Date of composition: 1905-1906
Premiere: 29 December 1906 at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg under the direction of the composer
Duration: 13 minutes
Performances by the Berliner Philharmoniker:
first performed on 3 January 1908, conductor: Ferruccio Busoni
In 1828, the Finnish writer and philologist Elias Lönnrot began to roam his homeland. Visiting remote villages in Karelia, he had the old sagas recounted orally, as they had been passed down for centuries. Enthralled, Lönnrot recorded them and worked them into fifty so-called rune songs, which he published successively from 1834 onwards: the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, was born.
Jean Sibelius, two generations younger than Lönnrot, first encountered this “heart of Finnish culture”, as he called it, during his school years. However, it was only later that his boundless enthusiasm for it was awakened – by his future wife, Aino Järnefelt, a passionate supporter of the Finnish national movement. And so, from 1890 onwards, Sibelius began to immerse himself intensively in the epic. Starting with the early symphony Kullervo through to his final tone poem Tapiola, numerous works of his are rooted in Lönnrot’s mythical songs – including the tone poem Pohjola’s Daughter, composed in 1905/06.
Pohjola, or Pohja, is the Finnish Northland, home of the Sámi people. Here we encounter the aged hero Väinämöinen, who may be imagined as a magician, shaman, or bard. He dashes through the snowy forest in a horse-drawn sleigh when, suddenly, as if in a vision, he sees a graceful young woman on a rainbow in the sky: Pohjola’s daughter, spinning golden threads at her wheel. Väinämöinen is enchanted and immediately wishes to reach out and marry her. The beautiful maiden, however, sets a condition: first, her suitor must build a boat from the fragments of a spindle … Väinämöinen does his best, but severely injures himself with his axe – and must renounce his beloved.
In his symphonic fantasy, Sibelius juxtaposes two strikingly different sound worlds. Väinämöinen’s sphere is dark and unfathomable: over a sustained G minor chord in the low winds, a recitative in the cello emerges like an incantation. Bassoon and bass clarinet continue the motif, underpinned by rolling timpani, all very sombre and mysterious. However, the music soon gathers momentum, with the strings playing the same sixteenth-note figures over and over, resembling repetitive patterns familiar today from minimal music: is this a portrayal of the shaman Väinämöinen, or do we hear his sleigh racing through the snow?
Then comes a sudden brightening: Sibelius shifts to an almost glaring E major, using harp arpeggios and tremolos in the flutes to depict Pohjola’s daughter. The two worlds – dark and light, low and high – then begin to converge; over surging repetitions in the strings, cantilenas blossom and fanfares ring out. Nonetheless, painful dissonances reveal that no happy ending awaits this couple. In the final bars, Pohjola’s daughter ascends to the heavens, while Väinämöinen remains motionless, as if frozen, with a phrase in the cellos and double basses marked morendo: “dying away”.