As we approach Halloween, it might be difficult to avoid the goblins and ghoulies. But classical music holds far deeper terrors. From Mozart’s stone guest to the screaming winds of Finland’s ancient forests, we explore why Jean Sibelius’s haunting tone poem Tapiola remains the ultimate chilling masterpiece, in the first of two posts about the Finnish composer. 

Back in the day, Halloween, which falls this Saturday night, wasn’t half as prominent as it is in today’s hyper-commercialised world. The end of October was all about preparing for Bonfire Night, or Guy Fawkes Night as it’s also known. But that seems to have been watered down due to Halloween, just a few days earlier, being a bigger money-spinner.

Still, it’s an excuse to explore the scary side of things, and so it had me thinking, in this Halloween week, of creepy pieces of music. For me, perhaps the most terrifying moment in all of music is when, in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the Commendatore calls the Don’s bluff, and actually turns up for dinner. Mozart’s sense of timing, and the terror he generates when the statue appears, is the stuff of Dr. Who/Dalek scariness (again, in its vintage heyday, not today’s pallid iteration of the iconic series).

In orchestral music, we can all think of works which try and capture a sense of fear and unease, from Schoenberg’s decidedly edgy monodrama Erwartung (‘Expectation’), to the gothic horror spookiness of Mussorgsky’s Night on a Bare Mountain, via Penderecki’s uncomfortable Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima.

Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre is always good fun, inspired by a Henri Cazalis poem, and directly linked to the night of October 31st. The same is true, more recently (1955), of Malcolm Arnold’s thumpingly entertaining Tam O’Shanter Overture, based on the Robert Burns poem, its setting being Halloween night.   

But there’s one in particular which I find quite disquieting: Jean Sibelius’s final major work, Tapiola (1926), a very strange, and in many ways terrifying, piece. It’s often spoken of as some sort of companion to the almost contemporaneous Seventh Symphony (1924), but I think such an observation is wide of the mark. For one thing, Tapiola has something of a programme, which Sibelius himself provided, not surprisingly one which conjures up the mysterious woodlands of Finland’s Kalevala legends which so informed the composer’s aesthetic. The Seventh is absolute music. It relies on melody, not least the imposing recurring trombone solo which delineates the work’s sections.

Rather than focusing on melody, Tapiola pushes Sibelius’s motivic development as far as he had yet taken it. Though the Symphony is, like Tapiola, in one continuous movement, of a similar duration (around 20 minutes), and though the tone poem is without doubt symphonic in its use of Sibelian profound logic, the effect is entirely different. It’s astonishing, concentrated music.

Wide-spread they stand, the Northland’s dusky forests,
Ancient mysterious, brooding savage dreams;
Within them dwells the Forest’s mighty God,
And wood-sprites in the gloom weave magic secrets.

Tapiola’s raison d’être is its conjuring of the ‘brooding savage dreams’, dusky forests and gloom, to quote the composer’s preface to the score, in music which is uncomfortably elemental. Even if the musical syntax is glaringly Sibelian, its gloom is not the reflective type which permeates much of the Fourth Symphony or The Swan of Tuonela, and the glowing B major at the end offers no redemptive peroration which we find elsewhere in Sibelius, but simply a way forward out of the dark forest.

The whole effect is remarkable, Sibelius at his most modernistic, his most expressionistic. In fact, if an alternative title was ever sought, it could easily be Erwartung, even if Schoenberg’s audacious opus deals with internal demons rather than Tapiola’s elemental phantasmagoria.

Next week, we’ll be looking at the Sixth Symphony. But in the meantime, Sibelius’s projected and, apparently, largely self-destroyed, Eighth Symphony was surely too big an ask in the light of Tapiola’s audacity and the terse Seventh Symphony. The realised sketches of the Eighth don’t amount to much, and they demonstrate a composer who was struggling at best, and had lost his compositional motivation at worst.  One of the artistic reasons why the composer fell silent for his remaining 30 years is surely because Tapiola composed him into a corner of concision for which he had long been searching, but from which there was no escape.

For it’s not only the Finnish forest that entraps, or All Hallows’ Eve which scares.

Sleep tight!