A Wee Bit of a Scottish Fantasy

What: The Harrisburg Symphony, with violinist Peter Sirotin, conducted by Stuart Malina

When: Saturday, Jan 11, 2025, at 7:30; Sunday, Jan. 12, 2025, at 3:00 (there's a pre-concert talk before each performance)

Who: Valerie Coleman: Umoja - Max Bruch: Scottish Fantasy - Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 2.

Where: The Forum in Downtown Harrisburg (PA)

The Harrisburg Symphony on stage at the Forum

 

This weekend, Stuart Malina conducts the Harrisburg Symphony’s first concert of the New Year which includes concertmaster Peter Sirotin as the soloist for Max Bruch’s “Scottish Fantasy.” If you're in the Central Pennsylvania region, you may familiar with Sirotin not only from the Harrisburg Symphony but also as a member of the Mendelssohn Piano Trio, a teacher based at Messiah University, and, with his wife, pianist Ya-Ting Chang, as co-directors of Market Square Concerts.

The symphony's program concludes with the 2nd Symphony of Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius, which I wrote about earlier (you can read it here and listen to a full performance by Finnish musicians of the Turku Philharmonic conducted by Leif Segerstam). 

If it helps to be Finnish to play a definitive interpretation of Sibelius – perhaps because they’re used to the snow and the cold we associate with Finland and which presumably, if not inspired Sibelius’ music, informed his style – does it help to be Scottish to play Bruch’s Fantasy? After all, it was written by a German born along the banks of the Rhine, writing it at the request of a Spanish violinist, Pablo de Sarasate, and which premiered in Liverpool, England. Oh, and at the time, he’d never set foot in Scotland.

While Bruch’s Fantasy is based on several Scottish folk songs, he didn’t collect them in Scotland but found a copy of the Scots Musical Museum, a six-volume collection with 100 songs in each volume, originally published by James Johnson in Edinburgh between 1787 and 1803, in a library in Munich.

Judging from the title on first blush, you might think this is one of those short showcases based on folk melodies or popular airs to entertain the audience and give the soloist a chance to dazzle them with virtuosic technique. One famous example would be the “Gypsy Airs,” Ziguenerweisen, by the great Spanish violinist, Pablo de Sarasate.

Instead it’s a full four-movement work of about a half-hour’s duration for violin and orchestra with a very prominent harp part (often, the harpist is placed to the front of the orchestra just behind the soloist), each movement making use of various Scots folk songs. Rather than being a medley of neatly arranged tunes, Bruch uses them symphonically, developing them beyond merely stating the melodies as if they were original themes he’d work into his own composition. Each tune has its own specifically Scottish flavor – no comments about Scotch or haggis, please – and the work as a whole brings to mind the musical souvenir Felix Mendelssohn brought back from a visit to Scotland in 1829 where his inspiration initially came from visiting the ruins of Holyrood Castle in Edinburgh.

Curiously, Bruch’s work is not a souvenir in the same sense: he never visited Scotland until the year after the Fantasy was premiered in 1881 in Liverpool, England, where Bruch had been the conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic Society. This would place him not that far from the Scottish border. And there’s no proof he ever did hear what a Celtic harp sounded like.

So how did a composer born in the Prussian city of Köln who spent most of his time in Berlin come to write a work based on Scottish folk songs?

Here’s one of my favorite performances of the piece, by the Russian virtuoso David Oistrakh recorded in 1962 with Jascha Horenstein and the London Symphony Orchestra:

I. Introduction: Grave. Adagio cantabile – Billed as being in E-flat Major (generally considered a bright key and, to Beethoven at least, one that could have heroic implications), the Fantasy opens with a slow, brooding introduction in the dark shadow key of E-flat Minor as if setting the scene for the tales about to be told. It was apparently inspired by reading a passage in a novel by Sir Walter Scott, “an old bard contemplating the ruins of a castle, and lamenting the glorious times of old.” Switching to the major mode, the tune of the Adagio cantabile, “Through the Wood, Laddie,” is often misidentified as “Auld Rob Morris,” a traditional tune Bruch incidentally set earlier in 1863 as one of his “12 Scottish Songs” (so you see, this was not his first time using Scots tunes in his compositions). The "Laddie" tune recurs at the end of the 2nd and 4th movements, as well.

II. Scherzo: Allegro – This is a lively dance movement, introducing “The Dusty Miller,” a tune dating back to 1700, over a bagpipe drone in the bass (a stereotypical reference to rustic music far removed from the genteel world of court and city). Laddie is apparently still working his way through the woods as Bruch makes a transition from his lively scherzo to the slow movement that follows without a break.

III. Andante sostenuto – This is the romantic core of the Fantasy and no doubt benefits from Bruch’s own experience writing for the voice (primarily known at the time as a choral composer, Bruch was nine when he wrote his very first piece, celebrating the birthday of his mother, a professional singer. The song here is a 19th-Century song (probably not technically a folksong), “I’m a’doun for lack o’Jonnie.”

IV. Finale: Allegro guerriero – The tempo indication here is a bit unusual and the only other time I’ve ever seen guerriero (“war-like”) used like this was in the finale of Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony. Not surprisingly, Bruch apparently wrote to a friend that’s where he found the expression and decided to use it himself. And why not? The tune here is based on an old battle song, “Hae tuti taiti,” more famous with different lyrics added by Robert Burns as “Scots wa hae wi Wallace bled” (Scots who have with Wallace bled”) [Wallace was a Scottish leader captured by the English in 1305 and drawn-and-quartered for treason against King Edward I]. Historically considered to have been sung at the Battle of Bannockburn under Robert the Bruce in 1314 and again by the Scottish troops fighting with their allies the French at the Siege of Orleans with Joan of Arc in 1429, it was long considered the unofficial Scottish anthem, later supplanted by the popularity of “Scotland the Brave.” At the end, the Laddie makes one more appearance, now presumably out of the woods, to help bring the Fantasy to a triumphant conclusion.

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So how did a German composer write a fantasy on Scottish folk songs for a Spanish violinist?

Pablo de Sarasate was already established as one of the leading violinists of his day when he met Max Bruch in 1871. Bruch completed his 1st Violin Concerto, the famous G Minor Concerto, in 1866 and revised it after an unsuccessful premiere with the help of the great violinist, Joseph Joachim (Friend of Brahms and a composer in his own right). It would eventually go on to become his most famous piece and one of the most popular concertos in the repertoire. So taken by Sarasate’s playing, Bruch wrote a second concerto for him, which they premiered in London in 1877 (the year, incidentally, Brahms wrote his violin concerto for Joachim).

A little over a year later, Bruch told a friend “Yesterday, when I thought vividly about Sarasate, the marvelous artistry of his playing re-emerged in me. I was lifted anew and I was able to write, in one night, almost half of the Scottish Fantasy that has been so long in my head."

When Bruch asked Sarasate for a meeting to collaborate on the new piece, knowing Sarasate had a keen interest in Scottish music, he was disappointed when Sarasate failed to respond, so he turned to Joachim instead who helped him with technical details and suggestions (he had done the same for Brahms but Brahms ignored every one of them). Bruch completed the work, then conducted the premiere with the orchestra he conducted in Liverpool but was upset by Joachim’s “poor performance” of the piece, claiming “he annihilated it.”

As a result, Bruch renewed his contact with Sarasate, they became friends again and then performed it together for the first time in London in 1883.

The score of the work, when it was published in 1880 (between the time he completed it and the premiere the following February), was “dedicated to my friend Pablo de Sarasate” but they didn’t reconcile till after the premiere, not performing it together for the first time till London in 1883. (I wonder what Bruch, an ardent conservative who favored Brahms over the modernists Wagner and Liszt, felt when their concert became a memorial tribute to the late Richard Wagner who’d died five weeks earlier?)

The official German title, as it appears on the score, is “Fantasie: für die Violine mit Orchester und Harfe unter freier Benutzung schottischer Volksmelodien, Op. 46.” or Fantasy for the Violin with Orchestra and Harp, then in much smaller print underneath, freely using Scottish folk melodies. When he performed it with Sarasate in London, it was listed on the program as “Concerto for Violin (Scotch).” At another concert in Breslau (now Wrocław in present-day Poland), also with Sarasate, it was called the “Third Violin Concerto (with free use of Scottish themes).” What eventually became Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 3 (Op. 58) was completed in 1891.

When precisely the Scottish Fantasy became known as the “Scottish Fantasy,” I’m not sure. It did not catch on with other violinists, certainly not like his First Concerto did. The American violinist Maud Powell, who’d played Bruch’s 1st under Joachim’s baton in Berlin in 1883, included the Scottish Fantasy in her active repertoire. She also gave the American premieres of the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius concertos, and played the Dvořák concerto with the New York Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall under the composer’s supervision in 1894. 

But by the early 20th Century the work had disappeared from the concert stage until Jascha Heifetz, then in his mid-40s, recorded it with William Steinberg and the RCA Victor Symphony in 1947. You can listen to it here transferred from the original 78rpm records. The sound isn’t great and the “breaks” when you’d change from one side to the next can be annoying – it took six sides to contain the whole work – but it gives you an idea of how people heard it before there were stereo LPs, digital CDs and modern day sound-file technology.

While Heifetz played it over 100 times and recorded it at least two more times in his career, even playing it live on TV in 1971 (which I got to see, much to the chagrin of my fraternity brothers who were missing a Star Trek re-run…), it eventually became part of the mainstream repertoire. 

By the way, I remember being told by a friend of Scottish descent that “Scots” and “Scottish” are the preferred terms when referring to the People of Scotland: “Scotch,” he said, “is what we drink.”

I was reminded of this, seeing the reference to the “Scotch” Concerto, above. But then, in the folk song that’s the basis of Bruch’s finale, “Hae tuti taiti,” one of the lyrics used for this tune – several have been superimposed on it, including a poem by Robert Burns – contains the immortal refrain,

Fill up your bumpers high,
We’ll drink a’ your barrels dry,
Out upon him, fye! oh, fye!
That winna do't again!

Slàinte!

– Dick Strawser

Sibelius & his 2nd Symphony

Not long after his 78th birthday, Jean Sibelius wrote to his son-in-law, “My second symphony is a confession of the soul.” What could he – or any other composer – mean by that?

This weekend – Saturday Jan. 11th/7:30; Sunday Jan. 12th/3:00 – the Harrisburg Symphony opens their first concert of the New Year with Valerie Coleman's Umoja (Anthem of Unity) and concertmaster Peter Sirotin playing Max Bruch's Scottish Fantasy, a large-scale work for violin and orchestra in four movements that might as well be a concerto. The title suggests something of a "smaller" nature, a kind of virtuosic potpourri on folk songs similar to the "Gypsy Airs" written by Bruch's dedicatee, Pablo de Sarasate, so originally Bruch called it his "Violin Concerto No. 3 (Scotch)." You can watch a live TV broadcast (imagine, network TV broadcasting a concert of classical music!?!) with none other than Jascha Heifetz, broadcast in 1971 (not the best video and sound reproduction, here, but hey, it's Heifetz). Granted, it could benefit from having a conductor to help the orchestra through some of the gnarlier passages, but again, it's Heifetz's playing that's the draw here... 

I should probably do a separate post about it, anyway, so maybe I'll get around to that since, with this cold weather, I don't really feel like doing much else.

Speaking of "cold weather," the symphony that concludes the program is one we associate with the ice and snow of the composer's native Finland. Since I'd written about Jean Sibelius' Symphony No. 2 for a Harrisburg Symphony performance in 2015, I thought I'd recycle most of it from the old Harrisburg Symphony Blog I used to write back-in-the-day.

The performance I've chosen was recorded at a concert in December of 2015 with Leif Segerstam conducting the Turku Philharmonic, an all-Finnish performance. It may be painful to see him looking "so old" as he approaches the podium at the beginning, but the transformation as the music takes over belies the idea of "old age." (He died this past October at the age of 80 following a short bout of pneumonia. Two things I did not know about him before revising this post: as a composer, he wrote 371 symphonies (how is that possible!?!); in one of his last interviews in March of 2024, he described himself as being autistic.

Sibelius' 2nd symphony, a long one often clocking in around 45 minutes (the longest of Sibelius' seven symphonies), is in the traditional four movements, though the scherzo blends directly into the finale without a break after a long build-up that, when it finally arrives, is a great example of the power of harmonic tension.

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One of those commonplace things to say after hearing Sibelius' 2nd Symphony is that it's a depiction of the bleak Finnish landscape, its sound cold and forbidding like the Finnish winter, forgetting there could be any other type of landscape or season in Finland.

Rapallo, Italy

So I begin by pointing out here is where the 2nd Symphony came into being: it was on a visit to Rapallo in Sunny Italy in 1901 that Sibelius jotted down his first ideas to begin sketching what became the second movement, perhaps the bleakest sounds in the entire work. Perhaps, one might argue, he was homesick? Perhaps, another might respond, this was what music sounded like in Sibelius' soul?

After all, another might argue, it was a trip to Italy that produced one of Brahms' most light-hearted moments, the finale of his 2nd Piano Concerto. Why, then, was Sibelius' response so... dreary?

Kajanus & Sibelius, 1894

Sibelius was 35 years old when he began this new symphony in early 1901 – the previous year had not been an easy one. He had married Aino Järnefelt in 1892 and by the turn of the new century they had three daughters, but the youngest, Kirsti, born in 1898, died of typhoid fever in February, 1900, which sent Aino into a period of depression and Sibelius deeper into his drinking problem. Before this, his love of alcohol had been of a more “celebratory” nature, part of the partying lifestyle he had developed as a law student in Helsinki in his 20s. In the mid-1890s, it was part of his “Symposium,” the group that met at a Helsinki hotel cafe where discussions about art would last late into the night and be accompanied by vast quantities of alcohol. But now, after the death of his child, his drinking became darker and more dangerous.

That spring, his friend and fellow drinking buddy, the conductor Robert Kajanus, was taking his orchestra on a European tour of works by Finnish composers that would present 19 concerts in 13 cities, culminating at the Paris Exhibition. On the programs were several of Sibelius' works including his new 1st Symphony, revised after its premiere the previous year, along with the equally new and wildly popular Finlandia, two of the Lemminkainen Legends (including the Swan of Tuonela) written in 1895, and excerpts from the King Christian II Suite, written two years earlier for a friend's play. This would be the first time Sibelius' music would've been heard outside of Finland.

Swedish and Danish critics were enthusiastic, those in Berlin especially where one viewed him as “a composer of great talent, someone who knew how to express his elegiac feelings and pathos, but who went to extremes in his bursts of passion.” Another called him “a formidable talent.” Paris was less enthusiastic but given the successes particularly in Berlin, it was easier to take.

In October, a friend gave him money for a trip to Italy, suggesting it would do them good, so Sibelius took his family first to Berlin where they stayed till January but by that time, however, all of the money had spent and they hadn't even left for Italy. So he borrowed more money and soon arrived in the coastal town of Rapallo on the Italian Riviera where he began work on the slow movement of a new symphony which eventually took precedence over a proposed work inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy.

In the margins, he scratched out comments about the meeting of “Death with Don Juan,” a scene from the original legend comparable to the “Statue Scene” in Mozart's setting, Don Giovanni.

But soon his second daughter, 6-year-old Ruth, became ill with peritonitis and had a fever of 104°. She recovered but the family was grounded so she could convalesce. Sibelius traveled quickly to Rome where he jotted down themes in a notebook that would later be used in Pohjola's Daughter and Night Ride and Sunrise. Returning to his family, they went to Florence once Ruth was well enough to travel, then they returned home in May, stopping off in Prague where Sibelius met Antonin Dvořák.

But he was no sooner home than he was off again to Germany to conduct his music at a June festival in Heidelburg – again, to favorable reviews. Other conductors began performing his works elsewhere – music from King Christian II was the first music by Sibelius to be heard in England that fall.

Sibelius' home in 1901

In the autumn, once back in Finland, he resumed his work on the 2nd Symphony which he completed early the next year in time for him to conduct its March premiere.

A triumph, his newest work – regarded by one influential critic as “an absolute masterpiece, one of the few symphonic creations of our time that point in the same direction as the symphonies of Beethoven" – was viewed as a “heroic” symphony “imbued with a patriotic spirit” by Finns pessimistic over the state of Russian oppression.

(Keep in mind, Finland had been an autonomous Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire since 1809 but only recently had the Russians begun to censor nationalistic views in what was called the “Russification of Finland” – independence would not come until after the 1917 Revolutions toppled the tsar and that, only after a brief but fierce civil war.)

Though Sibelius denied he wrote the symphony in support of nationalism as any kind of outwardly patriotic statement (don't forget, his Finlandia had been an overtly patriotic work written only three years earlier: what would patriotic Finns hope for?) or that he wrote it inspired by his own dark drama ultimately overcoming Fate (if not Beethoven's 3rd, why not Beethoven's 5th?), he did write that one comment years later in which, looking back on his career over a distance of four decades, he described the symphony as “a confession of the soul.”

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In the usual scheme of things, we think of Classical Music Composers as child prodigies like Mozart or Mendelssohn or who, like Schubert, died young. Remembering that Sibelius completed his 2nd Symphony when he was 36, remember that at 36 Schubert had already been dead five years and Mozart, one; Mendelssohn would die at 38. Let's face it, judging from the 19th Century, becoming a composer was not a guarantee of longevity.

Sibelius, 1923 at 57

But Sibelius, born on Dec. 8th, 1865, died on Sept. 20th, 1957, at the age of 91. The only thing was, he had essentially stopped composing around the time he was in his early-60s, living an almost 30 more years as fans waited and hoped for new pieces from a composer who'd risen to become one of the most popular living composers – and then, without anything new to show, fallen quietly into a kind of old-fashioned oblivion.

To many younger musicians today, Sibelius is a music notation software on their computer developed by the Finns (actually, twins Ben and Jonathan Finn who were British students) in the mid-1980s.

But there was a time when Sibelius ruled the concert halls of Europe, especially England, and America. In the fall of 1920 when Sibelius was 54, the Eastman School of Music offered him a professorship which he considered for a long time before turning them down. He had already been to America as part of Yale's commission of a tone-poem that eventually became known as The Oceanides, premiered at Yale's summer music festival in Norfolk in 1914. Sibelius made the ocean journey, finishing the work during the voyage, then stayed to visit Niagara Falls, receiving during his tour an honorary doctorate from Yale, and meeting various American composers (as well as a former President, Howard Taft).

He made plans to return the following year for an extensive American tour which, he wrote home, would solve his financial problems. Unfortunately, by the time he returned from this trip, World War I had already begun which cut him off not only from his American plans but from his Berlin publisher and from the rest of the world.

Then, after the 1930s, when it became clear he was no longer producing new works – the long awaited 8th Symphony appears only to have been a myth, its near-completion and possible premiere a constant tease – his star began to fade. In 1938, the writer Theodore Adorno attacked Sibelius, writing, “If Sibelius is good, this invalidates the standards of musical quality that have persisted from Bach to Schoenberg.” And in 1955, on the occasion of the composer's 90th birthday, French composer and conductor René Liebowitz called Sibelius “the worst composer in the world.”

Sibelius' response, typical of any embattled artist, was to tell his friends not to pay attention to the critics, adding that no one ever raised a statue to a critic.

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Today, Sibelius has his champions and his detractors. It is curious, especially concerning how modern music evolved in the early-20th Century. Sibelius' style is hardly traditional – the 4th Symphony is undoubtedly one of the most austere works by a “romanticist” ever written – but he is not ground-breaking in the sense of Claude Debussy or Igor Stravinsky or Arnold Schoenberg. Perhaps part of that is because of his Finnish roots, outside the usual Western European circuit.

He is not a folklorist despite his reliance on ancient tales from the Kalevala that appear in The Swan of Tuonela of the Lemminkainen Legends or his early symphonic work, Kullervo. His musical language is not inspired by folk music though, for a time, he studied the “ancient runes” of Old Finland and incorporated some of them in his early music (the “Karelia” Suite, for instance) but otherwise, however much it might have shaped his melodies, it had little influence on his style.

Near Sibelius' birthplace

He is best known for seven abstract symphonies and his programmatic tone-poems ranging from Finlandia to Pohjola's Daughter to Tapiola, again, bristling with Nordic references. If anything, much of his music is shaped by the Finnish landscape: Nature was always one of his major influences and one of the typical responses by Westerners is to compare his music to Finland's “bleak wintry landscapes.”

In further posts to celebrate the 150th Anniversary, I'll summarize his biography – check back here for the link – but for now, I'd like to conclude with some quotes from Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Tim Page's 1996 article for the Washington Post about coming to terms with Sibelius at the end of the 20th Century:

“There are two things to be said straightaway about Sibelius. First, he is terribly uneven (much of his chamber music, a lot of his songs and most of his piano music might have been churned out by a second-rate salon composer from the 19th century on an off afternoon). Second, at his very best, he is often weird.

“For example, the Symphony No. 6 (1923) is one of the century's most curious masterpieces – serene, beatific, almost Mozartean in its clarity and grace, suffused with warm winter light. It is rarely played, has little to do with anything else Sibelius ever composed (what to make of the second movement, that long series of musical question marks?), and its interpreters have a habit of trying to turn it into Tchaikovsky or the more traditionally "romantic" Sibelius Symphony No. 5 or something else that they might recognize – trying, in other words, to make it fit into a pattern. And it doesn't fit – which is not at all to say it doesn't work.”

His music, for all its epic grandeur at times – thinking of the 2nd and 5th Symphonies – is also full of dramatic silences, that silence which is a significant part of Nature.

Page goes on to say, “If silence can be defined as an absence of sound, it may be helpful for the novice, when coming to Sibelius, to consider his music a temporary respite from quietude. The image of Sibelius as a brooding poet of the spare, near-motionless, unpeopled North is fairly hackneyed by now, but it is no less true for all that.”

- Dick Strawser

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The portrait of Kajanus & Sibelius is a detail from Akseli Gallen-Kallala's painting depicting the "Symposium" in 1894 which also features the artist and the (face-down) composer-conductor, Oskar Merikanto.