Faber & Faber

'You have saved me from a fiasco' were among Eric Tawaststjerna's first words to Robert Layton in 1965, at the centenary celebrations of the great Finnish composer Sibelius's birth. It signalled the start of a 25-year working relationship, translating one of the great works of musical biography, as Layton explains.

Spanning the years 1865 to 1957, and spread over three volumes, Tawaststjerna's magnum opus is now available in Faber Finds.

'1965 was the centenary of Sibelius's birth and to mark the occasion Finland organised an international congress of scholars at Jyväskylää, a provincial but elegant university town some 30 minutes flight over forests and lakes from Helsinki. My Master Musicians monograph was about to be published and so I was among those invited to take part. Presiding over the proceedings was the tall, distinguished figure of Erik Tawaststjerna.

There were guests from all over the world including the Estonian Leo Normet who read a long paper on the Kalevala and the French scholar-critic Marc Vignal whose magisterial study of the composer was published a couple of years ago.

I was asked to join Tawaststjerna in his hotel room for breakfast on the first morning where he asked me to check some phrases in the English text of his opening speech which he also made in Finnish, Swedish, German and if I remember correctly French. Erik was an excellent linguist and before his days as professor of musicology in Helsinki had served in the public relations department of the Finnish Foreign Ministry.

I made some small suggestions which he greeted with flamboyant exaggeration, 'You have saved me from a fiasco!' Flattering no doubt but not remotely true! That I would be spending so much of my time over the next twenty-five years translating his five-volume biography never occurred to me on that sunny morning: its first volume was just poised ready for publication.

Writing a book on such an ambitious scale is no mean undertaking; doing it in three languages is a daunting prospect. The five Finnish-language volumes appeared first but were all translated from the Swedish original which was the last to appear in print. The English was published in a three-volume adaptation from 1975 through to 1997: I worked from the Swedish as I don't, alas, know a word of Finnish. (I had lived in Sweden during the 1950s in the northern part of the country and then in Uppsala and Stockholm working on a book on the Swedish symphonist Franz Berwald, which appeared in Swedish before it came out in English.)

I made regular visits to Helsinki to go through the English text with him. Erik was immensely self-critical and if I suggested a cut (the English-speaking reader naturally differ from those of the Finnish or Swedish music-lover), he invariably wanted a more extensive one than I did. 

Erik was a night-owl and would ring at about midnight (2am in Helsinki) to talk about various musical matters. By no means always Sibelian. But in the mid-to-late 1980s, these calls became fewer and I subsequently learnt that he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. His mastery of prose deserted him and he left the last chapter or so in a form at variance with his usual style.

And so the very ending of the book was completed with the help of his lifelong secretary and friend Gitta Henning with whom I was able to sort out enough of the material to effect a conclusion. Of course, since his death Sibelius scholarship was made further strides, thanks to Fabian Dahlström and others, but Erik Tawaststjerna's mammoth volumes remain an indispensable study of the great composer.'