The Symphony No. 5 in E♭ major, Op. 82, is a three-movement work for orchestra written from 1914 to 1915 by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. He revised it in 1916 and again from 1917 to 1919, at which point it reached its final form.
The Finnish government commissioned Sibelius to write the symphony in honor of his 50th birthday, 8 December 1915, which had been declared a national holiday.
History During his creative process, Sibelius wrote in his diary: "It was as if God the Father was throwing pieces of mosaic from the edge of heaven and asking me to figure out what the pattern was." (Entry of 10 April 1915.)
The original version of the work was premiered by the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sibelius on 8 December 1915, his 50th birthday. The second version, only part of which survives, was first performed by the Orchestra of Turun Soitannollinen Seura in Turku exactly one year later. The final version, which is the one most commonly performed today, was premiered again by the Helsinki Philharmonic, conducted by Sibelius, on 24 November 1919.
The first version of the new symphony kept much of his familiar orchestral style (consonant sonorities, woodwind lines in parallel thirds, rich melodic development, etc.) but also shows some similarities with the more modernist Fourth Symphony, featuring a few bitonal passages. The 1919 version seems more straightforward, monumental and classical, and also cleared away some digressions and ornaments. Sibelius commented on his revision: "I wished to give my symphony another – more human – form. More down-to-earth, more vivid."Cf. Kari Kilpeläinen, Booklet of the BIS-recording of the original version 1919 (Osmo Vänskä, Sinfonia Lahti)
The 1910s were a decade of change for the symphonic form, which had by then existed for well over a century. Meanwhile, various landmark works in other genres had presented further radical developments. In 1909, Arnold Schoenberg pushed for more and more dissonant and chromatic harmonies in his Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16. From 1910 to 1913, Igor Stravinsky premiered his innovative and revolutionary ballets The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring. Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy were at work developing and performing their impressionistic music. Though he had been in the public spotlight for nearly twenty years, Sibelius found his works receiving poor reviews for the first time with the 1911 premiere of his Symphony No. 4 and, as James Hepokoski has written, "was beginning to sense his own eclipse as a contending modernist."
These events may have brought Sibelius to a point of crisis, forcing him to choose between changing his style to fit with the radical changes in tonality and rhythmic language prevalent among younger composers around 1910, or continuing to develop the musical language he felt familiar with. The Finnish conductor and Sibelius specialist Hannu Lintu, in discussing Symphony No. 5 on television in 2018, said that Sibelius seems to have made a definite choice, a year or two after his previous symphony, to stay within the frames of harmonic language of late-19th-century romanticism; instead he would innovate in the realms of macrostructure and instrumental colouring.
Instrumentation The Fifth Symphony is scored for the following instruments, organized by family (woodwinds, brass, percussion, and strings):
2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets (in B), and 2 bassoons 4 horns (in F), 3 trumpets (in B), and 3 trombones Timpani Violins (I and II), violas, cellos, and double basses
The original version of the symphony included a part for bass clarinet.
Structure
This symphony is unusual in its structure:
Of Sibelius's multi-movement symphonies, this is the only one where every movement is in a major key.
The symphony's form is symmetrical when it comes to tempo: the first movement starts slow but ends with the fast scherzo. The second movement is neither slow nor fast; it forms a calm intermezzo. Then the third movement begins fast but ends slowly. The duration is approximately 32 minutes.
First movement
Sibelius originally intended this to be two separate movements, but linked the slower introduction with the faster, waltz-like "scherzo" section to create a single form. The movement opens with a "horn call", containing much of the musical material of the work.
Though written in sonata form, the first movement can be structurally analysed in many different ways. Sibelian scholars – Cecil Gray (1935),Gray, Cecil. Sibelius: The Symphonies. London: Oxford University Press, 1935. Gerald Abraham (1947),Abraham, Gerald. The Music of Sibelius. New York: W. W. Norton, 1947. Simon Parmet (1955),Parmet, Simon. The Symphonies of Sibelius: a Study in Musical Appreciation. Translated by Kingsley A. Hart. London: Cassell, 1959. Robert Layton (1965),Layton, Robert. Sibelius. London: J. M. Dent and Sons; New York: Rarrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965. and James Hepokoski (1993)Hepokoski, James. Sibelius, Symphony No. 5. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993. – have their disagreements and individual ideas as to the movement's formal divides. They debate such points as its separation into two movements, the existence of two expositions, how to functionally describe the Scherzo and Trio, and the exact location of the beginning of the recapitulation and coda.
Differing analytical views Gray, the first musicologist to write on the piece's structure, makes no mention of sonata form, yet refers to the existence of two different subjects, seeming to imply that the movement is in sonata form. Abraham is one of the first to analyse the work in terms of sonata form and clearly lays out where he believes each section begins and why. He shows that the work opens with a double exposition, each with distinct A- and B-group material, then moves into the development of this material. He explains the distinctly melodic section beginning at the Allegro moderato as a Scherzo and Trio used as a substitute for the second half of the development. Layton disagrees with Abraham and considers the Scherzo to be the beginning of the recapitulation.
Most musicologists agreed with this analysis until Hepokoski's 1993 text Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 offered an altogether different interpretation. He argues that the piece can only be analysed in terms of what he has called "rotational form". He maintains the same divisional sections of the movement – double exposition, Scherzo, and recapitulation – but uses new vocabulary for its analysis. Hepokoski argues that Sibelius allows the material to determine form in many of his works, developing by the necessity of the music and not by an 18th- or 19th-century template; in the Fifth Symphony a circular rotation or strophe passes through sections of material, further developing it with each rotation. Through this analysis Hepokoski maintains the general location of sectional changes described by the earlier musicologists and agrees that the movement can roughly be analysed in sonata form.
Fusion of movements The first analytical point at which musicologists have disagreed is how to confront the clear separation of the first movement into two parts. In fact, in the first two versions of the work, Sibelius divided his symphony into four movements with the Allegro moderato section of what is now the first movement separated to form a Scherzo movement. In the final 1919 version, the character changes at this point with what Gray describes as "superficial dissimilarity and independence of each other". Earlier musicologists like Parmet analysed the movement as two separate parts while Gray stressed the separateness of these sections while acknowledging their coexistence in one movement. They did so because of the clear meter change from to . Furthermore, after this meter change, where rehearsal letters should continue from N to the end of the alphabet, they return to A, a clear sign of a beginning of a new movement.
More recent musicologists disagree with this separation into two movements on the grounds that both sections are based on the same material and in combination allow for analysis in sonata form. Abraham cites as precedent the fusion of these sections in Sibelius's Symphony No. 2 and Symphony No. 3, where the Scherzo and Finale movements are combined into one. The fusion is reflected in the score as well. Though there is a change in meter at measure 114, the tempo and compound division of the beat do not change: four measures of the Allegro moderato correspond to one measure of the previous section. The gradual accelerando, which begins at the end (the climax) of the opening Tempo molto moderato and leads into the Allegro moderato Scherzo, continues uninterrupted to the end of the movement; indeed, without access to a score, it is difficult for the listener to identify exactly where the Scherzo section begins. Most importantly, the clear use and development of the same materials throughout indicate that this is indeed one movement. In fact, Sibelius himself most likely thought of it as one movement as he published and performed the first movement of his final 1919 version without break.
Double exposition The second point musicologists have disputed about the first movement is the existence of two expositions. The symphony begins with soft calls in the horns, the first horn playing what becomes the main material of the A-group while the others play long notes below. The music has its own rhythmic character ("long-short-short-long") and is centred on the interval of the perfect fourth. This first theme continues in the horns and bassoons while increasingly the music is developed by the woodwinds playing sixteenth-notes in parallel third motion until the second theme is presented and eventually takes over in measure 9. It is agreed that the B-group begins by measure 18. At this point a third theme is heard in the woodwinds – like the first theme also built on the perfect fourth but this time with the defining rhythm "short-long-short" – with tremolo accompaniment in the strings. At measure 28, the fourth theme enters still in G major and distinguished by its duple (equal) subdivision of the beat in the horns and woodwinds as a chorale-like chord progression. This exposition concludes with the return of the third theme, now rhythmically in diminution and melodically circular, fading away to an afterthought.
Hepokoski points out that one would expect the end of an exposition to come with a clear cadence in the new key, in this case G major. But as the third theme fades away it is replaced in measure 36 by the first theme of the A-group, here still in G major. Though this next section proceeds in an unexpected key – G major then changing back to the tonic E in measure 41 – Abraham and Layton both consider it a second or "counter" exposition, like the 18th-century repeat of the exposition. They reference the recurrence of both the A- and B-groups almost in their entirety, though here they are used to emphasize the tonic.