The Six Symphonies

Abstract

The six symphonies of Finnish composer Erkki Melartin (1875 - 1937) and those of his more famous compatriot Jean Sibelius (1865 - 1957) were written in the same years (1899 - 1925), but they couldn't sound more different and still be products of the same time and place. Melartin's symphonies remained products of the late Romantic age. It is the sound of Gustav Mahler, not Sibelius, that haunts Melartin's Sixth. Melartin received his advanced composition training in Vienna under Robert Fuchs during just those years when Mahler reigned supreme at the Imperial Opera. He went back to Finland to become the first conductor to play any Mahler work in a Nordic country. He composed a great deal of light or salon music, but also wrote opera and regarded his six symphonies as the centerpiece of his compositional legacy. Although he showed no interest in leaving the Romantic style behind, he did adapt to new styles, albeit rather slowly. He wrote this symphony for a concert organized to celebrate his 50th birthday (February 7, 1925) and it had been nine years since his prior symphony. While the others move little beyond the romantic style of Glazunov or Rachmaninov (except that they don't sound at all Russian), this one does acknowledge many ideas that came into music during the first quarter of the twentieth century and even flirts with atonality. The influence of Mahler does not extend to length. The symphony is a comfortable 35 minutes and is in the standard four movements with a slow introduction. This introduction has some of the most radical music in a symphony that in the end re-affirms the primacy of melody and romanticism. The symphony begins Andante with a vague soft sound in the bass register and a six-note chord outlining a whole-tone scale on C played as a cluster. Over this chord, a very Mahlerian theme sounds on horns, then joins in counterpoint with a funeral march theme; Mahler's Symphony No. 3 comes to mind. The main body of the first movement is an Allegro moderato. Its main theme is full of passion and dominates proceedings, but three other themes and the two from the introduction also enter into the development. This plethora of ideas threatens to weaken the cohesion of the symphony, but somehow the 13-minute movement retains a clear form. The slow movement returns to an Andante tempo. By now, "modern" techniques such as constant chromaticism verging on atonality, chords built of fourths rather than thirds, and polytonality are established in the symphony, but tend to overload this comparatively gentle movement. Relief occurs when a lovely theme in exotic "Japanese" coloration appears. The listener might think of Madame Butterfly. Harmonic matters are more simple in the scherzo, Allegro. It continues to hint at Asian music and is less chromatic. The last movement, marked Finale, is highly sectional. An important leading motive appears in all movements, but the third emerges as the main player and powers the symphony to a grand brass statement over full orchestra in the end.

© Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide