Symphony No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 82

Program notes

About the Work

Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony has one of the most complicated histories in the orchestral repertoire, and the version heard today is the third the composer made. He began it during the First World War, and the first version was premiered in Helsinki on 8 December 1915, Sibelius’s fiftieth birthday, marked as a national celebration in a Finland still under Russian rule and stirring toward independence. But he was dissatisfied. He revised the work in 1916, then set it aside and returned to it again, finally completing the definitive version premiered in 1919. The struggle was real: his diaries from these years record both euphoria and despair, and the famous battle to fuse the symphony’s opening movements into a single coherent span occupied him through repeated rewritings. The result is one of his most affirmative and broadly loved works, music of granite strength and luminous, hard-won optimism.

The Fifth marks a turning point in Sibelius’s symphonic thinking. Where the Fourth Symphony of 1911 had been bleak, compressed and forbidding, the Fifth opens outward into spacious, sunlit grandeur. Yet it is no less radical in form. Sibelius was increasingly preoccupied with the ‘organic’ growth of a symphony, the idea that themes should emerge and transform gradually, as if grown rather than assembled, and the Fifth is a prime example. Most strikingly, he took what had originally been two separate movements, a slow introduction and a fast scherzo, and welded them into one continuous, accelerating structure, so that the symphony’s opening movement seems to speed up imperceptibly until it is launched into a whirling dance. This compression of four movements into three is the work’s great structural coup.

The symphony’s most celebrated inspiration came from nature. On 21 April 1915 Sibelius watched sixteen swans circling overhead and wrote in his diary that it was ‘one of the great experiences of my life.’ From that vision came the great swinging horn theme of the finale, known ever since as the ‘Swan Hymn’: a broad, rocking figure that seems to embody flight itself. The Fifth, scored without the heaviest forces, achieves its monumentality through breadth and weight of utterance rather than sheer size, and it ends with one of the boldest gestures in all symphonic music.

What to Listen For

The first movement is the one to follow most closely, because it does something extraordinary. It opens quietly, with a horn call and gently unfolding woodwind phrases over a soft tremolo: spacious, pastoral, unhurried. Listen for the way the tempo seems gradually to quicken: there is no obvious break, but the music accelerates by degrees until it has transformed itself into a fast, spinning scherzo, the trumpets ringing out at the top. This single accelerating arc, fusing slow introduction and dance into one, is Sibelius’s great formal achievement; the join is meant to be almost impossible to locate.

The central slow movement is a gentle set of variations on a simple, songful theme, passed pizzicato among the strings and taken up by the woodwinds, graceful and untroubled, with hints of the finale’s swinging rhythm already stirring beneath the surface.

The finale is the heart of the symphony. After a rushing, whispering opening in the strings, listen for the great ‘Swan Hymn’ to emerge in the horns: a broad, rocking theme, swinging back and forth like wings beating, inspired by the swans Sibelius watched in flight. Over it the violins sing a long, yearning melody. The music builds toward an overwhelming peroration, and then comes the ending no listener forgets. Instead of a continuous flourish, Sibelius closes with six massive, hammered chords, each separated by a yawning silence, scattered almost unpredictably so that you can never quite tell when the next will fall. The effect is startling, monumental, and strangely moving: a symphony that ends not with a rush but with six great strokes carved out of silence.