The Cinq Esquisses (Five Sketches), Op. 114, are the last piano pieces that Sibelius wrote, to be followed in the same year, 1929, by two sets of pieces for violin and piano, the last of his numbered works to be published in his lifetime.
Maisema (Landscape) is thoroughly pianistic in style in its contrast between chordal passages and rapider sections. Taalvikuva (Winter Scene) reflects a snow-covered and hushed winter landscape, to be followed by the livelier Metsälampi (Forest Lake). Metsälaulu (Song in the Forest) leads to a singing melody, mezza voce, set in the midst of characteristic harmonies. The pieces end with Ketvätnäky (Spring Vision), breathing an air of brighter optimism.
In common with other composers of the period, Sibelius found a commercial market for his piano music, particularly for sets of short pieces suitable for domestic performance.
The closing years of Sibelius’s active career were overshadowed by growing self-criticism. This probably explains why the Fünf Skizzen, Op. 114 were never published during the composer’s lifetime. Sibelius had, it seems, finished them in early 1929 and, as has already been said, offered them first to Carl Fischer. When Fischer returned them, Sibelius sent them to his trusted publisher Breitkopf & Härtel in Germany, who accepted the offer. Then he suddenly changed his mind and asked for them to be sent back to him because he wanted to revise Lied im Walde (Op. 114, No. 4). This he did, but kept the manuscripts. Fifteen years later, in 1945, the Finnish publisher R.E. Westerlund contacted Sibelius with a view to publishing Opus 114. Sibelius apparently agreed, since he began preparing the manuscripts for publication. At the last moment he nevertheless changed his mind once again and could not be persuaded, even though Westerlund courteously inquired again in 1950.
The Fünf Skizzen were not finally published, posthumously, until 1973. According to notes made by Sibelius’s son-in-law Jussi Jalas in 1945, Sibelius explained that as he had not produced anything new for a long time, he did not want these pieces to be published before the big work he was in the process of composing. The “big work” was most probably the Eighth Symphony, the fate of which ties in with Opus 114.
Opus 114 (Landschaft, Winterbild, Der Teich, Lied im Walde and Im Frühling) returns to nature, but more indirectly, like an observer viewing the landscape and hearing the forest sighing in the song. The descriptive titles challenged the composer to hone his expressive devices to the extreme. Pianist Kosti Vehanen recalls Sibelius once saying of his piano works: “There are more of my thoughts and ideas in them than in many of my bigger works.”
The Cinq Esquisses, Op. 114, which marked Sibelius’s farewell to the piano, had a troubled start in public life. In 1929 Sibelius was a world-famous composer of sixty-four, yet when he offered these pieces to the American publisher Carl Fischer he was turned down, and the work remained unpublished until 1973, sixteen years after his death at the age of ninety-two.
Ironically, it was in this last pianistic outing, more than in any of its predecessors, that he showed signs of embarking on a new phase of keyboard composition, marked by a significantly greater appreciation of truly pianistic resources and a move towards a steadily more abstract conception of composition as a whole.
Sibelius' Esquisses (1929) are the last pieces that he composed for solo piano. Remarkably, these were not published until 1973 and are still not very widely known. Written towards the end of the composer's last active creative period, they explore modal tonality and other compositional devices such as tonal meditation (for example in Forest Lake) while reflecting an increasingly personal response to nature and achieving a depth of expression (not dissimilar to Brahms' late piano pieces) coupled with a bold, radical approach to harmony.
Landscape is pensive in mood, showing an element of counterpoint and featuring ninth chords prominently. Winter Scene is tonally and emotionally ambiguous, using various different scale modes, whilst its chord spacings highlight Sibelius' ear for piano sonority. For me, the most striking of the set are Forest Lake and Song in the Forest. Beyond the immediate pictorial associations there lurks a darker, more disturbing undercurrent and blurred edges are perhaps what the composer had in mind when considering the important role of the sustaining pedal in both pieces. Finally, Spring Vision has a deceptively straightforward opening but its restless animoso theme suggests that a feeling of springlike optimism may be no more than fleeting.
Sometimes a throwaway soundbite sticks. Jean Sibelius’s offhand remark that the piano “doesn’t sing” has proved a lingering PR disaster for the composer’s varied and often daring works for the instrument. But if Sibelius was playing the disingenuous curmudgeon in that remark, perhaps he was playing the covert visionary at the same time. His works for piano prove in no uncertain terms that the instrument does indeed sing, even if they just as often show that it can growl, holler, squawk, stutter, hum and whisper as well. Of Sibelius’s 117 opus numbers, 19 denote piano works. The instrument was always in the composer’s life.
Sibelius’s piano music remains a secret – chronically neglected or approached from an entirely unsympathetic aesthetic standpoint. Sometimes, criticism is justified. “I will be the first to admit that Sibelius’s piano music is uneven in quality”, says Leif Ove Andsnes, pointing to the composer’s own cynicism towards his piano works as a possible reason for the neglect of the genuine gems. But Andsnes also professes in no uncertain terms that he is “on a mission” to bring Sibelius’s piano works out of the shadows.
For better or for worse, the orchestra has long haunted Sibelius’s piano music. What could and should have been his magnum opus for the instrument, his Sonata in F, is among the best examples of a composer failing to reconcile the character and mechanism of the instrument with that of his music. The piece has proved a woeful standard-bearer for Sibelius’s piano works, contributing more than any other to the misleading idea that Sibelius’s orchestral brain was fundamentally unsuited to the two hands of the pianist. In truth, there are piano works in which Sibelius’s orchestral thinking advances the language of the instrument even if it can test the technical orthodoxies of the player.
In contrast, the Five Sketches (1929) was conceived as a set and stands with Kyllikki as a pillar of Andsnes’s programme. These conceptual works, Sibelius’s last for the instrument and some of the last of his career, join the likes of Tapiola in suggesting that the composer’s famous three-decade creative silence was a product of his own artistic development: so beautifully distilled and fragmented did his musical voice become, that it ultimately disintegrated altogether. The Sonatinas had shown that Sibelius’s idea of timbre and process dictating form could transfer from orchestra to piano. The same is true here. “You feel his development as a composer in these pieces”, says Andsnes; “the music originates from the sound, even if it’s sometimes difficult to tell what Sibelius’s specific idea of the sound was.” The “sound” is certainly about more than Sibelius’s descriptive movement titles. It is pianistic, but not in the accepted sense; this is music that acknowledges the presence of two fleshy hands. There are tonal innovations aplenty – Sibelius lectured on his use of two overlapping pentachords as an overall frame for the piece and often breathes new significance into old intervals (not least the stacked-up thirds). But despite the radical nature of the music, the sturdy Sibelius remains, steady as a rock. “Every note and every gesture has to be weighed individually”, writes the musicologist Tomi Mäkelä of Sibelius’s piano music. Nowhere does that advice feel more pertinent than in these floating landscapes.
