During the early years of the twentieth century, Jean Sibelius' reputation outside his home country of Finland rested almost exclusively on the widespread fame of just a single piece: the "Valse Triste" from his incidental music to the play Kuolema (Death). Sibelius was keenly interested in the theater, and when asked in 1903 by his brother-in-law Arvid Järnefelt, the author of Kuolema, to supply some music to support the drama, he happily responded with six numbers scored for strings and percussion. Over the next few years, two pieces were extracted from the original six and published as Op. 44; two additional numbers, published as Op. 62, date from 1911.

"Valse Triste," a 1904 reworking of the first musical scene, has the dubious honor of being one of the most truly overplayed pieces in musical history; yet it is still rather easy to imagine the seductive, sparkling effect that this five-minute piece must have had on European coffee-house audiences of the day. The work, cast in the traditional three-part dance form, paints a striking picture. Paavali waits at the bed-side of his dying mother, who dreams of having gone to the ball. As Paavali goes to sleep himself, Death comes to take his mother, who, believing the figure to be her own dead husband, proceeds to dance the "Valse Triste" with him; the mother has expired by the time Paavali wakes up again. The interplay of melancholy, nostalgia, and resignation in the music of the outer two sections of this miniature tone-poem remains fresh even a hundred years after it first appeared; the middle portion, admittedly somewhat less outstanding, allows for some appropriately heated dance.

In 1906 Sibelius recomposed the third and fourth musical scenes into a single number, called "Scen med tranor" (Scene with Cranes) and published as Op. 44/2. For the new version Sibelius augmented the original string ensemble with two clarinets and thoroughly rewrote much of the musical material. The result is a tender portrayal of the bird-life that Sibelius loved so dearly and was so deeply influenced by in later works.

The two numbers published as Op. 62 were not put together until almost a decade after the original composition of the Kuolema music (added for a new production of the play in 1911). The Canzonetta, Op. 62/1, retains the original scoring for muted strings; it is a delicate—one might even say fragile—piece that far outshines the rather disappointing "Valse Romantique," Op. 62/2, the scoring of which—although supplemented by flutes, clarinet, horns and timpani—still somehow manages to come across as bland. The primary idea is promising enough, however, and in the hands of a skilled ensemble the work makes a lush impression.

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1.Valse triste

Despite almost a century of familiarity and unsatisfactory performances by unlikely instrumental combinations, it's easy to imagine the truly magical effect that Jean Sibelius' Valse Triste (1904) must have had on audiences of the day. The Valse was extracted and published separately from the composer's incidental music to his brother-in-law's play Kuolema (Death). Still, the work stands quite well on its own as an orchestral poem in miniature, and it seems today as fresh, charming, and thoroughly well-crafted as it did when it single-handedly spread its composer's fame through the tea houses of Europe and America. A brief paraphrase of the Valse can even be found at the end of the composer's Symphony No. 7 (1924), perhaps in acknowledgement of the tremendous effect this composition had on Sibelius' career. Cast in a ternary dance form, Valse Triste opens with a simple utterance, but this apparently transparent statement masterfully introduces an overwhelming mood of vast, if perhaps bittersweet, melancholy. As the music unfolds, it exhibits a remarkable ambiguity of mood, reflecting both an old woman's joy at being reunited with her dead husband and the audience's knowledge that it is in fact Death himself that the mother is dancing with. Passions rise in the middle section, and as the opening material reasserts itself at the end of the dance, it is clear that the woman has died. The work draws to a somber end with three ominous chords.



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2.Scene with Cranes

Scene with Cranes, Op. 44, No. 2, was composed in 1903 as part of the incidental music that Jean Sibelius created for his brother-in-law Arvid Järnefelt's play Kuolema (Death); it is, then, a sister piece to the much more famous Valse Triste, Op. 44, No. 1. While Valse Triste was an item of almost disgusting popularity during the first two decades of the new century (especially so to Sibelius, who constantly lamented that he had sold the little work for a pittance and thus received no royalties at all when it proved to be a smash hit), Scene with Cranes has always stayed on the fringes of the repertory.

Scored for strings, timpani and a pair of B flat clarinets (who are used sparingly as representatives of the cranes themselves), Scene with Cranes—or Kurkikohtaus as it is called in Finnish—is a four-minute piece arranged from two consecutive bits of incidental music: specifically, incidental music items Nos. 3 and 4. Sibelius reworked the original music to form a seamless, cohesive, slow moving 59-measure whole. Misty and evocative, Scene with Cranes begins as the first violins (who, along with the rest of the strings, are con sordino—muted) spin a beautifully aimless melody—it seems to have no solid point of origin or goal—in their upper-middle register. The second violins and violas slide chromatically downward as they try to find a grip on the tune and lend some kind of support.

The clarinets are heard in only eight measures in the middle of the piece. The watery pianissimo of the opening music is tossed out in favor of a series of tense sforzandos, against which the two clarinets—indeed, the two cranes—call out six times. Even more sparingly used is the timpanist, however, whose part consists only of two triple-piano (ppp) rolls near the end of the Scene; and few, if any, will even notice the timpanist playing at this point, for a doleful violin solo starts up at the exact same moment.

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