Category Archives: Historical criticism

Helmuth Thierfelder’s open letter to Jean Sibelius from 1935,[1] drowned for decades, has suddenly surfaced as Timothy L. Jackson has maintained that Adorno’s renown ‘Glosse über Sibelius’[2] or, in fact, its nameless first printing,[3] which Adorno wrote in New York, … Continue reading →

My title is appropriated from Richard Taruskin’s keynote lecture at the 2006 Bartók conference in Budapest, substituting Sibelius for Bartók.[1] His title pertains to the astonishing omission of Bartók from the recent Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music;[2] mine to the … Continue reading →

‘Whatever became of Jean Sibelius? For the first half of the 20th century, the square-headed Finn was the totemic symbol of a heroic nation and the most admired living symphonist,’ wrote Norman Lebrecht in June 2007. ‘Today, half a century … Continue reading →

It is difficult to establish who was the first to mention ‘Sibelius’s shadow.’ The idea pops up in the 1920s at the latest. In an essay on ‘the youngest Finnish music’ from 1928, the composer Ernest Pingoud (1887–1942) refers to … Continue reading →

“For critics incapable of making aesthetic judgments without first establishing a figure’s historical ‘import’, these composers [Sibelius and Busoni] fell into an aesthetic no man’s land by failing to conform to historiographical formulae” (Dahlhaus 1989: 367). Carl Dahlhaus’s statement describes … Continue reading →

Wenige Aufsätze über einen Komponisten dürften in destruktiver Wirkung Theodor W. Adornos Glosse über Sibelius übertreffen. Ursprünglich war die Schrift im Jahre 1938, ohne Titel, als Rezension des Buches Sibelius: a close-up (London 1937) von Bengt von Törne in der … Continue reading →

Cette note pertinente est publiée à l’occasion du 90e anniversaire du compositeur finlandais et tirée à 40 exemplaires vélin blanc et 11 exemplaires sur hollande antique, numérotés 1 à 51 par l’éditeur. Le tirage a été exécuté le 8 décembre … Continue reading →

Nationalism in European music, as in European thinking and culture in general, originally is a phenomenon of the 19th century and closely related to subordinated nations becoming aware of themselves and longing for political independence. The idea of a nation-state … Continue reading →