by KARL KliMAIV TRANSLATED FROM THE FINSfSH . BY EDWARD BIRSE JEAN
SIBELIUS His Life and Personality WITH A FOREWORD BY ERNEST NEWMAN
NEWYORK-ALFRED-A-KNOPF 1938 SSte Rfl Copyright 1935 by Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this boolc may be
reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the
publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages or
reproduce not more than three illustrations in a review to be
printed in a magazine or newspaper. Manufactured in the United
States of America FIRST AMERICAN EDITION First Published in Finland
under the title JEAN SIBELIUS EN KONSTNARS LIV OCH PERSONLIGHET
FOREWORD CHERE 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 discreetlytouched in with the FOREWORD 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 vi FOREWORD the 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...
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