the full tempo marking of this movement is actually: Tempo Molto Moderato - Allegro moderato (ma poco a poco stretto) - Vivace molto - Presto - Più Presto
OK, for today's posts, some sibelius. this is probably my favorite symphony after his first, although i don't know 6 or 7 too well. i think this is one of his greatest examples of a tone that suffuses his music - something that brings to mind thin, cold, cutting air.
this symphony was written in honor of his own 50th birthday (actually a national holiday) on commission from the finnish government. (wouldn't you love to have your own national government pay you to write music for your own birthday.) it was composed in 1915 and revised in 1916 and 1919. the 1919 version is the one we hear most today. at this time he was struggling with some of the modernist tendencies of the likes of schoenberg, etc. and this was reflected most in the form and structure of this symphony. (his preceding fourth symphony, which was not well received, was much more modernist. apparently the first version of the fifth had more in common with it, but upon revision he said he wished to make it more down to earth - in a word, more accessible.) harmonically, it still has more in common with the third symphony.
2/2/2/2 4/3/3/0 timp str
wiki points out that the entire symphony is structured sort of mirror form in its tempi - the first movement begins slow, ends fast; the second movement is a mid-tempo intermezzo, and the last movement begins fast but ends slow.
the grand horn call based on the interval of perfect fourths is probably sibelius's most well known symphonic opening ever. for me sibelius's music is so scenic, so imagery-inspired, that at times it's pretty much impossible for me not to think of some ice-swept mountain in a clear sky, and this is assuredly one of those moments.
the movement is probably a combination of what was originally the first and second movements of the symphony (at least in the first revision, which has mostly been lost). the second movement, a scherzo, becomes the second half (basically the second video posted above). the first half, the tempo molto moderato, is in 12/8, while the allegro moderato on is in a brisk 3/4. the rehearsal numbers actually begin again at the 3/4 (starting at A again).
wiki has a long and sort of obnoxiously musicology-ish bit about the debates going on over the form of this movement. is there a double exposition? it it merely two movements stuck end on end? is it sonata form? if it is, where's the recap? where's the coda? meh.
in any case: the material that gets developed is virtually the same in the allegro moderato as it is at the beginning, so we feel a sense of relief when, after getting through the increasingly murky first section, we emerge into the brisker version of something we know and love from the opening. since the leadup into the second section is climactic and signals something is coming, to a listener it wouldn't be at all the first assumption musically that these are two different movements. they are two variations upon the same idea. of course it doesn't fit neatly into any cookie cutter from the 18th or 19th centuries, but that's the avant garde step that sibelius was taking in this symphony.
the grandiose horn calls in the beginning are followed by little ascending motifs in the winds, and the oboe sound is instrumentationally genius in my opinion. but then we descend to a minor section with characteristic parallel thirds in the winds. with ascending and descending chromatic lines in the strings and signals of struggle in the winds (lots of diminished intervals, tritones, etc) along with percussion rumblings, we get more and more angsty; then we have a pause, and we begin a development of sorts at 3:03. repetitions of the opening motif get cycled around the winds and brass section, and an undercurrent of tremolo notes in the strings heightens the tension as it rises and the opening fourths get crunched into dissonance with that line.
this is pushed into more and more chromatic development; around 6:00 there's an extended section in which the strings repeat their ascending tremolos over a super chromaticized bassoon melody. at 7:08, all of a sudden the strings burst in with their first real melody, and it's basically a reprise of the bassoon melody - highly dissonant, angsty, and rising all the time. then, out of nowhere, the horn call comes in, this time FF, and much more triumphant, full, and robust. it quickly becomes sprightly and lively. the next section, which comes about before we know we're quite in that tempo at all (since the relation is mathematical, the violins' triplet sixteenths just become eighth notes in the new tempo). the allegro moderato actually comes at 0:36.
now sibelius takes the same material and develops it in quite a different way - he tries to maintain a base in an optimistic Eb minor, giving the winds a more extended version of what we only got a taste of at the beginning of the movement.
1:47 gives completely new material in the form of brass, one which has sort of a similar contour to the beginning but sounds much more dancelike. it is this theme that the strings will start to develop, just a few seconds later, pushing it chromatically in all directions with a few rude outbursts of the rising fourth theme amidst it.
the accelerando begins about a minute before the end, with the violins in a constant quarter note sequence of scales which underly hints of the ascending fourths in the winds and brass. the movement is brought to a galloping close in Eb major.
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