius unfolds a passionate melody, all in stepwise motion in thirds, made up of a short-long-short rhythmic pattern taken from the main theme and the wasp theme. Nevertheless, the key area and the contrast with the first section tell us this is probably the arrival at the second thematic area of a sonata allegro form.įinally, we arrive at our first real fortissimo on a D7 chord- all well and good if you’ve started to think the symphony is in G major, but a more problematic harmonic region to have arrived in starting in Eb major. This theme, which constantly swarms around the current tonic chord by half-steps like wasps (this impression of a swarming quality is reinforced by the accompaniment in the strings) quickly grows in intensity until it abruptly shifts gears at figure D to a passage which is essentially a chorale with a melody moving stepwise in thirds, but with the strings playing slightly ahead of everyone else. However, the new theme is basically an inversion of the original horn theme, instead of going up a fourth then a second as the horn did with a long-short rhythm, he goes down a fourth and then a second with a short-long rhythm.
#Sibelius 5 symphony ending full#
The “tail” theme grows longer and longer until it becomes a full bar in length, then the music makes a notable shift to G major (a slightly weird move- C minor would have been more expected, or Bb major) and what seems like a new theme. Gradually the tail becomes a new theme, but a new theme made of parallel thirds moving stepwise. That’s all he’s going to need, and that’s all Brahms would have needed to write a symphonic first movement, but Sibelius’ approach to form is much more radical than that of Brahms.Īs Sibelius repeats his primary progression over the next several bars, the woodwind fragment of the horn theme begins to evolve gradually, as it grows a little “tail” on the end. In the third bar, he already begins to develop his ideas, giving repeated fragments of the initial melody to the flutes, oboes and clarinets while introducing two new ideas- a countermelody in the bassoons and horns mostly made of parallel thirds moving stepwise and a repeated chord progression: F- 4/2 to Eb Major, or ii7 to I. The opening is deceptively simple- a tonic chord in six-four position (as musicologist Michael Steinberg says, it just screams out “Sibelius Five!”), and a simple melody made up of alternating long and short notes (crotchets and quavers) and large and small intervals (fourths and seconds). Just trying to answer that question can get you a long way towards understanding how Sibelius is approaching form and motivic development by this point in his development as a composer. There is a big, simple question every conductor and analyst has to ask themselves about the Fifth Symphony, and that question is- “how many movements are there in this symphony?” Is it four? Three? Two? Hmmm.
Sibelius’ constant evolution of thematic ideas forces him to abandon the very idea of recapitulation in the Fifth Symphony, trading closure for culmination. He said of the Fifth that it was “in a new form… the whole, if I may say so, a spirited intensification to the end.” creating a pivotal structural crisis (moving away from the tonic for the second theme of a sonata allegro movement), exploring the ramifications of that crisis (the development) then solving it (by staying in or strengthening the tonic in the recapitulation). In a work like the Fifth Symphony, Sibelius had moved away forever from the Brahmsian, or better yet Beethovenian, idea of formal closure– i.e. However, where Brahms’ motivic development is always carefully ensconced in classical forms, Sibelius takes Brahms’ approach one step farther, and makes the very musical form itself a manifestation of the development of the material. Perhaps only Brahms is equally rigorous in his constant development of motivic cells. It is well known that Sibelius’ approach to symphonic composition was intensely organic- in his mature music everything in a given piece grows from the same little bit of musical DNA. You’ll want to have a score of the piece handy while working through this essay.
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