Simon Parmet, conductor
"Despite its brevity it is the climax of his creative powers. Its music is a concentration of the essence of the best characteristics of his other symphonies."

Veijo Murtomäki, musicologist, 1990
"The seventh symphony (…) is something new and revolutionary in the history of the symphony (…) With the seventh symphony and Tapiola the era of major-minor tonality inevitably came to an end - but how magnificently!"

Osmo Vänskä, conductor, 1998
"The seventh forms a pair with the sixth. But it is not autobiographical. The ego is left behind, and things are seen from the point of view of humanity. The composer turns his eye away from himself towards higher powers. Number seven is sacred music. This piece, too, is very difficult to play."

Jukka-Pekka Saraste, conductor, 2002
"In number four there was already this idea of turning space upside down. In number seven it has become a predominant feature: melody without gravity, but yet existing within the fields of planets with varying masses. I think that the finest thing in it is the surging of different tonal masses in a state of weightlessness. I sometimes debated with Hämeenniemi (the composer Eero Hämeenniemi) at what stage near the end of number seven one starts to become aware of the rising line of the strings below the theme played by the brass: one suddenly just realises that it has risen from the background and really gone wild! Soon we hear the bassoon playing in a high register and the flute in a low one – and there too you have this cancelling out of gravity."
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Source: The Finnish Club of Helsinki's Sibelius website

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Wolfgang Klaoran (Compositeur)

"Sibelius is a king in a free dimension as to Mozart is to a King in a very cared of dimension. Only one is from Finland!"

Sir Donald Francis Tovey [1875--1940]--composer, conductor, pianist and writer on music.

'If the listener feels that unformed fragments of melody loom out of a severely discordant fog of sound, that is what he is meant to feel. If he cannot tell when or where the tempo changes, that is because Sibelius has achieved the power of moving like an aircraft, with the wind or against it. An aeronaut carried with the wind has no sense of movement at all; but Sibelius's airships are roomy enough for the passengers to dance if they like: and the landscape, to say nothing of the sky-scape, is not always to remote for them to judge of the movement of the ship by external evidences. Sibelius has not only mastered but made a system of that kind of movement which Wagner established for music-drama, and which the composers of symphonic poems before Strauss have often failed to achieve and have not always realized as essential to their problem. Moreover , he achieves it in absolute music without appealing to any external programme. He moves in the air and can change his pace without breaking his movement. The tempi of this seventh symphony range from a genuine adagio to a genuine prestissimo. Time really moves slowly in the adagio, and the prestissimo arouses the listeners feeling of muscular movement instead of remaining a slow affair written in the notation of a quick one. But nobody can tell how or when the pace, whether muscular or vehicular, has changed'.

This excerpt is from Toveys 1935 essay 'Symphonies and other orchestral works' and it still conveys Sibelius's extraordinary mastery of movement in the seventh symphony better than any writings that I know.--kullervopete.

Sir Neville Cardus [1888--1975] writer on music and cricket :

'Sibelius, in his first two symphonies proved himself a fulsome,
big--breathed melodist, who possesed the power to throw a
tune about like a giant. In his seventh symphony has he not
gone too far in his rejection of some of the ample juice and
rich blood which really belonged to him? Ought such a full man
as Sibelius not to have said, like Falstaff, '' I will refine myself
no finer than I am''.

A valid point of view I suppose, but surely what Cardus is overlooking here in the seventh is Sibelius's immense
concentration of symphonic thought.
It was the English musician and writer Cecil Gray who once
compared the 4th with a species of star which Physicists
and astronomers call a 'white dwarf' the substance of which
is so dense and compressed that a piece the size of a 10p
coin may weigh as much as several tons!

When I listen to Sibelius 7, when the final bars conclude, I feel
that I have emerged from a journey of epic proportions and all
in just over 20 minutes.--kullervopete.

Also, along the lines of big-breathed melody, I find the C-Major rondo theme one of Sibelius' most singable tunes, right up there with the big tunes in the 1st two symphonies.

Robert Simpson--Symphonist [1921--1997]

'As a musical structure the Seventh is at once the grandest and most subtly organized that Sibelius ever achieved, and its form shows no compromise with any vestigial symphony in separable movements. The great trombone theme that appears three times, crowning three widely spaced climaxes, is the most striking unifying factor, but the details, down to the smallest, show that Sibelius has here won a final victory in his lifelong struggle to create 'an inner connection between all the motifs'.

An excerpt from 'Sibelius and Nielsen' [BBC, 1965]--kullervopete.

Tom Service [music critic]

'The seventh is a kind of musical black hole, in which massive, elemental experiences are expressed in mere minutes. Its a completely new way of thinking about musical time, about what music can do'.
Interesting metaphor, at the edge of a black hole, time slows right down. Similarly in Sib 7 time seems to be stretched and we experience a cosmic journey in around 21 minutes.--kullervopete.

Jean Sibelius

'The entire Seventh Symphony has very much in common with antiquity, especially Greece. The trombones are handled like the musical instruments of antiquity'.

Jean Sibelius in conversation with Jussi Jalas in the 1940's.--kullervopete.

I remember reading that last one somewhere and relating this idea to the orchestra when we performed it, along with ideas about the Golden Rule and the Fibonacci sequence.

What relates the Fibonacci sequence with the seventh symphony?

The timings of the sections at a given tempo, with some flexibility somewhat relate to the Fibonnaci sequence.

Structural landmarks can be found at the following minutes:

0,1,2,3,5,8,13,21

The "zero" is especially important, the tympani roll that "starts it all".

Also, if one begins at the central C major rondo (roughly at the 13 minute mark), then one can again find structural points of interest at the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th and 8th minutes after the beginning of the Rondo.

For a nice summary of the Fibonnaci sequence, click

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.

Quite possibly the most elaborate and probably a little overdone quote I've yet seen, regarding the end of the Seventh:

"Delivered from mortal bonds of earthly understanding, rising above mountains we cannot conquer, gathering with the force of revolving planets, thrust into the chordal Om of the universe, to where the stars dwell."
-The Inkpot Sibelius Nutcase

Sounds really cool though...

I always find it so interesting that many discussions of the 7th have to do with planets, stars, lack of gravity, black holes, etc.

I suppose I am by no means the only one who thinks of the 7th as some sort of divine window into the cosmos. Many people I have encountered also conjure images of space when hearing this music; could it be that, by design, there is something imbedded deep within this music that never fails to arouse these celestial images? What sort of sorecery have you created, Mr. Sibelius?

Reminds me of a quote by Mahler: "The symphony is like the universe, it should embrace everything."

Did Sibelius understand this concept even more than the person who said it with his 7th?

Mahler actually said to Sibelius in 1907 'The symphony must be like the world.....but you are right about Sibs seventh. The composer Robert Simpson in discussing the differences between Tapiola and the 7th described the symphony as like 'a great planet in orbit, its movement vast, inexorable, seemingly imperceptible to its inhabitants. But, you may object, the Finnish forests of Tapiola are also on the surface of such a planet, revolving. Yes, but we never leave them, we are filled with expectation, and nothing but a great wind arises. There is no real sense of movement. The symphony has both the cosmic motion of the earth and the teeming activity that is upon it'.
Have you taken a look at the thread 'Where the stars dwell'

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in this section.--kullervopete/

Pete, you are right...I stand corrected. Mahler said "world," not "universe." Notwithstanding, I still think Sibelius beat Mahler at his own game.

Indeed I have seen the "Tahtola" (sorry for the lack of umlauts...I am typing this on my laptop and it's hard to do the codes for special characters). Again, this is further "proof" that there is something cosmic in this music.

What is so interesting is I began to envision scenes of outer space when listening to this music before I ever read others' commentts on the 7th. So, I was astounded to see that I am not alone.

If the 7th is "outer space," would it not be apt to describe the 4th as "inner space?"

My interpretation of Mahler's statement is that he was justifying the constant juxtaposition of disparate (musical) elements and shifting of moods that one finds in his symphonies. I believe that he was arguing that the world is not ordered and logical, but chaotic and random, which is why often in Mahler we find sublimity followed by horror followed banality, with a good old march somewhere in there.

Sibelius was of course more interested in the "Profound Logic" of music as such, which is naturally more expressive of "The Cosmos" seen on a grand scale than of "The World" seen from up close, with all its grotesque human details. As the 7th is a fantastic expression of this profound logic, it is no wonder that people associate it with the grand workings of the Universe.

Tapkaara wrote:

If the 7th is "outer space," would it not be apt to describe the 4th as "inner space?"

A very nice thought. I would expand on that a little as far as my perception of the fourth is concerned. I believe that the 4th is Sibelius writing music exactly as he wants it to sound, with no attention paid to what was expected from him, a pure picture of his inner musical being at that time and in that space. So although on one hand, I see it as completely abstract music, on the other, I see it as THE most distilled portrait at a given time of Sibelius' "Inner Space".

What a wonderfully astute post, Kurki!

I think your input on Sibelius vs. Mahler is extremely insightful.

The 4th, as far as I am concerened, cannot be thought of as purely absolute music. While I do not experiece "visions" of landscapes or things like this while I listen, one cannot help but be moved by the honesty of this music. This is, I think, Sibelius bearing his soul.

Interestingly, when he wrote the early En Saga, he said that he beared his soul like never before in that piece. What a long way he came by the 4th Symphony!

Kurkikohtaus wrote:

My interpretation of Mahler's statement is that he was justifying the constant juxtaposition of disparate (musical) elements and shifting of moods that one finds in his symphonies. I believe that he was arguing that the world is not ordered and logical, but chaotic and random, which is why often in Mahler we find sublimity followed by horror followed banality, with a good old march somewhere in there.

Furthermore, I think such wild changes in Mahler's music was a very personal thing, from himself and what he saw in the world as he knew it. Bernstein wrote some interesting articles on this subject...

ANYway, Sibelius' Seventh, as mentioned before, would take a look at the universe in itself, on a grand scale, not really taking in every little detail, but still... kind of an "overview" maybe?

That said, I think Mahler wrote symphonies his own way in which he did take details into account. Thus we have a composer who may well have been exactly like Sibelius... but with OCD or something. He wanted everything there in all the gory details (some more gory than others) whereas Sibelius just had everything as a single living organism, constantly evolving from its various components yet not saying, "Hey, let's zoom in on this person who's eating breakfast!" or something like that.

That's my (subject to possibly change) take on this subject.

Sibelius's famous exchange with Mahler is oft-quoted, but it does reveal the two masters different approach to Symphonic composition at a fundamental level.
Mahler tried to include all area's of human experience in his huge symphonies, and saw himself at the centre of it all. But were I part company with some of Mahlers admirers is the assumption that because of the huge and diverse range of emotions on display in his music, then this alone somehow makes Mahler a great symphonist. If this was true, then even the last three symphonies of Mozart would stand in Mahlers shadow.

Sibelius's approach is essentially at a classical level, for he rejects the philosophy of all inclusion. There conversation in 1907 says it all. Mahler could not agree that Sibelius's kind of organic concentration might enable him to express by mere suggestion more than could ever be embraced by attempts to be comendious. But this is why in a work such as Sibelius Seven we feel music on a cosmic scale. Sibelius was a magician of time and movement and although the 7th unfolds in just over 20 minutes, it suggests eternity.--kullervopete.

kullervopete wrote:

If this was true, then even the last three symphonies of Mozart would stand in Mahlers shadow.

That's an interesting thought, kullervopete, can you elaborate on that?