For those connoisseurs in the mid and late 1890s who were tracking the latest developments of musical “progress” (Fortschritt) in Austro-Germanic art music, there was no doubt. The most innovative orchestral works of the decade were the tone poems of the young modernist, Richard Strauss. Debated everywhere in these circles were the four stunners that comprise his second cycle of tone poems, each of which outflanked its predecessor in extremity and provocation: Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (1894–5), Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), Don Quixote (1897), and Ein Heldenleben (1897–8). (A later work, Symphonia domestica [1902–3], not considered in this essay, may be regarded as an extension to this cycle, as might Eine Alpensinfonie [1915], for which Strauss jotted down a few sketches as early as 1899, considerably before taking up the work in earnest over a decade later.) For listeners today, becoming acquainted with their narrative programs along with a basic history of their composition is a simple task. Such background information is well known and widely available. The more pressing issue is to orient ourselves to the larger artistic purposes that motivated these works in the first place.

For all of its fame, Finlandia has not been much examined from an analytical point of view. Perhaps some commentators have considered this work too self-evident in its meaning and structure to merit extended study. Perhaps the piece's primitivist surface has discouraged close attention – its coarse-grained rhetoric, its thick brush-strokes, its stark primary colours. Or it may be that Sibelius's most widely known composition, a shopworn concert favourite and a national emblem, has seemed to exist in a space beyond commentary. And yet there is much of interest to observe about Finlandia. In addition, recent archival work in Finland, uncovering and recording two early endings for the piece – first presented to the public in 1899 as ‘Suomi herää’ (Finland Awakens) – has invited a reconsideration of the music. It may therefore be appropriate that we ask ‘Suomi herää’ to awaken into the world of more sustained reflection. The following discussion will proceed in two arcs: first, an elementary overview of the music alone; second, a consideration of hermeneutic questions of representation, allusion, and meaning, questions informed especially by an awareness of its original 1899 context.

Symphonic practice in later nineteenth-century Europe was no unitary activity that we should collapse into a crisp, linear narrative. The reality was messier. It would be more accurate to regard the world of orchestral composition as an arena of competing ideologies and diverse aims, a field of energy and circulation. To be sure, the energy was anything but random. Composers, performers, publishers, critics, academics, students and audiences channelled it through a flurry of enabling and constraining preconditions, historical and cultural circumstances sorted out differently by different groups. Among the most significant precondition was the idea of tradition – or, more to the point, the struggle over the presumed ownership of that tradition. By the second half of the century the European idea of the symphony as a high-status cultural achievement was nourished by lovingly shaped readings of the genre’s Austro-Germanic past. Commonly enough, the grounding shape was reinforced by a heroic tale: the ascent to the apex, Beethoven – embodying the long-sought liberation of the modern idea of greatness in instrumental music, the definitional moment of full symphonic adequacy, the ‘undeniable’ launching of ‘the new era of music’ (as Liszt put it in 1855) – followed by a crisis of continuation in subsequent decades.

Spurred also by external factors – technological, economic, political, ethnic-national – the symphonic crisis invited a number of solutions: it had been disseminated to several different publics on several different terms. As a result, by mid-century no central authority was able to establish a consensus concerning the best way to continue the tradition while still honouring its past.

The Fifth Symphony is the first large-scale work that Sibelius composed fully on the other side of his confrontation with the New Music revolutions. Even more than the major works that immediately precede it, The Bard (1913, rev. 1914), Luonnotar (1913), and The Oceanides (1914), it marks his exit from a prolonged crisis of self-reappraisal, coupled with an uneasy acceptance of the withdrawal phase of his own modernism. Although he had entered the 1909–14 period with hopes of still contending publicly as a competing modernist, he left it resigned to failure, at least as judged by the marketplace terms of the institution of art music; resigned to a geographical and spiritual separation from the new currents of continental music; resigned to what he habitually called his Alleingefühl (sense of being alone, or total ‘otherness’); and resigned, ultimately, to a solitary, interior journey of phenomenological concentration that seems to have had as its aim the uncovering of the hidden core, or ‘being’, of Klang (musical ‘sound’) itself.

One way to approach all of this is to underscore the degree to which the physical and psychological patterns of Sibelius's life in these years of change were split between two radically different modes of existence: the isolation of ‘Ainola’, his spare, idyllically rustic home in the forests of Järvenpää; and, in the sharpest possible contrast, his occasional visits to the grand capitals of European music, especially Berlin, Paris, and London.

Peaking in 1912 after the discouraging continental reception of his Fourth Symphony, Sibelius's Modernist/New Music crisis encompasses both compositional and sociological issues. The ‘emancipation of the dissonance’, for instance, was not merely an up-to-date harmonic preference. More fundamentally, it was a high-profile surface component of a growing artistic and culture-critical wave that was challenging the musical institutions of European liberal-bourgeois culture that the earlier modernists (the ‘Generation of the 1860s’) had been committed to nourishing. With its multiplicity of individualized accents, the triadically based, post-Wagnerian musical language of the 1889–1914 period was far from a culturally neutral system to be approached only in technical terms; rather, it was a sign of the institution of art music with which it was inextricably linked. Put another way, a key feature of symphonic modernism's musical language was that it thematized not only its ostensible ‘content’ (Till Eulenspiegels, fauns, Tuonelan swans, transfigurations and resurrections, seascapes, landscapes, and so on) but also the sociopolitical currents in which it thrived. When composers continued to reflect on (and with) that language in imperiled times, they were simultaneously affirming the continued validity of the cultural principles that had stirred those currents in the first place. This generational or cultural clash lay at the heart of the Modernist/New Music crisis that was spreading throughout prewar Europe.

A relatively recent phenomenon, advanced Sibelius scholarship is still in its earliest phases. Before the currently available editions of the works can be properly assessed and ‘critical editions’ prepared, when needed – not to mention more complete collections of the letters, diary entries, and so on – a wealth of data scattered in various cities still needs to be uncovered, inventoried, and made accessible. In addition to Erik Tawaststjerna's monumental biography, the central coordinating document of virtually all current thought on the composer, two important recent publications from Finnish scholars have continued the advancing trend of ground-level Sibelius scholarship. Fabian Dahlström's catalogue from 1987, The Works of Jean Sibelius, includes much publication and first-performance information. And Kari Kilpeläinen's impressive catalogue from 1991, The Jean Sibelius Musical Manuscripts at Helsinki University Library, inventories the largest collection of Sibelius sketches, drafts, early versions, and fair copies in the world. Much (but by no means all) of this huge collection was originally Sibelius's own, accumulated throughout his entire life. These personal manuscripts eventually passed into family hands and thence, in 1982, into the Helsinki University Library. Dahlström's current project at the Sibelius Museum in Turku is the production of an expansive thematic catalogue, which will also provide an overview of the principal printed and manuscript sources of the works.

It is customary for historians to draw a line between Sibelius's dissonant, austere Fourth Symphony (1911) and the seemingly more accessible, comfortable Fifth (whose three versions received their premieres in 1915, 1916, and 1919). The gap often alleged to separate the two symphonies is that dividing the spirit of artistic ‘progress’ in the earlier work from its presumed absence in the later. However simplistic, the line has served to divide a generally legitimate earlier Sibelius, whose works may be approached without apology (especially the earlier ones, which can be conveniently, though reductively, collapsed into the somewhat tainted category of ‘nationalism’), from a problematic, post-Fourth Symphony composer, whose idiosyncratic works clung to an eclipsed symphonic tradition in markedly anti-Romantic times.

Commentators have consequently embraced the Fourth Symphony, which in its uncompromising stance has traditionally been considered the most forward-looking of Sibelius's seven. The Fifth's more overt orchestral effects, triumphant conclusion, and popular appeal have required a bit of dodging, even for champions of the later works. ‘The fifth symphony, with its imposing finale and heroic proportions’, wrote Constant Lambert in 1934, ‘might at first sight seem to be a mature reversion to an earlier mood, and it may be described as the most obviously great of Sibelius’ symphonies.

In June 1914 Sibelius returned from a month-long visit to the United States. This had been one of the most successful trips of his life. In addition to the various honours bestowed on him by fervent American supporters, the trip had featured his new tone poem, The Oceanides, his largest post-Fourth Symphony work to date. Although he returned home in an expansive frame of mind, the sudden onset of the world war at the end of July changed utterly the conditions of his life. Above all, the ‘business’ aspect of his career fell instantly into tatters. His habitual trips to the principal centres of European music were now unthinkable, and even the hope of publishing significant works outside of Finland became snarled in politics and, in effect, ground to a halt. Thus at the moment when Sibelius was crystallizing a new set of compositional principles, a four-year period of professional stasis was imposed on him. The effect was as if he had been literally banished to the periphery: an eccentric, troubled, broodingly ‘mystical’ figure residing in emphatically non-‘modern’ conditions with his family and servants and meditating deeply on the changing seasonal moods and deep silences of Järvenpää's forests, overlooking Lake Tuusula. While, far away (or so it seemed), the European world was changing forever.

The Fifth Symphony's local details become clear only when considered within the workings of a single purpose being pursued throughout all of the movements. This is a truism for grasping symphonic works in general, but nowhere is it more critical than in this work. Here the sheer burden borne by the ideas demands such an approach, for these ideas are now claimed to generate the non-normative, ad hoc architecture (‘content-based form’). If we wish to perceive these unconventional aims, it can be useful to leave some of our conventional expectations behind.

One may consider the symphony's tonal planes, for instance, as slow, ‘protominimalist’ transformation processes. As a whole the work may be heard as a prolonged E♭-major sound sheet set into hierarchies of surface and subsurface motion – as a vast reflection on the symphonic sonority (Klang) of the E♭ tonic chord. This is the centre of gravity, from which colouristic excursions onto secondary (non-dominant) sonorities are launched, but back into which they inevitably fall. Sibelius illuminates the symphony with only five ‘tonal colours’: E♭, G, B, C, and G♭. In the first movement the gravitational centre, E♭, is attracted to two other secondary sonorities whose roots are a major third above and below, G and B (thus equally dividing the octave by major thirds).

A good threshold: Sibelius's words stand as a warning to commentators on his music. And they are reinforced by the current state of hermeneutics and critical theory, which would regard as naive any claim, implicit or explicit, to have objectively understood the workings of any cultural artifact, much less such a multifaceted and socio-aesthetically complex one as the Fifth Symphony. What follows here, then, reflects only the current state of my own dialogue with that work and the material and psychological conditions under which it arose – a dialogue with which I confess to having been fascinated for as long as I can remember.

Sibelius's work on the Fifth Symphony's three performed versions from summer 1914 to its eventual publication by Wilhelm Hansen in 1921 forms an enormously complex story that cannot be offered in full detail here. Merely to compare the three versions adequately would exceed the space allotted, but we are also confronted with numerous sketches, drafts, partial revisions, diary entries, letters, and the like.