Karelia Suite by Sibelius, Happy Animals and Killer Butterflies Meet Sibelius

Karelia Suite by Sibelius

The Philharmonia orchestra conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy https://youtu.be/1ryhN5kNFzc

This is very cheerful music, some of the earliest works of Sibelius.

It's in four parts. The last part is some of the cheeriest, happy music I've heard. It conjures up a scene of a playground full of young girls merrily skipping around. and later joined by a group of dancing animals, horses, elephants, rhinos, hippopotamuses, warthogs, and birds.

First, the large mammals, elephants, rhinos, giraffes, hippopotamuses, horses, warthogs, and others enter the scene in a stately manner as if they were opening an Olympic ceremony. Later, they begin dancing and frolicking joining the younger ones who are stotting and playing and having a ball. There are birds there too, merrily singing.
****

Happy Animals and Killer Butterflies Meet Sibelius

The 4th part of the Sibelius Karelia Suite is unreasonably cheerful. How could anybody be that happy? Maybe girls, young girls and young animals. Maybe a playground of young girls merrily skipping and dancing as only young girls can do. And only for periods of time. They can't be that happy all the time. Sibelius couldn't be that happy, but he wrote the music anyway, so he must have had a glimpse of happiness. Boys can never be that happy.

Boys can't be happy because their dads aren't happy. They're emotionally distant, engaged in one-upmanship, and they prepare their sons to be the same. Boys can't skip and dance with joy because they're busy getting one-up on everybody else and everything else too.

Can animals be happy. Do elephants, rhinos hippopotamuses, warthogs, giraffes, and birds dance with glee as I imagine they do in the music? The animals I conjure up during the last part of the Karelia Suite are both adults and young, but the young ones, the colts, young elephants, rhinos, hippopotamuses, and warthogs are stotting and dancing as the young are always prone to do. A lot of animals are like that. Not so much insects though.

Butterflies, for instance, are fickle. Some years ago there was a jubilee of hackberry butterflies at my backyard compost pile. It was a good year, and the butterflies were plentiful. I would mash up a banana on a plate and carry it out to feed them. They could sense it before I set the plate down and swarmed around me landing on the plate as I held it. They happily ignored me.

There is a place where I hike and the hackberry butterflies gather, not a lot of them, a dozen or so. I don't know what they're doing, but they resent my intrusion and attack me concentrating their attacks on my face and hair. I call them killer butterflies. They pelt my face or land on it for a millisecond like an airplane's touch and go on a runway. It feels like tiny bits of paper hitting my face, but I get the message. Leave! They're like that, gleefull one moment and aggressive the next. Insects, though, lack the emotions of bird and mammals.

Perhaps young mammals, such as young girls or colts, are capable of feeling the glee expressed in the music of Sibelius, but adults, especially people, are seldom happy, and they are never nearly as happy as depicted in the Karelia Suite, the 4th part. I found myself becoming sad listening to that joyful music because nobody is ever that happy. Maybe little girls. Adults never.

Sibelius must have had a good day or a good few moments anyway to write that music. Maybe the Karelia Suite celebrated the memory of a few exceedingly cheerful moments he had in his life watching children and young animals.

He had a long life, and in his last 30 years he wrote virtually no music. Nevertheless, in Finland on December 8th a flag is flown commemorating the birth of Sibelius. They love him that much. They don't fly the flag every day in Finland like we do here. They only fly the flag on special occasions, mostly celebratory, and on occasion memorially, 20 days or so a year. The anniversary of the birth of Sibelius is cause for celebration in Finland.