racter, reflects a landscape. It is
full of home sounds, of cattle and "saeters," of timbered houses and
sparse nature. And through it there glances a pale evanescent sunlight,
and through it there sounds the burden of a lowly tragedy.

But it is only with his Fourth Symphony, dubbed "futuristic" because of
the unusual boldness and pithiness of its style, the absence of a
general tonality, the independence of the orchestral voices, that
Sibelius's gift attains absolute expression. There are certain works
that are touchstones, and make apparent what is original and virtuous in
all the rest of the labors of their creator, and give his personality a
unique and irrefragable position. The Fourth Symphony of Sibelius is
such a composition. It is a very synthesis of all his work, the
reduction to its simplest and most positive terms of a thing that has
been in him since first he began to write, and that received heretofore
only fragmentary and indecisive expression. In its very form it is
essence. The structure is all bone. The style is sharpened to a biting
terseness. The coloring is the refinement of all his color; the rhythms
have a freedom toward which Sibelius's rhythms have always aspired; the
mournful melody of the adagio is well-nigh archetypical. All his life
Sibelius has been searching for the tone of this music, desiring to
speak with its authority, and concentrate the soul and tragedy of a
people into a single and eternal moment. All his life he had been
seeking the prophetic gestures of which this work is full. For the
symphony is like a summary and a conclusion. It carries us into some
high place before which the life of man is spread out and made apparent.
The four movements are the four planes that solidify a single concept.
The first sets us in a grim forest solitude, out in some great unlimited
loneliness, beneath a somber sky. There is movement, a climax, a single
cry of passion and despair, and then, only the soughing of wind through
hoary branches. The scherzo is the flickering of mad watery lights, a
fantastic whipping dance, a sudden sinister conclusion. In the adagio, a
bleak lament struggles upwards, seems to push through some vast inert
mass, to pierce to a momentary height and largeness, and then sinks,
broken. And through the finale there quivers an illusory light. The
movement is the march, the oncoming rush, of vast formless hordes, the
passage of unnamed millions that surge for an instant with the