Symphony No. 7 in C major, Op. 105

Program notes

About the Work

Sibelius’s last symphony lasts barely more than twenty minutes and is played without a break. It took him the better part of ten years. The earliest ideas go back to about 1914, when he was at work on the Fifth Symphony, and for a long time the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh grew side by side in his sketchbooks. In 1918 he set down a plan for the Seventh: ‘joy of life and vitality’, with passionate episodes, in three movements, the last of them a ‘Hellenic rondo’. The plan did not hold. By 1923 the drafts had turned into a single continuous span, growing out of what had begun as a slow movement.

The last stage was hard. Sibelius was in his late fifties, his hands shook, and he drank while he wrote, to steady them as he put it. He finished the score in March 1924 and conducted the first performance in Stockholm on 24 March. The programme did not call it a symphony. It was announced as a Fantasia sinfonica, and Sibelius hesitated for some time before he gave it a number. When the score was printed in 1925 the title page read Symphony No. 7, in one movement.

The name matters, because the piece does what a symphony does by other means. A classical symphony sets movements in different tempos and keys against one another. Here almost everything of importance happens in C, major or minor, and the contrast comes from speed: the music moves from a slow opening through quicker, lighter episodes and back again, usually so gradually that the listener cannot say where one section ended and the next began. Slow movement, scherzo and finale are all present, but folded into one another.

Sibelius lived for another thirty-three years and never published another symphony. He completed the tone poem Tapiola, and he worked for years on an Eighth Symphony, but he is believed to have burned whatever he had written of it at Ainola, his home north of Helsinki. The Seventh therefore stands as his last word in the form.

What to Listen For

The opening is one of the quietest in the repertoire: a soft stroke on the timpani, then a scale that climbs slowly through the strings, off the beat, and lands on a chord from a quite different key. Woodwind answer with a brief, thoughtful phrase. Out of this the violas and cellos begin a long hymn, divided into many parts, which gathers the rest of the strings as it rises.

At the top of that climb a solo trombone enters with a broad, calm melody over the full orchestra. It is the theme the whole work turns on, and in the sketches it is said to carry the name of his wife, Aino. It will be heard three times, and it is worth fixing in the memory at this first appearance.

The pace then quickens almost without notice. The strings and woodwind trade light, detached figures, and for a while the music has the character of a scherzo. It darkens: the strings begin to swirl in rising and falling scales, and the trombone theme comes back above them, now in the minor and sounding like a warning. A second fast section follows, a dancing passage in a brighter mood, which is generally taken to be what survives of the ‘Hellenic rondo’.

The third arrival of the trombone theme is the climax of the symphony, with the strings climbing higher and higher beneath it. Afterwards the brass fall away and the strings are left alone at full intensity. In the last minute Sibelius glances back at earlier ideas, among them a turn of harmony from his own Valse triste, and then the strings pull the note B slowly up to C. That final step, held back until the very end, closes the work on a plain chord of C major.