Water Droplets (Sibelius)


Water Droplets, JS 216, is a chamber piece for violin and cello pizzicato written by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius when he was a schoolboy. The "tiny piece", which is just 12 measures long, cannot be dated with precision, because the autograph manuscript is lost. Scholars nevertheless speculate that Sibelius wrote the duo sometime between 1875 and—more likely—1881. Regardless, Water Droplets retains a degree of historical significance as Sibelius's earliest written work. published the piece in 1997. A typical performance lasts 45 seconds.

History

Sibelius's father, Christian Gustaf, died of typhus on 31 July 1868, leaving behind his pregnant, 26-year old wife Maria, as well as two young children: Jean and his older sister Linda; Christian had mismanaged his affairs, and following his death, his estate was declared bankrupt. Maria was forced to move back in with her widowed mother, Juliana Borg, and two unmarried sisters ; shortly thereafter, she gave birth to Sibelius's younger brother, Christian, on 27 March 1869. Throughout his childhood, Sibelius—then called Janne—lived within this extended family circle, which moved around Hämeenlinna several times. The children typically summered in Loviisa with their paternal grandmother, Katarina, and Aunt Evelina.
Sibelius's first attempts at composition—improvisational in nature—were at the family piano, on which his Aunt Julia began teaching him at age seven. Later in life, Sibelius claimed that his first composition had been a piano piece for children's theatre called Desert Scene ; no trace of this work has ever been found, perhaps because he never committed it to paper. Moreover, Aunt Evelina—who "very early on ... grasped the exceptional nature of musical talent, and watched its growth with sympathy and understanding"—was the subject of another early work, Aunt Evelina's Life in Music, an "embryonic Sinfonia domestica" that the boy also never bothered to write down.
Scholars believe the first composition that Sibelius committed to paper is a short, 12-measure duo for violin and cello pizzicato, which he titled Water Droplets. The piece only survives as a copy—likely made in 1915—by the Finnish composer and scholar Erik Furuhjelm, who was then writing the first biography of Sibelius in honor of the composer's semicentennial; to complete the book, he needed to examine Sibelius's juvenilia and early professional works. Because the autograph manuscript is lost, Water Droplets cannot be dated with precision. While Tawaststjerna dates the duo to 1875, other scholars—for example,, an authority on the composer's manuscripts—posit that Water Droplets more likely dates to 1881, when he was a 15-year old. Their reasoning is that in the mid-to-late 1870s Sibelius likely did not yet know the violin and cello well enough to write Water Droplets, because he would not begin violin lessons until the autumn of 1881, when he became a pupil of the local Hämeenlinna military bandmaster, Gustaf Levander. Indeed, Sibelius may have written the piece as an exercise for himself and Christian, who played the cello.

Music

Water Droplets, which was published posthumously in 1997 by, is in the key of E minor and has a time signature. Structurally, it is, according to Daniel Grimley, "a little Mozartian study ... with a simple Alberti (broken-chord) accompaniment", in which the main theme is first presented and then twice repeated with modifications.

Reception

While the piece "is no early product of a child genius", it nonetheless is a charming miniature in which Sibelius displays an "instinctive feeling for form". Moreover, with his deployment of a "realistic", almost onomatopoeic pizzicato, Sibelius demonstrates an ability to use instruments " ... to achieve the right atmosphere".
Glenda Dawn Goss goes further, placing Water Droplets in the context of both Finnish nationalism and Sibelius's special brand of "musical feeling":
In contrast, Harold Johnson's verdict is the most reserved: "What it establishes more than anything else," he writes, "is the fact that the boy was eager to create his own music".

Discography

The Japanese violinist and the Finnish cellist made the world premiere studio recording of Water Droplets in 1995 for Ondine. The table below lists this and other commercially available recordings:
ViolinCelloRuntimeRecording venueLabel
10:441995Ondine
20:452003BIS
30:35 2018Studio Domovina, PragueArta Music
40:45 2019Potton Hall, SuffolkChallenge Classics
50:472024Decca Classics