“Kajustaflan” by Axel Gallén. From left: Axel Gallén, Oskar Merikanto, Robert Kajanus, and Jean Sibelius. Gallén later created a more refined Symposion version of the motif.
The most famous of the artistic groups that Sibelius was a part of was undoubtedly the Symposion Circle, whose other core members were Robert Kajanus and Axel Gallén (later Akseli Gallen-Kallela). The Symposion artist circle began to take shape in the winter of 1892, when Sibelius had moved to Helsinki. Evening gatherings with Kajanus and others were initially held, for example, at the home of the director of the bell school, Lorenz Nikolai Achté, and his wife Emmy, who was a talented singer. The teenage daughter Aino, who later became a top-class singer, remembered Sibelius from this time.
“Kajanus was one of my father’s friends and occasionally visited our home. But when the ‘gang’ sometimes rang the doorbell in the middle of the night and my father ordered coffee and cognac to be set on the table, my mother, having gotten up, could not always rise to the same mood and take the situation with humor. Among the ‘gang’ was Jean Sibelius, who, in a sudden burst of creativity, wanted to immediately rush to the nearest proper piano to see if the notes sounded as enchanting in reality as they did in his imagination.”
The wives’ disapproval moved the gatherings from homes to restaurants. Kajanus and Gallén fascinated Sibelius, and among the circle’s occasional extra members were Armas Järnefelt, Adolf Paul, and Gallén’s brother-in-law Mikko Slöör. Armas and Adolf were often abroad, though. The poet Eino Leino was not a member of the Symposion Circle, despite frequent claims to the contrary. In 1892, Leino was only 14 years old. Nor was he the model for the “sleeping burgher” in Gallén’s Symposion painting, as when the painting was made, Eino was a 16-year-old boy, not the thick-necked man depicted.
The leading figure in the Symposion Circle’s core trio was Robert Kajanus, a conductor and composer who was a decade older than the others. Kajanus had already experienced the deaths of two wives and his firstborn daughter, and all this had hardened the former young idealist. Kajanus’s third marriage to his wife Lilli was very stormy. The husband would blow off steam in restaurants in the evenings.
Gallen-Kallela, for his part, was still a brighter personality at the time. “The trials and disappointments of the artist’s career had not yet broken him; he was full of optimism, fighting spirit, and creative power,” Sibelius recalled in 1935. “He was talkative and lively, and enlivened our gatherings with festive stories about his study trips. He had seen quite a bit of the world and knew how to utilize experiences, humorous as well as others.”
Together, the three of them certainly discussed the significance of the Kalevala for the new Finnish art and wanted to be involved in further developing the Young Finnish ideas that had arisen in the inner circle around the culturally progressive newspaper Päivälehti. They were also interested in the philosophical currents of the time, including Nietzsche, even though the young men’s knowledge was not always as great as their enthusiasm. For example, this is referenced by the circle’s extra member, the German master violinist Willy Burmester, who had taken a job as the second concertmaster in Kajanus’s orchestra in the autumn of 1892. He recalled the Symposion gatherings as follows:
“I also became friends with unknown but very ambitious writers, painters, and musicians, who enriched my life. We philosophized and debated theories that today [in 1926] would make me smile. But the discussions with these kindred yet so different personalities cannot be underestimated, for they were inspiring intellectual gymnastics. We met after the concerts ended in a private room at our regular tavern. German punch, Benedictine, monk liqueur, and cigars sparked the desire to change the drowsy atmosphere into an exchange of ideas. I hardly need to emphasize that musical improvisations provided a pleasant contrast to our lively discussions. Once we stood around the grand piano, deeply absorbed in true art, listening to Alfred Reisenauer’s genius playing (…) and this pupil of Liszt and artist by the grace of God had chosen not a bad audience. Around the grand piano stood the soulful person and musician Kajanus, the genius, passionate Sibelius, the famous painter Gallén, the writer Adolf Paul, who had written the famous Die Tänzerin Barberina and many other well-known works, the excellent musician [Oskar] Merikanto, Armas Järnefelt, and many other young men who created valuable art! (…) Once, I played with Reisenauer in my home for all these greats from eight in the evening until five in the morning, ten sonatas by Beethoven, three by Brahms, and two by Grieg.”
Gallén’s snapshot from the spring of 1893 highlights the circle’s pleasure-seeking nature. “I became greatly invigorated during the course of the evening, especially when Kajanus and Sibelius arrived. It is simply necessary to relax now and then,” he wrote.
In early 1894, Symposion lived through its most intense phase. From these times comes the most famous Sibelius anecdote, about which there are dozens of variations. According to the anecdote, Robert Kajanus conducted a concert in St. Petersburg in the middle of a drinking session at Kämp. When he returned, he made a detour to Kämp and saw the other members of the circle still sitting at the same table. “Why do you keep bothering Kajus with these doors? Sit down and drink like the others,” Sibelius is said to have remarked.
In 1929, the artist Sigurd Wettenhovi-Aspa gave the following version of the joke:
“Once, [Armas Järnefelt] traveled all the way to St. Petersburg to conduct a concert. He stayed there for two whole days, but since he was usually relatively quiet, no one noticed his absence in this excellent company. At least Sibelius had hardly noticed that his brother-in-law was gone. When brother Armas returned to Helsinki, he reasoned like this: ‘Naturally, the plenary session of the assembly of geniuses is still ongoing.’ He was right, and when he re-entered the room with his new laurels, which he naturally wanted to show his comrades, Sibelius fixed his probing blue eyes on his brother-in-law and said: — Well? Have you been on the phone again? As you can see, replied Järnefelt. I ordered a couple of laurel wreaths from St. Petersburg.”
Sibelius himself emphasized that they discussed art and didn’t just drink during the sessions. As late as 1950, he enthusiastically remembered the idealism of the 1890s, when artists didn’t talk about money or paying rent but about the art itself. Sibelius thought that even the businessmen of the 1890s were art connoisseurs and gladly paid for the drinks when they got to talk with artists about new directions.
At the end of January 1894, Gallén moved to Sääksmäki, and the Symposion trio dissolved for a while. However, during the year, Gallén immortalized the core trio in a couple of works, in “Kajustaflan,” which is now in the Serlachius Art Foundation’s collections and has also been called Problem or Sketch for the Symposion Painting, and in the actual Symposion painting, which seems to be the more finished and refined version of the motif. In this work, the artists appear less drunk and look more dignified than in Kajustaflan.
In Kajustaflan, a naked figure is depicted sitting on the table with hands around the knees, a furious Gallén, a caricature of Oskar Merikanto painted using a turnip as a model, a philosophical Kajanus, and a very drunk Sibelius. On the table, there are many empty glasses and bottles, including Benedictine liqueur, which was called “the monk.” In the more finished version, Sibelius, Kajanus, Gallén, and a dozing “burgher” are sitting in a restaurant with monk liqueur. The young geniuses are looking at the wings of Osiris against a deeply symbolic background.
Gallén’s explanations about the sleeping person varied. “I took care of Merikanto, this turnip head, by letting him fall asleep on the table,” the artist wrote to Louis Sparre on April 28, 1894. Later, the explanation for the sleeping figure became more profound. It was now claimed that the “burgher” did not have a direct real-life model but that Gallén wanted to depict a type of person who could not climb the ladder of genius, becomes tired, and falls asleep, while the others awaken – perhaps inspired by alcohol – to hear the voices of eternity. Among the models for the “burgher” were, in turn, at least Mikko Slöör, Oskar Merikanto, and Adolf Paul.
The critics were furious. Uusi Suometar called Gallén the naughty boy of the exhibition. “Both hours and bottles have passed, as the cigars have fallen from the gentlemen’s fingers, and the third companion has already fallen asleep with the monk [Benedictine liqueur], this late-night companion,” the newspaper joked. Päivälehti
The critics were furious. Uusi Suometar called Gallén the naughty boy of the exhibition. “Both hours and bottles have passed, as the cigars have fallen from the gentlemen’s fingers, and the third companion has already fallen asleep with the monk [Benedictine liqueur], this late-night companion,” the newspaper joked. Päivälehti’s Kasimir Leino was more positive towards “the local boys.” “That the artist is indeed moving in the free waters of ideas, he wanted to remark by painting a starry sky around the men instead of walls,” wrote Eino Leino’s older brother. Albert Edelfelt was fed up with symbolism. He didn’t believe in a “morphinistic, theosophical, spiritualistic, and sexually abnormal art.” Naturally, one can argue about whether Symposion is symbolist and whether Edelfelt was referring to, among others, this painting with his statement.
In the early 2000s, Janne Gallen-Kallela-Sirén has pointed out the work’s possible connection to Rubens’ Four Philosophers and Seneca’s bust and refuted the claims about these works’ possible symbolism. He believes that the painting’s background rather refers to the Bible and Acts 2:12-21, where it says that God will pour out his spirit on all flesh and that in connection with this, blood and fire and vapor of smoke will appear, and that the sun will turn to darkness and the moon to blood. The art historians’ dispute over the meaning of the paintings is likely to continue.
Such subtleties were discussed by few contemporaries: for them, the painting depicted well-known artists drunk in an unconventional and radical painting. The Problem or Symposion painting was, according to Gallén, “a bomb,” whose “all the fragments will naturally ultimately fall on me, but I believe I will survive it.” Some of the fragments also hit Sibelius, who, because of the painting, was considered a decadent drunk. After the vernissage, the Symposion sessions faded away. Gallén withdrew to his studio in Ruovesi. His notorious reputation made it difficult to sell the works to private homes. For Sibelius, however, the Symposion phase left a pleasant memory.
“Our sessions were incredibly rewarding. (…) We pondered everything under the sun; the problems were sparked and flew, but always in an optimistic and liberating spirit. New ideas had to be cleared on all fronts. The Symposion evenings gave me much during this time when I would otherwise have been more or less alone. (…) The Symposion era lasted from the autumn of 1892 to 1895. Then Gallen-Kallela went abroad, and I prepared to go my own way. The mood of the 1890s did not return.”