Unexpected reactions to music

[Serial_Apologist]

Just a minute, wasn't he very good at avoiding slips of hesitation, repetition, and deviation and at the end of many rounds grabbing a point?

Yes, and always in that spectacularly lugubrious way that belied all personal gain. I miss Clement: I disagreed with much of his politics, but he would have made the Coalition more interesting, I think.

[kea]

I don't remember the circumstances that led to these particular reactions, but for me Sibelius's 3rd creates an impression of windswept loneliness, 4th one of slow creeping horror and tragedy, and 6th one of emotional emptiness and desolation (the most accurate musical representation of depression I know of). These impressions are fading a little by now—I rarely if ever listen to Sibelius—but I've been unable to see e.g. a neoclassical influence in the 3rd until someone pointed it out, or to read any humour into the scherzo and finale of the 4th, or similarly see where most of the normative views are 'coming from'.

[richardfinegold]

I don't remember the circumstances that led to these particular reactions, but for me Sibelius's 3rd creates an impression of windswept loneliness, 4th one of slow creeping horror and tragedy, and 6th one of emotional emptiness and desolation (the most accurate musical representation of depression I know of). These impressions are fading a little by now—I rarely if ever listen to Sibelius—but I've been unable to see e.g. a neoclassical influence in the 3rd until someone pointed it out, or to read any humour into the scherzo and finale of the 4th, or similarly see where most of the normative views are 'coming from'.

3 never struck me as depressive. I always thought of it as one of Sibelius more life affirming works. It is interesting how different listeners react to a work.

[cloughie]

3 never struck me as depressive. I always thought of it as one of Sibelius more life affirming works. It is interesting how different listeners react to a work.

Rfg I agree with you about 3, though 4 does have a chill to it. It is interesting that for whatever reason Karajan did not record 3 and there is no 3 or 6 in the forthcoming Ormandy Sony box which will have 2 each of 1 2 and 7, and does not include the 50s mono recordings of 4 and 5, Leminkainen Suite and other tone poems.

[Roehre]

3 never struck me as depressive. I always thought of it as one of Sibelius more life affirming works. It is interesting how different listeners react to a work.

3 and 6 are IMO the "lightest" of the seven.
Though both 4 and 7 are the "heaviest", "darkest" of the lot, these are the two which I like most, in that order too, for the contrast between the life affirming and the low feeling passages .
For me the same qualities which make Mahler 6, 7, 9 and 10 my favourites.

[kea]

3 never struck me as depressive. I always thought of it as one of Sibelius more life affirming works. It is interesting how different listeners react to a work.

The heroic aspects of Sibelius invariably ring false for me; as though he could never compose anything genuinely life-affirming. E.g. the triumphant finale of No. 2 sounds completely wrong, impersonal, somewhat static. The same with No. 3 which is an anti-life-affirming conclusion, one that just turns the preceding music into stone sculpture. Very magnificent sculpture it is, but it is stone. It does not move.

I think the thing about No. 3 is that it's the first symphony in which Sibelius tried to purge all traces of humanity. A vigorous main theme that is quickly revealed to have no actual forward motion or development—a theme that describes not some kind of human drama but a static natural phenomenon (of great energy mind—for example, the Red Spot of Jupiter). A second theme that is just slight variations on a short fragment, and then a long 'development section' consisting entirely of soft running semiquavers, like the movements of pond scum across a microscope slide. The overall effect of the first movement for me is that of sitting on, I don't know, some lonely Scottish hilltop while keenly observing the minute changes in one's environment. The 'slow' movement (Sibelius's best, probably) is just an endless downward spiral of one melody that never gets out of its rut and grinds to a halt. Then a combined scherzo-finale whose first part captures the 'windswept loneliness' I mentioned—in spite of all its activity it feels very bleak and unchanging.

No. 6 is indeed light, but I would also describe it as dark; the darkest symphony, not only by Sibelius but by anyone. It's hard for me to describe exactly how this is so except for, as in No. 3, the complete absence of humanity. Only somehow he does convey the sense of... something that used to be there, but isn't now. Emotion, perhaps. When I get fanciful I imagine what he's describing is a world that is brightly lit, but in which all life—people, animals, plants, bacteria, whatever—has gone utterly extinct, with no signs left to suggest it was ever there; with me, the listener, being the last survivor, who at the end dies. That's the kind of piece it is but, as I say, no one else seems to see it that way.

[Serial_Apologist]

3 and 6 are IMO the "lightest" of the seven.
Though both 4 and 7 are the "heaviest", "darkest" of the lot, these are the two which I like most, in that order too, for the contrast between the life affirming and the low feeling passages .
For me the same qualities which make Mahler 6, 7, 9 and 10 my favourites.

I get that same feeling from much of Bartok's middle period music, often thinking he (and Mahler too, for that matter) must have been bi-polar.