Jean Sibelius was a Finnish composer of the late Romantic and early modern periods. He is widely regarded as his country's greatest composer, and his music is often credited with having helped Finland develop a stronger national identity when the country was struggling from several attempts at Russification in the late 19th century.
Erik "Eero" Nikolai Järnefelt was a Finnish painter and art professor. He is best known for his portraits and landscapes of the area around Koli National Park, in the North Karelia region of Finland. He was a medal winner at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889 and 1900, taught art at the University of Helsinki and was chairman of the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts.
Juhani Aho, originally Johannes Brofeldt, was a Finnish author and journalist. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature twelve times.
The Symphony No. 8, JS 190, was the final major compositional project of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, occupying him intermittently from the mid-1920s until around 1938, though he never published it. During this time Sibelius was at the peak of his fame, a national figure in his native Finland and a composer of international stature. A fair copy of at least the first movement was made, but how much of the Eighth Symphony was completed is unknown. Sibelius repeatedly refused to release it for performance, though he continued to assert that he was working on it even after he had, according to later reports from his family, burned the score and associated material, probably in 1945.
Järvenpää is a town in Finland, located in the southern interior of the country. Järvenpää is situated in the centre of the Uusimaa region in the immediate vicinity of Lake Tuusula. The population of Järvenpää is approximately 47,000. It is the 24th most populous municipality in Finland. Järvenpää is part of the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, which has approximately 1.6 million inhabitants.
Lars Eliel Sonck was a Finnish architect. He graduated from Helsinki Polytechnic Institute in 1894 and immediately won a major design competition for a church in Turku, St Michael's Church, ahead of many established architects. The church was designed in the prevailing neo-Gothic style. However, Sonck's style would soon go through a dramatic change, in the direction of Art Nouveau and National Romanticism that was moving through Europe at the end of the 19th century. During the 1920s, Sonck would also design a number of buildings in the emerging Nordic Classicism style.
Kullervo, Op. 7, is a five-movement symphonic work for soprano, baritone, male choir, and orchestra written from 1891–1892 by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. Movements I, II, and IV are instrumental, whereas III and V feature sung text from Runos XXXV–VI of the Kalevala, Finland's national epic. The piece tells the story of the tragic hero Kullervo, with each movement depicting an episode from his ill-fated life: first, an introduction that establishes the psychology of the titular character; second, a haunting "lullaby with variations" that portrays his unhappy childhood; third, a dramatic dialogue between soloists and chorus in which the hero unknowingly seduces his long-lost sister; fourth, a lively scherzo in which Kullervo seeks redemption on the battlefield; and fifth, a funereal choral finale in which he returns to the spot of his incestuous crime and, guilt-ridden, takes his life by falling on his sword.
Nightride and Sunrise, Op. 55, is a single-movement tone poem for orchestra written in 1908 by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius.
Sibelius is a 2003 Finnish film biography of Jean Sibelius directed and written by Timo Koivusalo. It is the first full-length feature film about the famous composer.
Aino Sibelius was the wife of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. They lived most of their 65 years of marriage at their home Ainola near Lake Tuusula, Järvenpää, Finland. They had six daughters: Eva (1893–1978), Ruth (1894–1976), Kirsti (1898–1900), Katarina (1903–1984), Margareta (1908–1988) and Heidi (1911–1982).
Erik Werner Tawaststjerna was a Finnish musicologist who also worked as a pianist, pedagogue, and critic. He is remembered as a significant biographer of Jean Sibelius.
The Sibelius Society of Finland is a society in Finland dedicated to the music of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. It was set up in December 1957. The Society and the Ministry of Education opened the composer and his wife Aino's Järvenpää house Ainola as a museum in 1974. Since 1965 they have also organised the international Sibelius competition in violin every five years.
Luonnotar, Op. 70, is a single-movement tone poem for soprano and orchestra written in 1913 by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. The piece is a setting of Runo I of the Kalevala, Finland's national epic, which tells the legend of how the goddess Luonnotar created the Earth. Luonnotar premiered on 10 September 1913 at the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester, England, with Herbert Brewer conducting the festival orchestra; the soloist was the Finnish operatic diva Aino Ackté, the tone poem's dedicatee. A few months later on 12 January 1914, Ackté gave Luonnotar its Finnish premiere, with Georg Schnéevoigt conducting the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra.
Benno Alexander "Santeri" Levas was a Finnish writer and photographer, best known for his books on the composer Jean Sibelius.
The Wood Nymph, Op. 15, is a programmatic tone poem for orchestra composed in 1894 and 1895 by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. The ballade, which premiered on 17 April 1895 in Helsinki, Finland, with Sibelius conducting, follows the Swedish writer Viktor Rydberg's 1882 poem of the same title, in which a young man, Björn, wanders into the forest and is seduced and driven to despair by a skogsrå, or wood nymph. Organizationally, the tone poem consists of four informal sections, each of which corresponds to one of the poem's four stanzas and evokes the mood of a particular episode: first, heroic vigor; second, frenetic activity; third, sensual love; and fourth, inconsolable grief.
Kyllikki, Op. 41, is a three-movement suite for piano written in September 1904 by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. Although the title is taken from the Kalevala, Finland's national epic, Sibelius denied that the piece was programmatic in nature.
Ainola railway station, formerly Kyrölä railway station, is a Helsinki commuter rail station in the town of Järvenpää, Finland. The station is served by Helsinki commuter rail R- and T-line trains. Trains to Helsinki depart from track one and trains to Riihimäki depart from track two.
My Own Land, Op. 92, is a single-movement, patriotic cantata for mixed choir and orchestra written in 1918 by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. The piece, which is a setting of Kallio's Finnish-language poem of the same name, is chronologically the sixth of Sibelius's nine orchestral cantatas; in particular, it belongs to the series of four "little known, but beautiful" cantatas from the composer's mature period that also includes Song of the Earth, Hymn of the Earth, and Väinämöinen's Song. My Own Land premiered on 25 October 1918 in Helsinki with Armas Maasalo conducting the Helsinki Youth League —the commissioning ensemble and dedicatee—and the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra.
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. Fazer Music published the piece in 1997. A typical performance lasts 45 seconds.
The Raven was a projected song for soprano and orchestra that occupied the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius from 9 November to mid-December 1910, at which point he abandoned the project. The piece, a commission by the world-renowned, Finnish prima donna Aino Ackté as a novelty for her February 1911 tour through Imperial Germany, was to have set a German-language translation of Edgar Allan Poe's 1845 narrative poem The Raven. Sibelius had accepted reluctantly, as he had at the time been at work on—and struggling to meet an early-1911 deadline for—the Fourth Symphony (Op. 63). Juggling major projects proved too much for him to bear, and on 11 December he reneged on the agreement with Ackté, greatly upsetting their professional relationship. Three years later, however, Sibelius made amends by composing for Ackté Luonnotar (Op. 70), a virtuosic, Kalevala-themed tone poem for soprano and orchestra.
