His First and Second symphonies, the latter a concert-hall staple, rely on a lush, Romantic idiom, but beginning with the Third Symphony, he began sounding a more austere note, as he experimented with both structure and tonality. Of the seven works he completed in the genre, several are masterpieces, each strikingly different from the rest. But Sibelius’s legacy will forever rest upon his symphonies. Sibelius would go on to compose beautiful, haunting, picturesque tone poems, such as Pohjola’s Daughter, The Oceanides, and Tapiola, as well as one of the greatest violin concertos in the literature. His heroic tone poem Finlandia, an unofficial anthem that would be invoked often during any number of national crises, remains his most popular work, the apotheosis of his nationalist period. That Sibelius relied so heavily on folklore meant that his music would become synonymous with an emerging Finnish artistic culture. His reputation in Finland only grew with the pieces that followed, En saga and the tone poems of the Lemminkäinen Suite, also based on mythological themes. So he committed his energies to composition, achieving his first major success with Kullervo, an epic symphonic poem, based on Karelian folklore and myths, that premiered in 1892. He had dreamed of becoming a violinist, but he suffered from crippling stage fright and was not, in any case, good enough to embark on a solo career. The gestation of the symphony may have been long and troubled, but Sibelius had, at various times, referred to his manuscript as “brilliant,” “a great work in the making,” a piece that would have been “the reckoning of whole existence.” For so long, he had had but one desire: to finish the piece before drifting off “to the final silence.” Why, then, did Sibelius destroy such a highly anticipated and promising work? This remains one of the most perplexing questions in all of music history.Īny assessment of Finnish music is impossible without Sibelius, for Finnish music essentially began with him. He appeared strangely optimistic, no longer depressed, as if the fire had brought on some magnificent catharsis. Afterward, a strange calm descended upon the composer. Aino, who would recall the event after her husband’s death, could confirm the identity of only one of the pieces her husband burned-the early Karelia Suite-but it is now considered a certainty that the Eighth Symphony was destroyed as well.
One day, Sibelius carried a laundry basket filled with his manuscripts into the dining room at Ainola and began feeding the pages into the raging fire in the stove. Sometime in the 1940s, the struggle was seemingly lost. Yet he continued to wage a turbulent artistic struggle with himself as he attempted, over the course of several years, to write his Eighth Symphony. From about 1933 onward, he published no music of any significance, nothing but a few trifles and arrangements. Surrounded by fields and birch forests, it befitted the isolation of Sibelius’s later years, when Finland’s most revered musician became a withdrawn, reclusive figure. He called the house Ainola, after his wife, Aino.
(Public Domain via the Finnish Club of Helsinki)įrom 1904 until his death in 1957, the composer Jean Sibelius lived some 20 miles north of Helsinki, in a rural villa built of timber and stone on the shores of Lake Tuusula. Jean and Aino Sibelius with Margaret, Catherine, and Heidi at Ainola in the fall of 1915.
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