Underrated Classical Music: Sibelius's Pelleas

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iulnOW18hfg&fbclid=IwAR1WAGrOxR1wASfHnvy0b97_TKMR1AipzQ8wjcQJ3ImimeXYxcvHuCtMnDw

I dont' believe it. A Zinman Pelleas (Sibelius). Pelleas is, I think, Sibelius's most underrated work. At least The Tempest has its champions, but Pelleas just floats under the radar - everybody who hears it loves it, but there is so much Sibelius and even now with 50 Finnish conductors proliferating on the world scene like rabbits, we still hear not even half of it regularly.

I could do a long Sibelius post. He has gone slightly down and up in my estimation as I get to know the work of contemporaries better like Nielsen and Janacek, but the fundamental fact of Sibelius is that, like Brahms, there is nothing but dependability in Sibelius's music. It has this overwhelming spiritual center, and the very act of listening is a sort of catharsis. But Sibelius has even truer forerunners than Brahms. The only composers I can truly compare Sibelius to are Bach and Palestrina. there is a kind of purity to the part writing which is unique to them. Bach and Sibelius clearly grew up with the hymns of Luther in their ears, and there is a spirituality that is unlike any other composer. In Bach's case, the center of his musical imagination is obviously the Protestant Church, in Sibelius's case, it is just as obviously the dark Nordic woodlands, but within those woodlands is a pagan spirituality completely unlike any other composer.

Is Sibelius one of the greatest of the great? There are moments when I truly wonder if he is, but there is also a kind of humanism that Sibelius lacks, and sometimes I think that is a willful choice on his part. He prefers the inanimate and the animals within it, and that's certainly his right, but for those of us dependent on music for the strength to go on, there are moments when the gloomy and bombastic lack of humanity leaves a sour aftertaste.

Such is the sublimity of his vision that there are a number works which belong among the very greatest ever written (Tapiola, symphonies 4-7, En Saga), and there are also so much wonderful light music for the salon. Pelleas is a seamless unity of those two sides of his musical imagination, and consequently one of his greatest and most renewable works. On days like today when some of us desperately need the morale to go on, Sibelius is perfectly attune what we need.