Largamente from Symphony 5

Jean Sibelius, Arranged by Matthew Allsop

Instrumentation: Brass Band

Length: 6 Minutes

Difficulty: A Grade

Sibelius was commissioned to write the symphony by the Finnish government in honour of his 50th birthday, which had been pronounced a national holiday in Finland. It was originally composed in 1915 but revised in 1916 and again in 1919.

The 1910s was a decade of change for the over a century old symphonic form. In 1909 Schoenberg continued pushing for more dissonant and chromatic harmonies in his Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16; from 1910-1912 Igor Stravinsky premiered three revolutionary ballets The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps); Ravel and Debussy were at work developing and performing their Impressionistic forms; and in 1911 the premiere of Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier further pushed music toward a new style. Though having spent nearly 30 years in the public spotlight, Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) found his works receiving poor reviews for the first time with the 1911 premiere of his Fourth Symphony and, as James Hepokoski remarks, the composer “was beginning to sense his own eclipse as a contending modernist.”

These events brought Sibelius to a crisis point in his career. It forced him to choose between changing his style to fill the more modern desires of audiences or continue composing as he felt best fit. The first version of his symphony kept his orchestral style (consonant sonorities, woodwind lines in parallel thirds, rich melodic development, etc.) while further developing his structural style. Hepokoski calls this structural development “sonata deformation” or the change and development of sonata form itself. The success of this change can be seen in the popularity of the Fifth Symphony across Europe throughout the war years and worldwide into the present day.

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