Woodsman

The villagers who wandered the birch-laden slopes near Lake Tuusula in southern Finland were accustomed to seeing the massive old man in his Homburg and precisely tailored business suit walking slowly along the shaded lanes, easing his weight on a heavy stick. Invariably, they saluted him, for they knew that they were in the presence of greatness. His admirers indeed claimed Jean Sibelius as one of the century's greatest composers, and since he outlived all major contenders for the title except Stravinsky, during recent years he reigned in almost solitary splendor. Yet, compared to such contemporaries as Richard Strauss and Debussy, to say nothing of Alban Berg and Prokofiev, Sibelius often sounded cumbrous and provincial. No major composer stood more stubbornly aside from the 20th century's musical revolutions or responded less to the shifting winds of musical development.

Adagio to Scherzo. Jean Sibelius molded his ideas in the post-romantic Germany of the 1890 While he was studying in Berlin he was exposed to such famed symphonists as Bruckner and Brahms (whom he described as "an unsavory-looking fellow, untidily dressed"), and he went home to Finland imbued with Germanic musical vision, but with a style of his own. His early music--En Saga, Finlandia and other tone poems--is filled with striding themes, echoes of folk tunes, broadly brooding melodies that reminded listeners of the good Finnish earth and established Sibelius as the composer of unfettered nature. With his occasional Nordic rages, he sounded like Brahms gone berserk, but he was also capable of a strongly appealing lyricism. His symphonies, with their acrid dissonances, their brassy shouts and cool, lonely instrumentation, seemed even closer to the stark northern land. Although Sibelius testily denied the implication that he wrote music merely descriptive of nature, he would say: "The seasons are like movements in a symphony. Spring is adagio, the fall is scherzo."

If his mosaic construction, his occasional savagery, his new instrumental groupings seemed shocking in the early 1890, they were already conventional in the 1920s to ears becoming domesticated to the wild rhythms of Igor Stravinsky or the pulverized harmonies of the atonalists. About Stravinsky and his experiments, Sibelius remained steadfastly unenthusiastic; the works of Arnold Schoenberg he found "unsympathetic." Speaking of his serious, sometimes forbidding style, Sibelius said: "Other composers may manufacture cocktails of every color; I offer the public pure water." But as he went on his own lonely way, he took huge, enthusiastic audiences with him: no serious composer was more popular with U.S. and British audiences in the 1930s; no contemporary composer has a more secure place in the current symphonic repertory.

Scherzo to Finale. His life was without outward struggle. A doctor's son, Sibelius had been back home after his studies in Germany for only six years when the Finnish government gave him a 2,000-marks-a-year pension (about $400) so that he could devote all his time to music. He settled down with his wife in a white clapboard house at Lake Tuusula, where they raised five daughters. By the early 1920s, he had turned out 13 tone poems, seven symphonies, countless songs and choral works. He attempted an opera with no success ("I like opera very much, but opera does not like me"). His imagination seemed to flag. He published his last works in 1929, retired to Lake Tuusula as one of the venerated elder statesmen of symphonic music.

During the years of retirement, Sibelius never moved far from his house, wrapped himself in cigar smoke and in music (he liked to listen to concerts from all over the world on a powerful short-wave set). Said he wistfully of jazz: "If I were only younger!" Of cowboy ballads: "They never get grey hair, do they?" He was said to have composed steadily, but nobody was able to discover just what the music was like. From 1932 on, when the late Serge Koussevitzky announced that he hoped to premiere Sibelius' Eighth Symphony with the Boston Symphony, audiences looked eagerly for a new score. Several times Sibelius' friends hinted that he was nearly ready to publish, but the new score did not appear.

Last week, the symphony presumably still unfinished, 91-year-old Jean Sibelius died of a cerebral hemorrhage several hours after rising and taking a final look at the wooded countryside that had nourished his art.

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