A composer whose work is no longer performed or, worse still, is heard only in one particular way disappears beneath the views of later generations, without being able to change the perspective on his own work. For anyone who loves Western classical music, Finlandia, Sibelius’s symphonic poem about his native country, is an essential work. Not only as a composition, but also as an indispensable starting point for understanding Sibelius (1865–1957), a task that every musician wishing to perform his music must undertake. One might even say that this understanding depends on how fully we recognise the connection between Finlandia and the great symphony of Sibelius’s life story.
In a small, seemingly insignificant corner of this life symphony lies a colourful detail: Jean Sibelius was an organist. His friend, the Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela, had an organ in his studio, on which Sibelius often improvised. The two artists were undoubtedly united by the same idea: the symphony of their nation’s freedom and of the culture of its people.
It is the performing musician’s responsibility to do justice to the identity of a composition, especially when, as I do, he plays transcriptions of orchestral works on the organ. This is precisely why this little-known aspect of Sibelius matters: he wrote several organ works, making it somewhat easier to understand how he wanted the instrument to sound. Consider, for example, his Trauermusik (Op. 113) or Die Musiken (Op. 113).
It is also particularly interesting in this context that Sibelius expressly welcomed Herbert Austin Fricker’s (1868–1943) organ transcription of Finlandia (Op. 26). Fricker was then a well-known composer, organist and conductor in England and America. Making organ transcriptions of Sibelius’s symphonies and symphonic poems is therefore by no means an untenable idea.
My transcriptions start from the premise that the organ is an independent instrument, capable of far more than merely imitating an orchestra. For me, transcribing a symphonic work for organ therefore means being able to give its character, atmosphere and emotional experience an entirely new and very personal dimension.
In Sibelius, there are both similarities and differences between his conception of the organ and that of the orchestra. Naturally, it is chiefly the differences that concern the transcribing organist. Consider the particular way in which a crescendo is built on the organ, or the arrangement of stops at different pitches. The various facets of a solo timbre are also much easier to use in an orchestra than on an organ, even one with four manuals and countless stops: the distribution of sounds between the manuals limits the organist’s possibilities.
Furthermore, registration on the organ is not directly comparable to orchestration. This is not only because each organ is an individual with its own sound, but also because a soft horn sound and a forte horn sound in an orchestra cannot simply be imitated by different forms of the same organ stop. Some organs also lack the very stops that are essential in Sibelius: his fff accents can only be realised on an organ with truly powerful trumpet stops.
Doing justice to the composer’s sound and intention therefore sometimes requires creative solutions. It is precisely these solutions that can make an organ transcription an independent version of the original work. Fortunately, experience in a living performance practice almost always leads to convincing “illusions of sound”, provided one believes that an organ’s available sound resources offer possibilities rather than impose limitations.
Transcribing is also a particularly intimate way of reading a score. Many refinements in motivic development or the handling of tone colour, for example, only become fully apparent when one transcribes: they are not literally written in the score, yet they determine an essential aspect of the music. In the first movement of the Second Symphony (Op. 43), for instance, the brass lend a special dimension to an otherwise unchanging sound by briefly entering and then disappearing again.
Beyond all these differences and the ways of approaching them, an important similarity between organ and orchestra is that both can make more audible than the sum of the parts that constitute the score: they can let us hear the music the composer imagined.
Sibelius regarded his music as a fragment, a piece in a mosaic of divine inspiration. I hear in it a deep, cool sadness, magic and a sense of monumentality. To give such fragments a new face and a new expression is the aim of my transcriptions and my concert.
It is an attempt to reunite the organ and orchestral aspects of Sibelius’s work, long separated for various reasons. A truly symphonic thought, which supports my belief that this is a good way to approach the work of Sibelius the “symphonist”.
