Sibelius: The Early Years; Maturity & Silence

Christopher Nupen’s two award-winning films on Sibelius, each lasting about 50 minutes, were made in the early 1980s. Nupen focuses on Sibelius’s own words and music, along with the words of his wife, Aino, to portray the composer’s struggle with himself, his work and the world en route to becoming one of the 20th century’s greatest symphonists. This is particularly effective in the first film, where judicious use of film of scenic Finnish landscape and pictures of Sibelius and his family are skilfully interspersed with shots of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra playing his music (satisfyingly long excerpts, I should add). If you watch the second film immediately after the first, the effect palls somewhat, partly due to repeated views of the same scenery and the same limited camera angles. But for anyone not already well acquainted with Sibelius’s life and music, this DVD provides a fascinating insight into the composer’s development.

About the filmmaker

Christopher Nupen is a documentary filmmaker known for a long series of music films built around close access to major performers and composers’ own words, Vladimir Ashkenazy, who conducts the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in this pair of films, was himself a frequent Nupen collaborator across several other documentary projects. The two Sibelius films here were made specifically to draw on Sibelius’s own writings and Aino Sibelius’s recollections, rather than relying solely on third-party biography or narration.

About the composer’s later silence

The second film’s title, Maturity & Silence, points at one of the strangest episodes in twentieth-century music: after completing his Seventh Symphony in 1924 and the tone poem Tapiola in 1926, Sibelius effectively stopped composing new work for the final three decades of his life, living quietly at his home in Järvenpää until his death in 1957, a period musicologists still refer to as the “silence of Järvenpää.” He kept working in smaller ways, revising earlier scores and hosting a steady stream of visiting musicians and admirers, but no major new composition ever appeared. Exactly why has never been settled, theories range from a harshly self-critical perfectionism to a sense that the musical language moving around him had left the kind of symphony he wrote behind, which is part of what makes a documentary built on his own words, rather than outside speculation, a genuinely useful way into the question.