Kalevi Aho’s Insect Symphony
Many nicknamed symphonies exist both inside and outside the classical canon: Beethoven has the Eroica, Pastoral and Choral; Mozart the Haffner, Prague and Jupiter. There are Mahler’s eschatological Resurrection; Tchaikovsky’s devastating Pathétique; Mendelssohn’s pair of postcards, the Scottish and Italian. More obscurely but intriguingly come Mayer’s Military, Dopper’s Rembrandt, Rautavaara’s Van Gogh, Bliss’s Colour, Brian’s Gothic, Ching’s Rituals, Glass’s Heroes (based on a David Bowie album), King’s Night, Lipkin’s Sun, Wallace’s Creation and Zádor’s Children. Half of Haydn’s seem to carry a sobriquet: in particular, there are the Bear and the Hen, numbers 82 and 83 respectively in the catalogue (the ursine work hopefully not eying its galline neighbour for a spot of symphonic supper).
Such zoological appointments bring us to another named for living creatures: Finnish composer Kalevi Aho’s outrageously entertaining and often deeply moving Insect Symphony (1988). It is his seventh of eighteen wonderful works so far for the genre, with the latest premiered in February 2024 and offered as a protest against contemporary racism and militarism, specifically Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (A prolific composer, Aho has also written numerous chamber works, piano and organ pieces, dozens of brilliant concertos for almost every conceivable instrument or combination of instruments, as well as, in 1997, the exceptional Chinese Songs for soprano and orchestra, which use rich, sensual texts for exquisitely crafted music that grows progressively darker until light and life break out in the final song.)
The Insect is a sardonic, ironic, programmatic symphony using material from the composer’s own opera Hyönteiselämää, ‘Insect Life’, which tells of a drink-sodden drifter who, in his intoxication, starts imagining human lives and characters for the buzzing insects he sees around him. He realises that humans act like bugs and flies, and vice versa, so really, we’re not so different after all: dangerous, mischievous, mortal, leading lives of drudgery and play, work and war.
Transforming the stage work’s scenes into a wholly orchestral piece, the Insect Symphony either excludes the vocal elements entirely or subtly metamorphoses them into new instrumental shapes. To meet the demands of the new musical form, the action’s ordering is often very different from the opera, while the work creates a fascinating new kind of symphony, one which refutes the traditional, oft Beethovenian, journey of moving forwards to triumph.
Instead, Aho’s movements quiz and question one another, each successive part interrogating its antecedent, with anarchy and disarray sown further as the symphony progresses. Yet it is never complete chaos, for there is a definite and careful plan at work, the oppositions weirdly labouring to support each other, their antagonisms providing a flexible strength, not a fragmentation. What at first seems chaotic, like an insect swarm, is in fact a very well ordered and methodical community of hierarchy, collaboration and mutual assistance.
Looked at another way, there is a kind of culminating narrative to the symphony as we move through the movements, almost configuring itself as a kind of ‘Eroica for Invertebrates’:
I. The Tramp, the Parasitic Hymenopter and its Larva
II. The Foxtrot and Tango of the Butterflies
III. The Dung Beetles
IV. The Grasshoppers
V. The Working Music of the Ants / The War Marches of the Ants
VI. The Dayflies / The Lullaby for the Dead Dayflies
Life, love, conflict and death – it is the very stuff of a Beethoven symphony. Yet the way in which Aho stresses the continual thesis/antithesis nature of the work guards against any such convenient, linear interpretations. Insects, in fact, operate in ways quite different to our own lives, stories and art. Nonetheless, as indicated above, there are parallels to be drawn, lessons to be learnt, from the insects. After all, we each love to order everything, placing things into compartments – and, ultimately, all we do is as fleeting, as ephemeral, perhaps as apparently pointless, as the lives of the poor dayflies.
The Insect Symphony is always going awry, fighting against its particular internal predecessors and begin again, offering new assertions, falling equally into comedy and tragedy, satire and romance, as its musical language and landscape shift in the sonic sky. But when those dayflies are lamented, we mourn their transience as we mourn our own, using the wonder of music to try to commemorate, prolong and endure both the misery/glory of life and the horror/release of death. Isolation, estrangement, brevity and beauty coexist in a haze of poignant meditation.
In some respects an anti-symphony, Aho’s Insect is furiously unusual, exploiting a strange subject and a stranger structure to marvellous effect in order to examine the whole notion of what a symphony (or any piece of music, come to that) is. Far more than just an amusing collection of hexapod tone paintings, its complex construction and intricate interactions bestow upon it an intense musical and philosophical depth that far outlasts its colourful set-pieces.
We might mock the dayflies for the briefness of their lives, for their ridiculous impermanence. But they are us, lest we forget, and we too should strive for some of their dignity and nobility as well as for the magnificent use they make of their short time on earth.
Two Great Recordings:
Osmo Vänskä / Lahti Symphony Orchestra (BIS)
Max Pommer / Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra (Ondine)
Dr David Vernon is the author of four books: Disturbing the Universe: Wagner’s Musikdrama, Beauty and Sadness: Mahler’s 11 Symphonies, Ada to Zembla: The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Beethoven: The String Quartets. His next book, Sun Forest Lake: The Symphonies and Tone Poems of Jean Sibelius, will be published in November 2024, while a study of Yukio Mishima’s novels is planned for 2026.