Jean Sibelius - His Life and Personality

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JEAN SIBELIUS - His Life and Personality by EDWARD BIRSE. Originally published in 1935. FOREWORD: THERE have been biographies of Sibelius before this of Karl Ekmans, but his is the first to pre sent us with something like the essentials of the portrait of the man. I say something like the essentials be cause we know, from previous experiences of the kind, that the first official or quasi-official biographies of great men are apt to be as remarkable for their reti cences as for their revelations. We have to resign our selves to that, for if it were not for these reticences there could be no first biographies at all. I am not, of course, suggesting that there is anything in Sibeliuss life that needs to be hushed up I doubt whether a world avid for scandal about Queen Elizabeth will ever have the thrill, blent of horror and delight, of learning that he ever robbed a bank, forged a cheque, or even committed a minor homicide. All I mean is that experience in these matters has shown us that in a first biography of any great artist a good deal that concerns his opinions of other . people and his relations with other people has to be discreetly touched in with the lightest of strokes, if only because there are intimacies and susceptibilities on all sides to be considered. I am not contending, then nor, I fancy, would either the author or the subject himself do so that this book of Karl Ekmans will be the final biography of Sibelius fifty years hence. But I do contend that it is a work of high value. All first biographies should be written by someone with the entree to the inner circle of the subject able, consequently, not only to extract illu minative reminiscences and avowals from the subject himself but to tap, before it is too late, the memory of those who were intimate with him in the formative early and middle periods of his life. Ekman has had special facilities for doing this and so his book con tains a mass of hitherto inaccessible information that is of the highest interest and value to students of Sibelius. The book is interesting not only because it furnishes us with so many details, gathered at first hand, of what, for all its relative seclusion from the greater world, has been a life of immense energy, but also because it con firms at every point the impression of Sibelius the man which those of us who have been studying him for the last thirty years or so had formed from his music. We now realize better than ever the strain of independence in the mans personality that has made his music what it is. External influences upon him have always been of nthe slightest he has passed through other composers music, through contacts with contemporary artists, through public musical life in various European cities, calmly extracting from them all, with the unconscious sureness of an animal or a tree, just what he needed for nourishment and development in accordance with the inner law of his own being, and calmly rejecting the unassimilable remainder. His instincts have always been sound even when his procedure may not have been strictly logical. It was not strictly logical of him, for instance, to become an anti-Wagnerian at an early age on the strength of a rather limited acquaintance with Wagners works certainly long before he had seen any of them on the stage...