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Jean v. Paavo. Politically and by temperament Sibelius is a nationalist. A large number of his early works (Kullervo, the Karelia Suite, Finlandia, et al.) were written as patriotic tributes. Though no one has succeeded in identifying any of his melodies as folk themes, considerable controversy still goes on as to whether he has been influenced by national Finnish idioms. His ancestry contains both Finnish and Swedish strains. Clergymen, doctors, merchants and small landowners, including a few intelligent musical amateurs, were his progenitors. He springs from the great ranks of the bourgeois.
His father was a regimental physician, and Sibelius was born at Tavastehus, a small town in the interior of Finland. He was just an ordinary little boy when he began to study the piano at the age of nine, but he started to compose almost immediately. At 15 he took up the violin, with the local military bandmaster as instructor. In his mature years he confessed to an early ambition to become a great violinist. The respectable Sibelius family, however, considered a career as a musician too precarious. They suggested law, and for a time the young composer dutifully pegged away at the University of Helsingfors. But he spent all his spare time composing and studying harmony with Martin Wegelius at the Music Institute.
Music won out, and in 1889, at the age of 24, Sibelius went to Germany to continue his musical studies. There he immersed himself for the first time in the great orchestral music of the Central European romantics. After a year in Germany he went to Vienna, studied with Carl Goldmark and Robert Fuchs, met Brahms who complimented him on his work. When he returned to Finland after an absence of three years, the young man of 27 was already regarded as a figure of national consequence. After a few years of teaching composition and violin at the Musical Institute of Helsingfors he was awarded the grant that enabled him to devote the remainder of his life exclusively to composition. When he was younger Sibelius traveled much in Germany, France and Italy, composed several of his works away from home. In 1914 he visited the U. S., teaching for a short time at Boston's New England Conservatory.
To U. S. musicians the two biggest living composers in the world are undoubtedly Finland's Sibelius and Germany's Richard Strauss (Salome, Der Rosenkavalier). U. S. audiences would probably include a third—dapper, chameleonesque Igor Stravinsky (Le Sacre du Printemps, Petroushka).
In the world at large Finland, home of honest muscular seamen, has been more famous for her athletes than for her salons. But Tavasts and Karelians (all Finns are one or the other) point with greater pride to Finland's world's champion literacy record, boast that, except for 0.9% every last Finn today can read and write, exhibit Modernist Architect Eliel Saarinen as world evidence of Finnish culture. If you were to ask on the streets of a U. S. city who was the outstanding modern Finn, chances are the reply would be: Paavo Nurmi. But if you asked the same question on the streets of Helsingfors the answer would almost certainly be: Jean Julius Christian Sibelius.