Legend has it that the young Jean Sibelius would take his violin out into the boreal forest near his birthplace of Hämeenlinna, Finland, and play for the rocks, the trees, the mosses, and the birds. On the evidence of the music he would later write, however, it’s clear that he was listening as well as performing. Once derided (by no less of an authority than composer and critic Virgil Thompson) as ‘vulgar, self-indulgent, and provincial beyond all description”, Sibelius can now be seen as a crucial link in a musical lineage that extends from Antonio Vivaldi through Ludwig van Beethoven and on into the latest works from the Alaskan tone poet John Luther Adams.
And, as with Adams, Sibelius’s nature is far from universally benign. Consider the storm that erupts midway through his Symphony No. 7 in C major, which opens this program. A terrifying swirl of strings places us in a blizzard on the taiga, or perhaps clinging to the ice-slicked deck of a schooner in a Baltic tempest. Yes, the storm passes, with the music moving on to depict a serenely beautiful morning, but the memory of implacable violence remains.
Nature is not the only unruly force in the Symphony No. 7, however. Sibelius completed the work’s long gestation in 1924, afterwards sinking into a 33-year silence that produced only one more symphonic work, the symphonic poem Tapiola. Depressed, struggling against his addiction to alcohol, and worried for the future of his country, sandwiched as it was between the quasi-imperial powers of Russia and Germany, Sibelius poured his concerns into music that conductor Simon Rattle has described as “almost like a scream” by the time it comes to its conclusion.
“It’s the most depressed C major in all of musical literature,” Rattle has said, although for Victoria Symphony music director Christian Kluxen that’s a contentious statement. “For me,” Kluxen avows, “that final C major isn’t a collapse, it’s a revelation. Yes, the symphony is a tour de force—intensely concentrated, emotionally vast, and filled with drama that feels like it’s compressing a lifetime of struggle into just over 20 minutes. But the way it reaches that last C major chord is anything but defeated.
“There’s a sense of clarity, of elevation—as if Sibelius has carved away everything non-essential to reveal something pure and eternal,” he continues. “That final ascent, especially in the last moments with the augmented seventh resolving upward, feels to me like a reaching toward perfection—not only in music, but in art and in life. It’s not about death. It goes beyond life. It touches another dimension. That’s not depression; that’s transcendence.”
It’s not, perhaps, how one would normally choose to begin an evening. But either interpretation works as a way of leading into Songs for Murdered Sisters, for this astonishingly powerful new collaboration between composer Jake Heggie, librettist Margaret Atwood, and baritone soloist Joshua Hopkins contains horror, hope, acceptance, and transformation.
The cold facts of the matter are that in 2015, one violent man murdered three of his former partners, Carol Culleton, Anastasia Kuzyk, and Nathalie Warmerdam. And for Hopkins, the events were especially traumatic; one of those women, Warmerdam, was his sister.
Music was his solace. When he heard the terrible news, he explains, he was just about to go into rehearsals for The Barber of Seville with the National Arts Centre Orchestra. “I did the rehearsal because sticking with the world of Rossini seemed like a beneficial escape,” he says. “And then there was just kind of a strange circus around all of it, because it made national headlines. Going to the grocery store the next day and seeing ‘Murder! Murder!’ plastered over the front of all the papers, and knowing that that was my sister… That was surreal.”
Once the shock subsided, Hopkins knew that something had to be done. But what?
“It was kind of a logical idea that my wife Zoe and I had, to suggest the creation of something that would honour the memory of Nathalie, Carol, and Anastasia,” He explains. “And of course at that time we had no idea what it could be, but we knew that we wanted a project where I could use my voice to express this devastation and loss. But in what form? We weren’t really sure what it would be. Would it use existing poetry? Would it be a young and up-and-coming composer? Everything was very free-form at the beginning.”
Heggie was a natural candidate for the composer’s role, having already written Hopkins into his 2016 opera, It’s a Wonderful Life. “I arranged a lunch with him and wanted to propose him writing this piece,” the singer says. “He was immediately honoured and touched that I would approach him about telling my sister’s story, and what he really instilled in me was this goal of thinking big about who to partner with. And of course he needed a great writer to inspire his music to flow through him.”
Building on the coincidence of Atwood having seen Hopkins sing with the NACO, an approach was made—and according to the singer, the response was immediate.
“It was ‘I have known several women who were murdered by their partners or ex-partner,’” Hopkins reveals. “There was a bit of back-and-forth over email with questions about form: how many selections were we aiming for? And there was also a discussion about ‘Shouldn’t there be a female voice, or would this be a piece for two voices, a male and a female?’ Jake and I discussed that, and I delved deep into myself about that, too, and to be honest it felt important for us just to keep it to my voice, for me to kind of inhabit the idea of a male ally to the cause. Which is not to say that a woman couldn’t sing these songs; these songs are for anyone to sing.”
Atwood’s texts are terse, to the point, and display really remarkable empathy for Hopkins and his family. “I just wept, because I felt like, without even meeting me, she had tapped into everything that had kind of been numb for years but that was right under he surface of what I felt,” the singer confesses. “I can’t say that I’ve ever felt the need for vengeance against the man that killed my sister; that is not the type of person that I am. So that’s part of the song cycle in the song ‘Rage’; it doesn’t really reflect me personally, but the same type of rage can be in there. It’s not necessarily a vengeful one.
“I had the same reaction when Jake sent me the music and I just kind of played through it: this is unbelievably beautiful and powerful and poignant,” Hopkins adds. “It expressed and enhanced everything that Margaret had written. And the amazing thing about what they’ve produced is that it’s helped me to process my grief, and it’s brought out the emotions that I needed to feel, after something so traumatic. I’m grateful to them for that, because they kind of led me through that journey.”
Just as Sibelius’s storms prefigure Songs for Murdered Sisters, the great Finn will deliver us into calmer feelings. As Heggie does in his song cycle’s “Bird Soul”, Sibelius uses an avian metaphor in his tone poem The Swan of Tuonela, while he once described his Symphony No. 6 in D minor as a drink of “pure cold water”. What could be better than that after a powerful shock?
Notes by Alex Varty
Christian Kluxen, conductor