"While other composers are mixing musical cocktails for the public," Sibelius once said, "I offer them a drink of clear, cold water." This illustrious statement has probably journeyed into the language of every civilized people on the globe, and been grasped at by music lovers as a reason for liking Sibelius. Yet if one would arrive at a comprehensive appreciation of his music, it is impossible to take the remark seriously. True, in the symphonies and tone-poems, there are passages of a woodwind complexion, of a curious rough-hewn quality, which have been traditionally seized on as the hall-mark of Sibelius's idiom. But the great moments in his great works are not this "incarnation of the fjords of Finland." The great works breathe a richness and a warmth such as cold water never did or could have, but which ripe heady wine always has had.

Probably the common conception of Sibelius as half-man half-fjord is shaped also by the peculiar type of structure of his symphonies. A single movement in any eighteenth or nineteenth-century symphony followed a certain general pattern--the main theme was stated at the outset, in all its length and loveliness, then in succeeding measures was broken down and developed. Sibelius uses an exactly opposite approach. He takes fragments of theme, broken bits of melody, and toys with them for a while. He juggles them from instrument to instrument, combining them in a variety of ways. Gradually they are linked together to form an extended and coherent theme. If one sees in this only orchestral splinters in a disconnected sequence, then a Sibelius symphony may be "fjord-like," or "stark," or whatever adjective the Sibelius cultists favor most. But if one's mind follows the organic growth of this material, one perceives that it is incomparably warm and rich, and the product of a vital poetic imagination.

With this scheme, moreover, Sibelius is able to pack climaxes of Wagnerian scope into a symphony a half an hour long. Bruckner had great conceptions, but his ideas meander baldly around and get lost in the involvements of the sonata form. Wagner, in order to work out his climaxes fully, had to extend them endlessly. But Sibelius's method is the essence of compactness, entailing none of the delays, enforced hesitations, and bridge-passage gaps of standard symphonic form, but allowing the composer to start on as low a level as he wishes, and move swiftly and cleanly to the peaks. Sibelius's symphonies, especially the last three, have an absolutely economy of notes. Yet within this seemingly small framework, and out of what seem the humblest thematic threads, they weave climaxes of epic dimensions.