Sibelius (1965)

Abstract AALTONEN: Mr Britten, as a composer you are master of a variety of branches of music. Would you please tell us which one you prefer working in?BRITTEN: I think the answer to that is a very short and simple one: I prefer working in them all. There’s no kind of music that I don’t want to write. The occasion, of course, demands which kind of music I write in, but it can be any kind from opera, to songs, to instrumental music, to symphonies to quartets; it just depends what I’m asked to do and what I want to do. But I have no blinkers on, if I can put it like that.AALTONEN: You are often referred to as the national hero in the realm of music in Britain; that is exactly the title given to Jean Sibelius in Finland. What is your relationship to Sibelius’s music?BRITTEN: Well I hope I can fulfil a tenth of what Sibelius did for music in Finland. I think my own reactions to Sibelius are personal but perhaps interesting. When I was young I found Sibelius-the music of Sibelius-unsympathetic. I was interested much more in the Schoenberg-Berg-Webern school, and of course the overwhelming personality of Stravinsky. And then quite by accident, not so many years ago-perhaps ten, perhaps fewer-I heard some music of Sibelius without knowing what it was, and I was deeply interested and surprised and even bewildered by this music, which seemed to me to be so new and so personal that I was eager to find out what it was. I discovered it was the Sixth Symphony of Sibelius, which I think is a very, very fine one. After that moment I bought all the scores that I could possibly find of his music, and although I wouldn’t pretend that I know or understand or even like everything he wrote, I find it a most sympathetic, interesting phenomenon in the musical world, and a most important figure. I think it only goes to show how ludicrously unimportant fashions in music are-that for instance in the Twenties there was only Sibelius in England, which was not true, and now there is no Sibelius, which is also not true; a great man like Sibelius can weather all storms of fashion.