The Wood Nymph

The Wood Nymph
Tone poem by Jean Sibelius
The composer in 1913
Native name	Skogsrået
Catalogue	Op. 15
Period	Late-Romantic
Composed	1894
Duration	22 minutes
Premiere
Date	17 April 1895 (1895-04-17)
Location	Helsinki, Finland
Conductor	Jean Sibelius
Performers	Helsinki Orchestral Society

The Wood Nymph (in Swedish: Skogsrået; subtitled ballade pour l'orchestre), Op. 15, is a single-movement tone poem for orchestra written in 1894 by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. The piece, which premiered on 17 April 1895 in Helsinki, Finland, with Sibelius conducting, takes its program from Swedish poet Viktor Rydberg's 1882 literary work of the same name, in which the hero Björn wanders through a magical Nordic forest and happens upon a beautiful—and coquettish—wood nymph (skogsrå). Organizationally, the tone poem consists of four informal sections, each of which corresponds to one of the poem's four stanzas and evokes the mood of a particular episode: first, heroic vigor; second, frenetic activity; third, sensual love; and fourth, inconsolable grief. Despite the music's beauty, many critics have faulted Sibelius for his "over-reliance" on the source material's narrative structure.

Never published, The Wood Nymph gradually fell out of the repertoire, with the exception of a performance in 1936. Six decades later, Finnish musicologist Kari Kilpeläinen unexpectedly recovered the lost manuscript among the University of Helsinki Library archives, a discovery that "caught Finland, and the musical world, by surprise". Osmo Vänskä and the Lahti Symphony Orchestra subsequently gave the piece its modern day "premiere" on 9 February 1996. Despite the tone poem's sixty year disappearance, its thematic material survived in abridged form via two other Op. 15 iterations: a piece for solo piano; and more importantly, a melodrama for narrator, piano, two horns, and strings. Sibelius likely arranged the melodrama from the tone poem, although he claimed the opposite. A typical performance of the tone poem lasts about 22 minutes, some 11 minutes longer than the melodrama.

History

Composition

Although the origin of the tone poem remains admittedly obscure, it is likely that The Wood Nymph gradually evolved out of music Sibelius had planned but never realized a verismo opera. The libretto, as related in a letter from Sibelius, dated 28 July 1894, tells the story of a young, engaged student who, while traveling abroad, falls for an exotic dancer and betrays his fiancée. Upon his return, the student describes the dance and dancer so vividly that his betrothed concludes he has been unfaithful; the opera ends with a funeral procession for the student's fiancée (the letter is unclear as to her cause of death). Furthermore, in a letter from 10 August 1894, Sibelius informs his wife, Aino, of a new composition "in the style of a march". For Veijo Murtomäki, these letters provide "invaluable information" as to the ballad's genesis:^[1]

The literary context of Skogsrået is foreshadowed by the opera plot: unfaithfulness or forbidden love and death. The piece in the style of a march would become the opening section of Skogsrået, and the opera's funeral procession its conclusion...Between these two sections is the section where the protagonist "takes himself off (abroad)" [mirroring The Wood Nymph's excursion through the forest] and then the section with forbidden, sensual love.

While both tone poem and melodrama would emerge from this material, it is not clear which musical form Sibelius initially used to tackle Rydberg's poem. In the 1930s, Sibelius claimed he had first composed the melodrama (premiered on 9 March 1895 at a lottery ball benefiting the Finnish Theatre), only to realize subsequently that "the material would allow a more extensive treatment" as a symphonic poem. Scholars, however, have disputed this chronology, arguing that given the premiere of the tone poem a mere month later, it is "improbable, if not totally impossible" that Sibelius could have expanded the melodrama so quickly. Rather, Sibelius would have "compressed" the earlier tone poem, eliminating bridges and repetitions, to produce the streamlined melodrama.^[2][1][3]

Performances

Biblis by Bouguereau, 1884

The tone poem premiered on 17 April 1895, at the Great Hall of the University of Helsinki, Sibelius himself conducting the Helsinki Orchestral Society; the programme also included, among other pieces, the tone poem Vårsång (Spring Song) and selections from the Karelia Suite. A second concert was given two days later. Despite its positive reception, The Wood Nymph would only be played another five times in Sibelius' lifetime: twice in Turku on 29 and 30 November 1897; twice in Helsinki at the premiere of his Symphony No. 1 on 26 and 30 April 1899; and after a 37-year hiatus, once in Helsinki on 27 October 1936. Sibelius, at that point a septuagenarian, was not present for this final performance, although he appears to have personally selected The Wood Nymph for the program;^[4] Georg Schnéevoigt, who cut the score extensively in order to fit the performance into the radio broadcast's allotted time, conducted the Helsinki Philharmonic, with President Pehr Evind Svinhufvud, Prime Minister Kyösti Kallio, and Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim in attendance.^[2]

After 1936, The Wood Nymph again disappeared from the repertoire. The work was "rediscovered" six decades later by manuscripts expert Kari Kilpeläinen, who had been cataloguing the various papers and scores the composer's family had deposited in 1982 at the University of Helsinki Library archive. A subsequent inspection of the manuscript by Fabian Dahlström "caught Finland, and the musical world, by surprise": the tone poem, 22 minutes in length and scored for full orchestra, was far more than the melodrama "recast without the speaker" many in the Sibelius establishment had assumed it to be.^[4] The Wood Nymph received its modern day "world premiere" on 9 February 1996 by the Lahti Symphony Orchestraon, with Osmo Vänskä conducting. Vänskä had received permission from Sibelius's family to perform the work.^[5] Out of necessity, Vänskä supplemented the manuscript—full of edits and, thus, "very difficult to read" in isolation—with notes from the 1936 performance.^[6]

Orchestration

A Nordic forest

• Woodwind: piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons
• Brass: 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones
• Percussion: timpani, triangle, bass drum, cymbals, tambourine
• Strings: violins, violas, cellos, double basses

Structure

In The Wood Nymph, Sibelius adheres closely to the narrative structure of Rydberg's poem, so much so that at the 1895 premiere, audience members were provided with copies of the source material, indicating the centrality of Rydberg's plot to the performance.^[7][2] Due to its programmatic qualities, musicologists commonly describe the The Wood Nymph, although in one movement, as consisting of four informal sections or "dramatic tableaux",^[8] each of which corresponds to one of the poem's four stanzas and reflects in its music the poem's "changing atmosphere":^[2]

1. Alla marcia
2. Vivace assai—Molto vivace
3. Moderato
4. Molto lento

First section

Björn, the dashing youth, is announced by a heroic brass fanfare; mesmerized by the forest's "winking" trees and "blinking" stars, he diverts from the banquet he was due to attend, "something magic in his mood". The music, "breezy" and triumphant in C major, recalls Sibelius' Karelia Overture from a year earlier,^[7] and betrays no sign of Björn's impending fate. Björn's theme is recapitulated at the end of the second section.

Rydberg in 1876

Second section

Björn plunges deep into the magical Nordic forest and encounters evil, mischievous dwarves, who "weave a net of moonbeams" and "laugh so hoarsely at their captive".^[10] Arguably the tone poem's most striking section,^[11][12] the "proto-minimalist" music in A minor is at once hypnotic and delightfully propulsive: Sibelius repeats and reworks the same short motif (belonging initially to the clarinets) into a rich woodwind tapestry, quickening the tempo and adding off-beat horns and pulsating trombones, to produce what Murtomäki has described as a "modal-diatonic sound field".^[12]

Third section

Björn discovers and is seduced by the beautiful wood nymph (skogsrå); enchanted by the creature's spell, Björn betrays his wife. The sensual, midsummer-night music in C-sharp major is "bathed in an erotic afterglow",^[11] a solo cello, joined by horn and pizzicato strings, representing the nymph's coquettish advances. "Who could resist," Glenda Dawn Goss has written in mock defense, "her [the nymph's] throaty solo cello voice, her sensuously swaying movements, a white limb glimpsed, honey-smooth, beneath a moon-white gown, a sweetly heaving breast?"^[8]

A Nymph In The Forest by Lenoir

Fourth Section

Having lost any hope of earthly happiness (in Swedish folklore, a man who succumbed to the skogsrå was doomed to lose his soul),^[10] Björn despairs. The music, a dark and mournful "funeral march" in C-sharp minor, describes the heart-broken hero's "inconsolable grief", and as the undulating, "aching" violin theme crashes against the brass, Björn is left to lament his tragic fate. "Hardly ever has music been written," wrote the music critic of the newspaper Uusi Suometar following the 1899 performance, "which would more clearly describe remorse."^[13]

Reception

Karl Flodin

Although well received upon its premiere, critical opinion as to the merit of The Wood Nymph has varied. Following the 1895 premiere, Oskar Merikanto, writing in Päivälehti, praised Sibelius for having "masterfully" recreated Rydberg's plot with the use of "unique and fascinating colors",^[2] while critic Karl Flodin complained in Nya Pressen that the piece was "unquestionably too long".^[2] Modern day opinion has been similarly equivocal. While conceding that The Wood Nymph contains "some splendid melodic ideas" and "luxuriant scoring", Erik Tawaststjerna has characterized the work as the "experiment" of a composer "still trying to find his feet as a tone-poet", suggesting that Sibelius is too dependent on the source material's narrative structure.^[14] Murtomäki, though praising the piece for its "unforced freshness of vision and tonal audacity" and "well elaborated, original and inventive characters",^[15] agrees with Tawaststjerna that The Wood Nymph is too episodic in construction:

As a whole, Skogsrået is not a highly unified organism like Sibelius’s subsequent large orchestral works: the four Lemminkäinen legends and the first two symphonies...The formal problem is that the links are, for the most part, missing; Sibelius simply juxtaposes different formal sections without connective elements smoothing over the junctures. In view of his later mastery of the "art of transition," achieved by subtly overlapping different textures and tempos, in Skogsrået Sibelius is sill at the beginning of his development.

Guy Rickards, concurring that the piece "never quite escapes a dependence on the verses", has echoed Tawaststjerna in wondering what might have been had Sibelius returned in his maturity to The Wood Nymph, as with En saga.^[16] Finnish composer Kalevi Aho's response has been similar, calling the piece "an interesting work" in need of "more polishing".^[12] Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä, however, has championed the ballad. "It's a tremendous piece," Vänskä has said in interview. "He [Sibelius] never managed to revise it, but nothing is wrong with the music. Sibelius never forbade performance of The Wood Nymph."^[6] Stylistically, scholars have detected in The Wood Nymph the influence of Richard Wagner.^[17][7][12] Tawaststjerna, for example, finds "shades of Lohengrin" in the epic finale,^[14] while Murtomäki discerns the "erotic harmonic vocabulary" of Tristan und Isolde.^[18] In light of Sibelius' "Nietzschean response"^[7] to Wagner's operas (initially enamored, Sibelius by July 1894 had repudiated Wagner's ideas as "calculated" and "manufactured"), such observations are of particular interest in that they illustrate the extent to which Sibelius, at the time of The Wood Nymph, had not yet succeeded in breaking with the German master.^[18]

Analysis

Sibelius in 1907

Autobiographical details

A few musicologists have speculated that The Wood Nymph is potentially autobiographical. Murtomäki, most notably, has argued that the tone poem's depiction of "a fatal sexual conjunction" between Björn and the skogsrå is a possible allusion to the composer's own youthful indiscretions. "The strong autobiographical element in Skogsrået is unmistakable", Murtomäki has written, adding that in the piece "Sibelius probably confesses an affair to Aino".^[19] For Murtomäki, the balladic nature of The Wood Nymph is key, as in the genre "it was expected that the singer/storyteller/composer should reveal himself":^[20]

The "balladic problem" was common at the end of the nineteenth century. Since men generally got married only at a relatively late age, they usually had their first sexual experiences with prostitutes. In their concealed or "unofficial" sexual life, they experienced a certain type of female sexual adventurousness that their wives could not easily match. For Sibelius, too, this was probably the case...It is plausible to surmise that Sibelius was coping with his unfaithfulness and, through these early pieces, he was writing himself free from lapses.

With its focus on sexual fantasy, The Wood Nymph differs sharply from yet another Rydberg poem Sibelius put to music, the melodrama Snöfrid (1900). In Snöfrid, Gunnar, the patriotic hero, resists a water nymph's sensuous "embrace" to instead "fight the hopeless fight" for his country and "die nameless". The contrast between Björn and Gunnar, Murtomäki has argued, reflects Sibelius' own personal transformation: crowned a "national hero" following the 1899 premiere of Symphony No. 1, Sibelius wished to demonstrate that he had "outgrown his early adventurism" and learned to place country before "libertine" excess.^[21] Murtomäki's conclusion, however, is not universally shared. David Fanning, in his review of the edited volume in which Murtomäki's essay appears, has savaged as "dubious" and "tendentious" such autobiographical speculations. "For Murtomäki every half-diminished chord seems to be a Tristan chord, with all the symbolic baggage that entails," Fanning has argued. "Such half-baked hermeneutics baffle and alienate...enthusiasm has occasionally been allowed to run riot".^[22]

Lack of publication

Why Sibelius should have failed to prepare The Wood Nymph for publication is a question that has perplexed scholars. Murtomäki has suggested that Sibelius, despite having been fond of The Wood Nymph, was "unsure about the true value" of his output from the 1890s,^[23] an ambivalence that is perhaps best illustrated by the piecemeal publication history of, and multiple revisions to, the four Lemminkäinen legends (appearing in the composer's 1911 diary under a list of works to be rewritten, The Wood Nymph, too, looks to have been scheduled by Sibelius for a reexamination, albeit one that never came to pass).^[2] Scholars have offered a number of explanations as to why Sibelius may have "turned his back" on his early compositions. Perhaps, as master, he looked back on the works of his youth as technically "inferior" to his mature output; or, as evolving artist, he sought distance from passionate, nationalistic exclamations as he developed his own, unique musical style and aimed to transition from "local hero" to "international composer"; or, as elder statesman, he feared he might have "revealed himself too much" in early "confessional" pieces, such as En saga, Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of the Island, and The Wood Nymph.^[24] In the absence of any new information from Sibelius' papers, however, the reason why The Wood Nymph was never published ultimately "appears doomed to remain a subject of speculation".^[2]

Discography

Despite its "sensational" reemergence, The Wood Nymph remains comparatively under-recorded. It received its world premiere in 1996 under the BIS label with Osmo Vänskä leading the Lahti Symphony Orchestra. Subsequent recordings by Vänskä, Storgårds, and Bostock make use of the Breitkopf & Härtel JSW critical edition, published in 2006, which reinstates a few measures performances from the 1990s had omitted.

Notes

References

• Anderson, Martin (1996). "Sibelius's 'The Wood Nymph'". Tempo (Cambridge University Press) 196: 51–52. Retrieved October 24, 2014. 

• Barnett, Andrew (2007). Sibelius. New Haven: Yale University Press. 

• Fanning, David (2001). "Review of Sibelius Studies". Music & Letters (Oxford University Press) 82 (4): 663–666. doi:10.1093/ml/82.4.663. Retrieved October 24, 2014. 

• Goss, Glenda Dawn (2009). Sibelius: A Composer's Life and the Awakening of Finland. London: University of Chicago Press. 

• Grimley, Daniel (2004). "The Tone Poems: Genre, Landscape and Structural Perspective". In Grimley, Daniel. The Cambridge Companion to Sibelius. Cambridge Companions to Music. London: Cambridge University Press. 

• Kurki, Eija (1999). "The Continuing Adventures of Sibelius's Wood-Nymphs: The Story So Far". Music Finland. Retrieved October 24, 2014. 

• Murtomäki, Veijo (2001). "Sibelius's symphonic ballad Skogsrået". In Jackson, Timothy; Murtomäki, Veijo. Sibelius Studies. London: Cambridge University Press. 

• Rickards, Guy (1996). "Review". Tempo (Cambridge University Press) 197: 43–45. Retrieved October 24, 2014. 

• Rydberg, Viktor (1882). "Skogsrået" (PDF). Naxos Music Library. pp. 114–115. Retrieved October 24, 2014. 

• Sirén, Vesa (2005). "Other Orchestral Works: Skogsrået (The Wood Nymph)". Sibelius.fi. Retrieved October 24, 2014. 

• Tawaststjerna, Erik (1976). Sibelius: Volume 1, 1865–1905. (Robert Layton, English translation). London: Faber and Faber. 

• Tumelty, Michael (February 3, 1996). "The Key to Settling an Old Score". The Herald (Glasgow). p. 13.