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Not too far from Stockholm, in Hämeenlinna, Finland, Jean Sibelius was born to Swedish-speaking parents in 1865. During the next 15 years he began his musical studies, first in Hämeenlinna and Helsinki, then for one year in Berlin. Following Berlin, he was off to Vienna. From Vienna in the fall of 1890, Sibelius reported that he had experienced an "intoxicating first encounter" with this city of enormous culture. In a letter to his fiancée, Aino Järnefelt, he described his room at Wiedner Haupstrasse 36, a room that is the site of the beginning of a musical mystery still waiting to be completely explained. In this room Sibelius began to compose a chamber work featuring the clarinet. "My room is rather large and has two windows and a high ceiling. In the middle of the room there is a grand piano on which all my music is piled in a mountainous heap. The furniture consists of two easy chairs and a sofa that has seen better days. Between the windows there is a small mirror, which together with the nightstand is the most handsome thing in the room." In this historic room, Sibelius attended to his composition study dictated by Robert Fuchs, of the Vienna Conservatory, and by Karl Goldmark, who was an international celebrity after the success of his opera The Queen of Sheba. We know with certainty that the first advice Goldmark gave to Sibelius was to study the orchestral scores of Mozart and to particularly notice the relation of the clarinet writing to the rest of the orchestra. What is unknown is whether the chamber work for flute, clarinet, and strings that he began to compose was a composition assignment, or born from self-need. Years after his Vienna study period, Sibelius told biographer, Karl Ekman, Jr., that in the spring of 1891, while in Vienna, he had begun to compose an octet for flute, clarinet, and strings. By September 1892 it had become a septet. In November it had evolved into a work he called Ballet Scene No. 2 that was "...like a fairy tale in the Romantic Style." One month later he completed his orchestral work En Saga, which he told biographer Erik Furuhjelm had as its basis the octet for flute, clarinet, and strings begun in Vienna. All sketches of the septet, octet, and Ballet Scene No. 2, which are considered the first stages of En Saga, have vanished. No one knows how similar the lost chamber pieces are to En Saga, but we do know that at least some of the themes of En Saga were first used in the lost chamber works. Later in life, Sibelius said that En Saga, the work of which the lost chamber pieces were the basis, "...is one of my psychologically most profound works. I might almost say that it encapsulates my entire youth. It is a statement of a state of mind. At the time when I wrote En Saga, I experienced many shocking things. I have never revealed as much of myself in any of my works as in En Saga." The version of En Saga that we generally know today is the revised 1902 score. I have obtained from the library of Jean Sibelius's "home orchestra," the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, the score to the original 1892 version of En Saga. This being the first version, it is also the closest to the lost chamber pieces that were its basis. From this original version I have arranged, with permission from the legal successors of Jean Sibelius and the copyright holder, Breitkopf & Härtel, a septet for the original instrumentation of flute, clarinet, and strings. In my presentation, I will trace Sibelius's development as a composer of chamber works, through recorded and printed examples, from the age of 10 up to his work on the lost septet for flute, clarinet, and strings. Over those 15 years Sibelius wrote approximately 130 works. I will then show, with an accompanying recording, a facsimile from the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra library, of the score to the first (1892) orchestral En Saga version. Finally I will show a score of the reconstructed Septet for Flute, Clarinet, and Strings with a recorded excerpt. This is a fantastic addition to the clarinet chamber music repertoire.

 

 

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