In the waning days of the Soviet empire, I had the chance to visit Estonia. After a lecture at the University of Tartu, I was invited to dinner by my hosts. As was usual in “special” restaurants in the Soviet Union, the scene was surreal. The faded decor was a bizarre attempt at elegance, the dinning room was mostly empty, the waiters looked like goons, and the food was terrible. During our conversation, a middle-aged woman spoke one of the most chilling lines I have ever heard in my life. She said, “You who were born free will never understand us who were born slaves.”
Later in the capital, Tallinn, I had a meeting with the foreign minister, Lennart Meri (now the president of a free Estonia). I asked him about Estonia’s most renowned living composer, Arvo Part. He was quite struck by the international fame Part enjoyed and told me how frequently he was asked about him. In retrospect, I wished I had asked after another of Estonia’s musical treasures, a composer whose reputation disappeared about the same time the country did.
There is no Tubin, Eduard, in my handy musical dictionary, or in any other book I have on 20th-century music. Tubin (1905-1982) slipped down the same memory hole that swallowed his native Estonia after it was occupied by the Soviet Union along with the other Baltic states in 1940. But like Estonia, Tubin’s music is back, though the composer unfortunately did not live long enough to see his country liberated. The neglect suffered in Tubin’s lifetime has now been remedied by Robert von Bahr’s extraordinary BIS label and conductor (and countryman) Neeme Jarvi, who over the past decade and a half have brought out a complete cycle of Tubin’s ten symphonies, accompanied by other orchestral compositions. This extraordinary body of work paints a different picture of Estonia than the one I received at dinner in Tartu. Without overpoliticizing Tubin’s music, I would say that it is decidedly “anti-slave,” free in spirit, and full of anguish over the fate that befell his beloved country.
Tubin studied at the College of Music in Tartu with Estonian composer Heino Eller. In 1944, he fled to Sweden with his family and remained there for the rest of his life. Exile means obscurity for most composers, who often lose both their reputation and creative urge in a foreign land. Tubin, however, remained highly productive in Sweden, though his music took on a grimmer cast away from his homeland. In fact, his symphonies can be neatly divided into two groupings: those written in his native country, Nos. 1 to 4, and those produced in exile, Nos. 5 to 10.
Tubin’s early music shares in the nature mysticism and heroic nationalism that characterized the outpouring of Scandinavian music at that time, especially from Sibelius in Finland and Carl Nielsen in Denmark. Both composers are clear influences on Tubin, who otherwise found his own way as a symphonist, creating a distinctive sound that in his later works took on a relentlessness and gritty toughness that no doubt reflected the tragedy of his country. The decidedly darker cast and thicker textures of Tubin’s later works may lack the Sibelian breadth, expansive melody, and unforced quality of his earlier pieces, but they gain in extraordinary cohesion and compactness. No matter how dark the shadow of exile may have become, Tubin remained a completely tonal, traditional composer, which may help explain why his music did not receive more than regional notice—the times being far more propitious for musical revolutionaries.
What BIS’s ambitious project reveals is a highly significant symphonist whose stirring works are well worth reviving. The seven BIS releases, covering compositions from 1931 to 1973, contain a wide variety of musical expression. The material runs from simple pastoral treatments of Estonian folk songs to symphonic arguments of real ferocity.
Tubin’s First Symphony is very much in the lyrical, highly rhapsodic vein of his other early works, which culminate in the extremely beautiful Fourth. Like Sibelius’s First, Tubin’s First Symphony is amazingly self-confident and ambitiously large and powerful for a composer’s first essay of the symphonic form. Also, like Sibelius’s music, its nationalist associations are prominent, and it is no surprise that its debut took place on the anniversary of the Republic of Estonia on February 4, 1936. Surprisingly, it is a stronger composition than the overly descriptive and somewhat meandering Second Symphony. Neeme Jarvi and the Swedish Radio Symphony give it a stunning performance.
Mysteriously subtitled Legendaire, Tubin’s Second Symphony is full of gorgeous nature painting. It begins softly with some lovely atmospherics that soon give way to a depiction of a stormy sea. In one section, the strings cry out very much as they do in Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony. The symphony seems to follow a pattern of storm and abatement. It is pictorially exciting, and there are moments of real beauty, but it is not as convincing symphonically as the First.
Tubin’s Third Symphony (1942), like the Second, has a strong pictorial orientation, and displays a martial character in its heavy use of timpani. It has grand themes, propulsive rhythms, and heroic vistas. The full complement of orchestral resources is deployed in some rousing moments of real sweep and grandeur. The last movement, however, tends toward the grandiose.
Perhaps Tubin’s single most beautiful, majestic utterance is the Fourth Symphony, which deserves its appellation, Sinfonia lirica. It is frightening to think that this masterpiece was almost lost when the building in which it was housed was bombed by the Soviet air force in 1944. The Fourth has both Sibelian breadth and the kind of flowing lyricism found in fellow Scandinavian Wilhelm Peterson-Berger’s gorgeous music. It has a completely natural feel to it—that unforced quality missing from some of Tubin’s more angst-ridden works. Tubin said that he “wrote the work down fairly quickly,” which is not surprising since it seems to spring from a single, intense inspiration. For those whose tastes run to the rhapsodic, this exhilarating piece may well become a favorite. For this listener, its ample charms have remained intact through many listenings since its first release on LP more than 15 years ago.
The first product of Tubin’s exile is the Symphony No. 5 (1946). It shows that Tubin had cast aside anything inessential to symphonic form. Around the time it was written, he said about his Piano Sonata No. 2 something that applies equally to this work: “It taught me a lesson for life. I learned to concentrate on the essentials and leave out everything else, all that was unnecessary, superfluous, repetitive; each note had to find its right place.” The lushness and extravagance of the early works are gone. Less lyrical, stronger symphonically, though not yet dominated by the more abstract rhythmic preoccupations of the Sixth, the Fifth points to the telegraphic concision and obsessive rhythm that would become dominant features of the later works. As for its expressive content, Swedish composer Moses Pergament wrote after its premiere, “There can scarcely be any doubt that this symphony has been conceived and written as a depiction in sound of the Estonian national tragedy, a view in which the drama itself has been painted with the same force and artistic imagination as religiously colored hope for the future and the inspiring prophetic vision of freedom.”
Symphony No. 6 (1954) could not come from a more different world than that of Tubin’s early works—a nonpictorial one, based primarily upon obsessive rhythm. It has shed any national identity and is practically shorn of lyricism. Its transmogrification of a number of dance rhythms gives it the feeling of a danse macabre. It is a turbulent, relentless work with some horrific timpanic eruptions a la Nielsen. Whereas in Nielsen’s Fourth the main theme emerges triumphant from under the percussive rubble, here things conclude in resignation—a serene enough ending, but one born of exhaustion, not resolution. This is a disturbing, not easily assimilated work. Yet it has an eerie, grating power that fascinates. I would apply to the Sixth Symphony the remark that Estonian conductor Olav Roots made, I believe inappropriately, about Tubin’s Third: “The despair, obstinacy, and hate which have overcome a race which longs for its lost independence find musical expression in the symphony.” The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra premiered the Sixth Symphony in 1955, and its reprise here is extremely potent in execution and stunning in sound.
The Seventh Symphony is clearly part of Tubin’s earlier symphonic sound world. The same kind of formal thinking evident in his early symphonies is present here, but in leaner form—less lush and ecstatic, more mature and melancholic, but still quite beautiful and full of longing. It is also without the violence and sense of catastrophe found in the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies.
Tubin’s Eighth Symphony (1966) is music of a knottier sort, far more introspective and infused with a sense of tragedy. The searing opening movement employs a halting tempo, punctuated by expressive silences that convey a feeling not so much of uncertainty as of deep hurt. The whole work is thematically tight. The second movement introduces a dancing motto that is driven with great harshness. A variation of it returns in the third movement and is whipped into an infernal whirl that then slowly unwinds. The symphony does not so much end as stop with a held breath. A fascinating and enigmatic work, it receives an excellent performance by Jarvi and the Swedish Radio Symphony.
Symphony No. 9 (1969) seems to have escaped the cataclysms that Tubin felt it necessary to express in some of the grimmer works he wrote between it and the composition of Symphony No. 4. Certainly this much briefer and somewhat leaner work has a concision, if not compression, that is quite different from the flowing lyricism of its 1943 predecessor. But it also quite clearly inhabits the same tonal and expressive universe. In fact, some may find this a surprisingly traditional composition for 1969, though not unlike similar efforts by contemporary English exponents of tonality. While its two movements are both marked adagio, there is no lack of propulsion and the melodic interest never flags.
Tubin’s last symphony, the Tenth (1973), is written in one movement, marked adagio. It begins somberly in the strings, but recurring horn calls soon attempt to summon the music from its melancholic brooding. These give way to a more energetic and uplifting theme, which is, if not triumphant, at least enlivened by a note of optimism. The two themes alternate effectively, creating a weighty feel for both the inertial pull of melancholy and the great strength needed to overcome it. The spirited theme finally prevails in the adagio festivo, which builds to the symphony’s powerful and magnificent climax, after which comes a long orchestral fade to the end. It would be an overstatement to call Tubin’s last symphony elegiac, but it is pervaded by a strong sense of mortality and by the feeling of sadness that comes with the knowledge that triumph is always temporary.
The unexpected is intriguing and in this case reveals several masterpieces that speak of the beauty of a native land and the sorrow of its loss. Nothing I have heard in Tubin’s music could possibly explain, much less justify, its complete neglect. Now that the Cold War in music is over, I hope to hear more of these deserving works in our concert halls. Lovers of 20th-century Scandinavian music should be especially interested in these superb releases from BIS, as should anyone wondering why more composers did not continue to write tonal music even after Arnold Schoenberg told them not to.