Jean Sibelius

Establishing a career

Jean (originally Johan, or Janne) Sibelius was raised in a Swedish-speaking household in Hämeenlinna. His father died when he was three, leaving the family in financial difficulties. An uncle gave the young Sibelius a violin and he began to play chamber works with friends and relatives, harbouring an ambition to become a virtuoso violinist. After studying law, he attended conservatoires in Helsinki, Berlin and Vienna, increasingly moving his focus towards composition. He gained early experience by writing incidental music and orchestral suites, composing his First Symphony in 1899.

Representing a nation

Before 1917, Finland was a ‘nation in waiting’: a Grand Duchy within the Russian empire. Around 1900, Russia embarked upon a period of ‘Russification’, attempting to limit the political autonomy of Finland and suppress its cultural distinctiveness and language. This prompted resistance, which awakened in the young Sibelius pronounced feelings of Finnish identity. He became involved with the nationalist movement, writing patriotic songs and orchestral works based around episodes from the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic, associated with the Karelia region. Although he often used modal harmonies, he rarely quoted folk songs, unlike other nationalist composers of his generation.

Home and away

Sibelius spent an extended period in Italy in 1901 and later travelled regularly to Britain, Germany, France, the US and throughout Scandinavia promoting his works, but rooted his life firmly in Finland, living at Ainola, a house in the countryside outside Helsinki that he had built in 1904. The house’s lakeside setting offered him a tranquil location, surrounded by nature, in which to compose. Moving to Ainola temporarily halted Sibelius’ bad behaviour – periods during which he would drink heavily and run up huge restaurant bills in Helsinki – though he was prone to periodic relapses, which put a considerable emotional toll on his family.

Critical fortunes

Sibelius’ compositions attracted great interest in Finland from the outset. Patriotic works such as Kullervo, The Swan of Tuonela and Finlandia resonated with the contemporary spirit of nationalism and he was granted a government salary that allowed him to focus on composing full-time. The 1920s marked the pinnacle of his success during his lifetime, when he became one of the most frequently played living composers. However, by 1930 he had substantially stopped composing and, during his long retirement, witnessed a backlash against his works by Modernists who regarded him as a Romantic throwback. From the 1960s, boosted by recordings, there was a sharp revival of interest in his work internationally, which has endured to the present.

Sibelius was taught at the Vienna Conservatoire by the renowned Austrian composer Robert Fuchs, who also taught Mahler and Zemlinsky. During his time in Vienna, Sibelius took a keen interest in the symphonic music of Bruckner and Beethoven, who inspired his interest in the organic developments of musical themes. Tchaikovsky’s Romantic lyricism was an important model for Sibelius during his youth. However, returning from studies abroad in 1891, he spent the next decade forging an independent, more distinctively Finnish musical voice: consciously rejecting ‘Russification’ became central to his compositional ethos.

Like most composers of his generation, Sibelius was seduced by the reforms and imaginative orchestral language of Wagner, and he visited Bayreuth in 1894. Later, he revised his high opinion of the German composer and his efforts to write a full-scale opera of his own proved abortive. Liszt provided useful inspiration for Sibelius’ development of the symphonic poem or tone poem genre.