Ainola: Sibelius at Home

“Meeting Sibelius is like being confronted by a power of nature. He looks like an eagle in a storm, like a towering pine or an emperor hewn from granite,” said Ture Rangström of the Finnish maestro in 1925 at the unveiling of the composer's statue on his sixtieth birthday. “Marble is far too soft a material for his portrait.”

Indeed, to be in Sibelius’s presence was to meet a grand seigneur; stern and distant, yet at the same time gracious and disarming. His features were firm-set and forbidding; his steel-blue eyes surveyed his surroundings with a degree of sharpness which was often mistaken for contempt, and his voice had a deep and sonorous sound despite the fact that he spoke in a common dialect. Aino, his beloved wife, described her husband’s air as noli me tangere—”touch me not.” Sibelius recognized this aloofness when he referred to himself as “I, Sphinx.”

Though a retiring introvert by nature, Sibelius could be a boisterous man of the world: witty, impulsive and spontaneous. He sought out the best in life. A fastidious dresser, he always wore a three-piece suit, smoked only the best Havana cigars and enjoyed good food and wine.

However, it was to the rough and rugged woods and backroads of Finland that Sibelius looked for musical inspiration. As a young composer he had spent days and nights in the forests throughout the summer months trying to reproduce on his violin the sights, sounds and emotions that he had thus encountered. In 1904, he left Helsinki and moved permanently to the country where he could be close to Nature.

Sibelius’s brother-in-law, the artist Eero Järnefelt, had discovered a breath-taking spot some 38 kilometers from Helsinki, near the village of Järvenpää. Captivated by this hill clad with stately pines, Sibelius and Aino purchased the land, and in the spring of 1904 construction began on their new home. Plans were drawn up by architect Lars Sonck, a family friend, and in September the Sibelius family moved into their new, still partially unfinished house. Sibelius affectionately called it Ainola, a place where Aino dwells.

The villa was built in traditional, rugged Finnish style of native timber and stone, with balconies, gables and verandahs. The house has two storeys, with four rooms, kitchen and the servants' quarters downstairs and three bedrooms upstairs.

Considering the composer’s tendency for flamboyance, Ainola is rather surprisingly fitted with simple and restrained style. This Spartan spirit is pleasingly complemented by original works of art that adorn the log walls of many of the rooms, such as a painting of Aino by her brother; a drawing of Sibelius by Albert Edelfelt, one of the family’s many artist friends. A bust of Sibelius, sculpted by John Munsterhjelm, finds a prominent place in the drawing room. The focal point here is the black Steinway grand piano, a gift from the composer’s friends on his fiftieth birthday in 1915. Akseli Gallén-Kallela’s conception of Sibelius’s symphonic poem, Saga, hangs in the library. The shelves of the library display over 3,000 volumes of classical and contemporary masterpieces which Sibelius read incessantly in their original languages. He was conversant in several languages, and particularly enjoyed quoting the classics in Latin.

The move to Järvenpää was timely and opened a new era in Sibelius's creative life. "All the song in me had died in Helsinki," he commented. Ainola offered him the inspiration that he had sought all his life.

“Look at this scenery,” he remarked to a guest, “I like it, it’s so restful, the best possible milieu for my work: these vast, peaceful fields going right down to the lake.” On another occasion Sibelius said of this home, “Here in Ainola the silence speaks.”

This notion was recognized by Henry Akseli when he wrote of Sibelius: “The silent hours of the night are full of most intense life for him . . . The expression on his face . . . is now solemn. The strange, upright wrinkles on his brow are now much deeper. He is looking somewhere far away, and it seems that he has completely forgotten his surroundings. It is impossible to say what he is thinking about, but we may surmise that he is roaming in the limitless world of abstraction. The silent loneliness is to him an opportunity to hear the glorious music of the spheres.”

Sibelius lived in the realm of tones. He heard pitches and tonalities everywhere in nature: the curlew’s lament which sounded on white, warm summer evenings from the meadows around Ainola, was pitched between a and f; the cockoo sang “out of tune, neither major nor minor, but something in between.” Often Sibelius would stop at a window and, gazing into the black winter night sprinkled with bright stars, he would say, as if spellbound by a vision: “There are musical notes and harmonies on all planets. Naturally men live on them, too . . . It is laughable to think that our small planet is the only one to have life.” Sibelius was also affected by the individual properties of colors. He experienced them as musical sounds, each tone possessing an exact pitch. Thus he told that when his family bought him his first piano, a rugged brown upright, he immediately went to it and started to play in G-major.

Although it was Aino who reigned supreme over her household, life at Ainola revolved around her husband’s creative impulses. At an interview which she granted on the occasions of the composer’s seventieth birthday, Aino painted a picture of the Sibelius’s homelife: “We at home know that he lives constantly in the realm of tone. I generally never speak to him [in the morning] until he first addresses me. We do not want to trespass upon his thoughts [or] interrupt the flow of his creative imaginings. Music irritates my husband more than anything else. Forced to overhear a stray tune, a fragment of song, or someone whistling, he will throw his work overboard and wreck his inspiration. . . . That is why at home one never hears music. No one ever sings. No one whistles. That is unless my husband chooses otherwise.”

It was at Ainola that Sibelius wrote most of his best music. His last four symphonies were composed there, as were the tone poems Tempest and Tapiola. But curiously enough, after Tapiola silence fell. For the next thirty years, Sibelius seemed unable to create music which he deemed worthy to succeed his Seventh Symphony and Tapiola. Rumors persisted that an eighth symphony was in the making, but no note of it was ever sounded.

Sibelius lived in the solitude of his beloved Ainola, withdrawn from the world, but certainly not forgotten of the world. Gifts, telegrams and letters flowed into his library from all corners of the world. But the grand seigneur kept to himself, enjoying the autumn years of his life with his wife Aino, surveying the beloved acreage of their country estate.

Beautiful flower gardens, planted and cared for by Aino, were their pride and joy. Daily walks on the grounds kept the maestro’s robust spirit buoyant until, at the end of a normal day, on September 20, 1957, death came. Sibelius died in the evening at his home, while Sir Malcolm Sargent conducted a performance of his Fifth Symphony.

An impressive funeral took place ten days later in Helsingin Suurkirkko, the monumental neoclassic cathedral in Helsinki. The music played included the slow movement of the Fourth Symphony, In Memoriam and The Swan. Wreaths were laid by the Finnish president J.K. Paasikivi, Aino, close relatives and thousands of institutions and private individuals. Sibelius found a quiet resting place in the grounds of his beloved Ainola. Aino joined her husband twelve years later, at the age of 97. Their grave is under the apple trees which they had planted together.

Today Ainola stands much as it did when Sibelius lived there. It remains an intimate, comfortable home of an artist to whom peace and tranquility were of compelling importance.

Interior photos courtesy of Ainolasäätiö, Järvenpää, Finland. Other photos by the author.

For more on Sibelius, please, see:

solo songs of sibelius
sibelius database

(Unfortunately, this is in Finnish only)
sibelius links
sibelius