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...

Jean Sibelius His Life and Personality BY KARL EKMAN With a Foreword by ERNEST NEWMAN. PREFACE IT is not our intention in this book to enter into competition with the numerous responsible and subtle commentators, who have analysed and described Jean Sibelius the composer and his work in an excellent way. We are attracted by a hitherto untrodden field and have devoted our interest to Jean Sibelius the man, the unique personality behind his work. Whenever we have found it necessary to discuss some of the creations of this master hand as especially typical of important stages of his life and of striking features of his personality, we have kept our analysis and characterisation on the plane of common humanity. An attempt to give a complete picture of Jean Sibelius the man calls for no excuse. Like every artist of a high order Sibelius has exerted an influence on his contemporaries far in excess of the limits of the direct effects of his art. As a proclaimer in music of the feelings and dreams of his people he has become a leading figure in the history of Finland, as a fearless combatant in the lists of universal musical art one of the great, whose struggle and purpose contributed towards forming the spiritual physiognomy of the twentieth century. What such a man experienced, how he viewed the personalities he met, how he wrestled with the problems that life set him, how he reacted to tendencies and events in various spheres of lifenone of this can be a matter of indifference to his contemporaries. Most of the materials of this book are the result of personal conversations with Sibelius in a dozen sittings lasting all day in his country home at Jarvenpaa, an hours journey by train to thenorth of the capital of Finland In our talks the master placed himself at our disposal with all the kindness of his generous nature without allowing his persistent questioner to notice any sign of impatience. We have endeavoured as far as possible to express Sibelius views of all that is important in his lifeand even of what is less important, when this has come quite naturally in the course of easy conversationin his own words, either as we jotted them down on paper during our sittings or wrote them down immediately after, as the train steamed through the countryside of Nyland towards Helsingfors in the twilight. During our talks in Jarvenpaa we had occasion . more than once to recall that formerly Sibelius had consistently frustrated all attempts at inducing him to speak at all about himself and the reality that formed the background of his works this attitude was due on the one hand to the noli me tangere of an aristocratic and susceptible nature towards the insistent outside world, and on the other to the spontaneous revulsion of a proud artist against the mere idea of being suspected of wishing to encourage public interest by any other means than his art. We must admit that we, too, failed to ascertain all that we, and, no doubt, our readers would have liked to know.

This book contains an unusual biography of the well-known Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, focusing mainly on the man behind the music. Preface: 'It is not our intention in this book to enter into competition with the numerous responsible and subtle commentators, who have analysed and described Jean Sibelius the composer and his work in an excellent way. We are attracted by a hitherto untrodden field and have devoted our interest to Jean Sibelius the man, the unique personality behind his work. Whenever we have found it necessary to discuss some of the creations of this master hand as especially typical of important stages of his life and of striking features of his personality, we have kept our analysis and characterisation on the plane of common humanity. An attempt to give a complete picture of Jean Sibelius the man calls for no excuse. Like every artist of a high order Sibelius has exerted an influence on his contemporaries far in excess of the limits of the direct effects of his art. As a proclaimer in music of the feelings and dreams of his people he has become a leading figure in the history of Finland, as a fearless combatant in the lists of universal musical art one of the great, whose struggle and purpose contributed towards forming the spiritual physiognomy of the twentieth century. What such a man experienced, how he viewed the personalities he met, how he wrestled with the problems that life set him, how he reacted to tendencies and events in various spheres of life - none of this can be a matter of indifference to his contemporaries. Most of the materials of this book are the result of personal conversations with Sibelius in a dozen sittings lasting all day in his country home at Jarvenpaa, an hours journey by train to the north of the capital of Finland. In our talks the master placed himself at our disposal with all the kindness of his generous nature without allowing his persistent questioner to notice any sign of impatience. We have endeavoured as far as possible to express Sibelius views of all that is important in his life - and even of what is less important, when this has come quite naturally in the course of easy conversationin his own words, either as we jotted them down on paper during our sittings or wrote them down immediately after, as the train steamed through the countryside of Nyland towards Helsingfors in the twilight. During our talks in Jarvenpaa we had occasion .more than once to recall that formerly Sibelius had consistently frustrated all attempts at inducing him to speak at all about himself and the reality that formed the background of his works this attitude was due on the one hand to the noli me tangere of an aristocratic and susceptible nature towards the insistent outside world, and on the other to the spontaneous revulsion of a proud artist against the mere idea of being suspected of wishing to encourage public interest by any other means than his art. We must admit that we, too, failed to ascertain all that we, and, no doubt, our readers would have liked to know.'