Sibelius - Symphony no.5

So before we get started, feel free to skip all of these words and letters and numbers and things, and just jump to the embedded video at the end, that's the really good bit. Don't worry, I won't take it personally. Alternatively, just lie to me and say that you did read it all. Now ...

It's a last minute, and quite possibly the wrong, decision to open the blog with this, because I originally intended to tie things up in 52 weeks time with the 5th Symphony by Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), but here it is to start the year. Without question, it had to be either the opener or the closer, because it's got to be one of the very best examples of how birds can have a huge impact on music.

Sibelius's 5th Symphony, in particular the closing third movement, is about swans, Whooper Swans. It details how a heartstoppingly intimate encounter with nature can flood us with an overpowering sensation of joy. If you've never heard the symphony then I suggest you knock back a couple of pints of gin and a crate of Babycham, and brace yourself for a massive slap in the face - it's extraordinarily powerful stuff. An ideal performance of this symphony should leave a huge hole in the back of your skull.

Whooper Swans - the national bird of Finland. Seeing as he's the 'Greatest Briton of 2014', when we eventually join up to the single currency I think it's only right that the face of a smoking Nigel Farage should be stamped onto our Euro coins

Back in 1915 when Sibelius wrote the first version of this symphony, there wasn't a hobby called birdwatching. The only people who took a real interest in birds were eccentric aristocrats with speech impediments, and the offspring of nouveau riche post-Industrial Revolution capitalist pigdogs, who travelled world to blast birds out of the sky, stuff them full of sand and donate them to museums. A bit flippant that last sentence, because the specimens they donated are, to this day, the spinal column of avian science. But that really was how ornithology worked up until, well, up until the last 50 years or so, when optical equipment developed to a point where birds could be identified without stuffing them full of sand.

Birdwatching, like most modern hobbies, exploded in the immediate decades after WW2, when plebs and filth like you and me found ourselves with the freetime and financial opportunities to trample all over beautiful open spaces that had long been inaccessible to gutterscum vermin like us.

So the fact that Sibelius was actually birdwatching 100 years ago is pretty amazing. Because that's what Sibelius was doing, he was birding, he was an amateur birding pioneer, and I suspect he didn't even know it. In his diary he would write down the arrival and departure dates of migrating birds, he would count skeins of what he called 'wild geese' (based on where he lived in Finland they were presumably Taiga Bean Geese), he noted pairs of Curlews nesting in the bog around his house, and his seasons were defined not by calendar dates, but by cranes, geese and swans heading either north or south. A century on, and all of that is what we do as birders.

Sibelius also had a bit of a problem associating with the human race (he left Helsinki to live in the middle of nowhere with his wife), and then there was his horribly destructive problem with booze: again, these are typical traits of birders.

If you want to know more about the background to its composition and how this symphony achieves such power, then there are two brilliant things to look at online. Stephen Johnson's episode of Discovering Music on Radio 3

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gxx6q

And Alex Ross has put the Sibelius chapter from his book The Rest is Noise online

http://www.therestisnoise.com/2007/07/sibelius-chapte.html

But there is definitely one thing you need to know: 21st April 1915, outside his house on the shoreline of Lake Tuusula, and Sibelius wrote in his diary

"Today I saw 16 swans. God, what beauty! They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a silver ribbon."

Shortly after he sketched out the melody which was to become the main theme in the final movement of the symphony, the theme which is now commonly known as the Swan Hymn. It's not supposed to sound like a literal transcription of flying Whooper Swans, more of a sonic depiction of the euphoria which overcame Sibelius watching those swans. But the purity of those swans is eventually corrupted by an underlying sinister chromaticism in the music, in short, Sibelius starts to make it sound out of tune as the symphony approaches its conclusion. So if you like, you can go deeper with all of this: the 16 swans vanishing into the solar haze can be interpreted as Sibelius unable to grab hold of something so simplistically beautiful, something which could possibly lift him out of the throttling depression that pretty much destroyed his life. That kind of joy he felt watching the swans was all too brief - like any other wisps of happiness in his life - then it was back to the grind and the bottle.

You really should listen to the whole symphony, but if you're short of time then you'll have to make do with just the third movement which starts at 21:20. The Swan Hymn enters at 22:32.

Whatever you do, and this applies to all the music I'll post, make sure you listen either through good speakers or headphones - you have to be able to hear the bass.

Enjoy! And if it's your first hearing, let me know what you think.

Even if you only dip into classical music infrequently, you're going to hear a lot of Sibelius this year - he was born 150 years ago and the number 150 is extremely significant in music because it looks quite cool on festival brochures and concert programmes.