King Christian II: Nocturne

Sibelius enjoyed working for the theatre and, over the course of forty years or so, supplied scores for no fewer than twelve productions. Some items of incidental music, like the Valse triste written for Järnefelt’s Kuolema in 1902 and At the Castle Gate for Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande three years later, are among the most popular of all his pieces. While nothing he composed for Adolf Paul’s King Christian II in 1898, his first work for the theatre, has achieved that kind of familiarity, Sibelius’s music surely had a part in securing the initial success of the play at the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki. Certainly, the Suite from the King Christian II incidental music was his first orchestral score to appear in print and the first to be performed in this country (at a Henry Wood Prom in 1901).

What was interesting for a playwright about Christian II - the Danish King who ruled over the whole of Scandinavia in the first half of the 16th century - was his tragic love for a Dutch girl who, because of her unsuitably humble background, was disposed of in a ruthless political intrigue. Sibelius’s incidental music originally amounted to no more than four items, including an eloquent Elegy and a delightful Musette, scored for a small ensemble which he himself conducted behind the scenes. A publisher’s interest in those pieces persuaded him to write three more for a full-size orchestra, a Nocturne, a Serenade and a Ballade, which he then put together with the Elegy and the Musette in a King Christian II Suite. Whatever its relevance to the play - it is presumably an expression of Christian’s love for the Dutch girl - the relevance of the Nocturne today is its unfailing melodic inspiration, its romantic ardour and (alongside echoes of Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette) the emerging sound of the Symphony in E minor that Sibelius was to write a year later.