Am abused, alone, and all my real friends are dead. In order to survive, I have to have alcohol. In 1927, when he was sixty-one years old, he wrote in his diary, “Isolation and loneliness are driving me to despair. Sometimes he believed that he was in direct communication with the Almighty-“For an instant God opens his door,” he wrote in a letter, “and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony”-and sometimes he felt worthless. The contrasts in the reception of his music matched the manic-depressive extremes of his personality-an alcoholic oscillation between grandiosity and self-loathing. The crisis point of his career arrived in the late 1920s and the early ’30s, when he was being lionized as a new Beethoven in England and America and dismissed as a kitsch composer in the taste-making Austro-German music centers. Jean Sibelius may have asked that question once too often. The character of Palestrina speaks for colleagues across the centuries when he stops his work to cry, “What is the point of all this? Ach, what is it for? What for?” Hans Pfitzner dramatized that moment of panic and doubt in Palestrina, his “musical legend” about the life of the Italian Renaissance composer. Nameless terrors creep into the limbo between composition and performance, during which the score sits mutely on the desk.
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Unlike a novel or a painting, a score gives up its full meaning only when it is performed in front of an audience it is a child of loneliness that lives off crowds. What emerges is an artwork in code, which other musicians must be persuaded to unravel. It is a laborious traversal of an imaginary landscape. “Desperately difficult,” says the devil in Doctor Faustus. Suggested Listening and Reading (#litres_trial_promo)ĥ APPARITION FROM THE WOODS (#ulink_b3fadbc5-4a63-5a7f-9008-2d0bb9beafdf)Ĭomposing is a difficult business. He is also the author of Listen to This.Īpparition from the Woods (#ulink_60f19cbf-20a3-5543-a501-51ecd612f906) The Rest is Noise was his first book and garnered huge critical acclaim and a number of awards, including the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Read this chapter if you're attending concerts in the episode The rise of nationalism: rediscovering roots and folk culture.Īlex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker, is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Belmont Prize in Germany and a MacArthur Fellowship.
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The festival consists of a series of themed concerts. It is released as a special stand-alone ebook to celebrate a year-long festival at the Southbank Centre, inspired by the book. This is a chapter from Alex Ross's groundbreaking history of 20th century classical music, The Rest is Noise. Working in isolation, far from the great artistic capitals of Europe, Ross shows how Sibelius’s reinvention of classical forms went on to set the pace for classical composers around the world.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London’s Southbank, The Rest is Noise is an intricate commentary not just on the sounds that defined the century, but on art’s troublesome dance with politics, social and cultural change.Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic, and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, which was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.Jean Sibelius hailed from the ‘small nation’ of Finland.
This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, ‘The Rest is Noise’. The Rest Is Noise Series: Apparition from the Woods: The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius
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