Jean Sibelius

Jean Sibelius was born on 8 December 1865 at Hämeenlinna in southern Finland, then an autonomous grand duchy of the Russian Empire. Christened Johan Julius Christian, he later adopted the name Jean, after a seafaring uncle. His father, an army doctor, died of typhus in 1868, and the family then lived in difficult circumstances. They spoke Swedish, the language of the Finnish elite; Jean learned Finnish at school. He spent his summers in the countryside among forests and lakes, a landscape that would inspire all his work.

He began piano at seven and then, at fourteen, the violin, which became his passion: he dreamed of being a great violinist. In 1885 he enrolled in law at the University of Helsinki but soon gave it up to study at the Music Institute. Having come to the violin too late for a virtuoso career, he turned to composition. From 1889 to 1891 he continued his studies in Berlin and then in Vienna, where he discovered Bruckner and great orchestral music.

Back in Finland he became enthralled by the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, a collection of ancient folk poems, and by the national movement seeking to assert Finnish identity against Russian rule. In 1892 he premiered Kullervo, a vast symphony for chorus and soloists inspired by the Kalevala, which was a great success and made him a national hero. That same year he married Aino Järnefelt, from a family of artists committed to the Finnish cause. They had six daughters.

In the 1890s he composed the Karelia Suite (1893) and the Lemminkäinen Suite (1896), which includes The Swan of Tuonela, in which a solitary cor anglais represents the swan gliding on the river of the realm of the dead. In 1899, as Russia tightened its censorship, he wrote music for a patriotic event that became Finlandia. This work, with its closing hymn, became the symbol of Finnish resistance; the Russian authorities sometimes banned it under its real name. That same year he composed his Symphony No. 1.

In 1904, to escape the bustle of Helsinki and the temptation of alcohol, he moved with his family to Ainola, a wooden villa built in the forest near Lake Tuusula at Järvenpää. He lived there for more than fifty years. In 1905 he completed the final version of his Violin Concerto, one of the most performed of the twentieth century. He also composed the famous Valse triste (1904) and a series of increasingly concentrated and original symphonies. In 1908 an operation on a throat tumour forced him to give up alcohol and tobacco for a while.

For his fiftieth birthday in 1915 Finland held a national celebration, and he conducted his Symphony No. 5. He noted in his diary that the idea for its great final theme came to him while watching sixteen swans fly over his house. In 1917 Finland became independent. Sibelius composed his Symphony No. 6 (1923), then the Seventh (1924), in a single movement of about twenty minutes, and in 1926 Tapiola, a tone poem about Tapio, the spirit of the forest.

After Tapiola Sibelius published no major work during the last thirty years of his life: this is the “silence of Järvenpää”. He worked for a long time on an Eighth Symphony but, dissatisfied, probably burned the manuscript around 1945. He received visitors from all over the world and remained a revered figure in Finland. He died at Ainola on 20 September 1957, aged ninety-one. He is buried in the garden of his home, now a museum.