Here’s Simon Rattle on the final moments of this week’s symphony:

“It’s almost like a scream. It’s the most depressed C major in all of musical literature. There’s no other piece that ends in C major where you feel it’s the end of the world. Look at how carefully he orchestrates is so that it doesn’t sound like a victory, but as something you reach on the edge of death. You finally reach C major – and it’s over. It should be a struggle for the strings to achieve this last note with their last bit of energy”.

Sibelius’s 7th Symphony is more conventionally thought of as a vindication of a new kind of symphonic form (it plays for 22 minutes or so in a continuous single movement) and a reclamation of the affirmatory power of tonal possibility. It was first performed in 1924, when it was called “Symphonic Fantasy”; only when the piece was published a year later did Sibelius call it a symphony, the last he would give to the world). For many other commentators and conductors, the end of this symphony is the “grandest celebration of C major there ever was”, or a “triumphantly abrupt’ ending. It’s tribute to the huge emotional power of Sibelius’s music that it produces such wildly divergent interpretations – but I want to focus a little more on the scream rather than the triumph of what Thomas Adès, like Rattle, has called the “painfully inconclusive” ending of this symphony.

But let’s first think about the unique ambition of what Sibelius is attempting here. The journey towards the Seventh’s Symphony’s compression, its atomic collisions of different kinds of symphonic movement in a single, hyper-concentrated span, has its first precedent in Sibelius’s Third Symphony. The finale of the Third is a “crystallisation of chaos”, as he called it, that fuses scherzo and finale into a new kind of symphonic motion, music that generates a momentum that is simultaneously monumental, massive and irresistibly rapid. In the Fifth Symphony, he applies a similar logic to its first movement, which is really a welding together of two movement types, an opening allegro and a scherzo. But those already astonishing achievements are mere upbeats for what Sibelius is doing in the Seventh. The new piece (which evolved from a original multi-movement plan) fuses elements of slow movement, scherzo, of sonata-form, of rondo, and of grand symphonic coda in the same span of music, and it does so while attempting to elide the transitions from one to the other so that the effect of the whole piece is miraculously seamless instead of episodic.

In fact, the Seventh Symphony crystallises a conspectus of a compositional technique that later composers like Elliott Carter, George Benjamin, and countless others, would employ: so–called ”metric modulation”, in which you use a common unit of musical time to elide from one speed to another. Imagine a quaver ticking along at a certain speed, which then becomes the crotchet or the minim of the new tempo. And even better than that, listen to how Sibelius manages it in the Seventh Symphony, speeding up from an adagio to an allegro, and slowing down from presto to adagio. But the effect is even more subtle than simply shifting through the gears: the final appearance of the trombone theme, whose three-fold appearances are the symphony’s most obvious landmark, is achieved by a musical time-warp. What I mean is that Sibelius has sped up the music so much that time slows down (a sort of musical version of a common optical illusion, when spinning objects seem to slow down the faster they revolve) so that the hectic crotchets of the symphony’s last scherzoid music become the undulating accompanying bed of sound for the trombone’s theme. That’s a moment of musical magic; a truly Sibelian sleight of symphonic structure.

All of which means the Seventh Symphony is one of the most ambitious and extraordinary symphonies in the repertoire. So why the scream? For me, it’s because the gigantic energies that Sibelius is unleashing in his symphony – whether they’re the cosmic dance of the faster music, or the impersonal yet shatteringly moving slow music at the start and end of the piece, or the stately power of the trombone theme – are too massive to be contained by any structure, even one as sophisticated as Sibelius’s. I’m somehow aware, listening to the piece, of the vast spaces that lie just at the edges of the symphony, the strange regions it glimpses along its time-bending journey that Sibelius at once reveals and shrinks back from exploring. That’s why the end of the piece can sound like a scream into the void: that aching appoggiatura as the strings fight their way from B to C is the sound of a striving toward a coherence that Sibelius could well have felt was impossible, given the enormity of the musical powers he knew he had released - even as he closes off his symphony, and with it, his symphonic project (despite what may have happened to the Eighth Symphony). But all that’s in the ear of the beholder. Choose one of the performances below, and take your own journey into the other-world of Sibelius’s most astonishing and fantastical symphony.

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Five key recordings

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra/Leonard Bernstein Bernstein does the opposite - there isn’t a more obviously emotional 7th out there - and this is immensely powerful playing. Watch it here.



London Symphony Orchestra/Colin Davis : always masterly in Sibelius; this performance reflects a lifetime of experience with this music.

Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Thomas Beecham: Beecham had the imprimatur of Sibelius himself – listen why.

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/Simon Rattle: Rattle’s scream – find out whether it convinces – or terrifies.

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