In late-19th-century repertoire, the analysis of musical topics and their cultural and social associations, originally identified in the context of 18th-century music, needs refinement (e.g. Agawu 2009, Horton 2014). This paper aims for such refinement with Jean Sibelius, whose early work from the 1890s and 1900s presents an interesting conglomeration of musical styles: topics of the classical repertoire, post-classical 19th-century topics, associations to idealized folk music, and elements from the domain of 19th-century popular styles. This paper will consider an example piece – a movement from Sibelius's incidental music (JS 137) for an 1899 performance of historical tableaux vivants. I will focus on the tableau The Finns in the Thirty Years' War, later published in revised form in Scènes historiques I (op. 25, no. 2). The original incidental context gives the expressive and programmatic content of the music a particularly simplistic quality, while simultaneously making the piece firmly entangled in values of its cultural context.

I will start by identifying the central topical elements of the piece: the minuet, the fanfare and the march as well as the ombra and the tempesta. I will then consider, relying on historical documentary evidence, how these stylistic commonplaces and their associated meanings were transmitted to Sibelius through music he heard, scores he studied or literate sources he read, and what kinds of shifts in cultural meaning does this mediation produce.

My main arguments combine the traditional meanings of the topics with their late-19th-century reinterpretations: (1) The minuet carries associations to old-fashioned times, but the usual association to high-social status is subverted in the piece by an unusual instrumentation. (2) The military topics carry associations both to the classical orchestral repertoire and to the Finnish patriotic marches of the time. Some of the specific meanings of the military topics derive from the 19th-century literary depiction of heroism of the imagined past (cf. Monelle 2006). (3) The ombra and tempesta topics were mediated to Sibelius through Liszt and other 19th-century composers who used these topics for depicting conflict or struggle, the 19th-century meaning deviating from the original associations with supernatural events or natural catastrophes.

The analysis gives rise to several considerations relating to the ongoing methodological discussion: How to adapt topic theory to the context of late-19th-century music and intellectual culture? How to build bridges between historical and analytical viewpoints? How could clarifying historical networks of influence help to rethink the dichotomy between musical topics and extramusical meanings from a hermeneutic viewpoint (cf. Principi 2024)?

References

Agawu, V. Kofi. 2009. Music as Discourse. Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Horton, Julian. 2014. “Listening to Topics in the Nineteenth Century.” In The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory. Ed. Danuta Mirka. 642–664. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Monelle, Raymond. 2006. “Mahler's Military Gesture. Musical Quotation as Proto-Topic.” In Music and Gesture. Ed. Anthony Gritten and Elaine Kind. 91–103. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Principi, Dylan. 2024. ”Rethinking Topic Theory: An Essay on the Recent History of a Music Theory.” Music Theory Online 30 (1).