I recently purchased the Paavo Berglund edition of all of Jean Sibelius’ symphonies and tone poems. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to the symphonies and they are really magnificent. Sibelius wrote at the early part of the 20th-century, but eschewed a lot of the new musical trends going on in the rest of Europe (he was Finnish). Rather, his music has beautiful, sweeping and magnificent structures to it that are at times heroic, at times hymnnic, at times hushed.
It is the structure of his symphonies that intrigues me. I located a book by Lionel Pike entitled Beethoven, Sibelius, and the ‘Profound Logic’ that explores the internal, sometimes subliminal, structures inside his symphonies that make them unified and whole to the listener. (Apparently Sibelius was having a discussion with Gustav Mahler about the symphonic form and mentioned he liked it because of its ‘profound logic.’) The book explores the musicological structures in Beethoven’s music as a basis for the symphonic form, then uses that as a way to look into Sibelius’ symphonic works.
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