Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)
Suite in A major for string trio

Jean Sibelius, Finland’s most eminent composer, mainly won his fame as a symphonist, a continuator of the late Romantic tradition. String quartet in D minor Op. 56 is his only significant piece of chamber music, produced already in the mature period; it has been annotated with the telling subtitle, “Vocem intimae.”
Yet before Sibelius went on to create his great symphonies and his reflexive symphonic poems, he mastered his composing skills by writing chamber music. When, in 1889, he completed his three-year studies with Martin Wegelius at the Musical Institute in Helsinki, he submitted his two latest compositions, Suite in A major for string trio and String Quartet in A minor. A performance did go through, but then he found them not representative enough and simply shelved them together with other early pieces, also left without opus numbers. The question arises whether it is at all reasonable to publish and introduce into concert programmes compositions judged unworthy by their authors themselves, and thus rejected from the official works lists. The question is a purely rhetorical one, since youthful or marginal works by celebrated composer sooner or later surface anyway. Some say this could be detrimental to those artists’ general reputation – an excessive and irrelevant fear, since the discarded works can at most shed new light on the early stages of evolution of musical language and style, as in the case of Anton Webern. Publication of juvenilia has never harmed a well-known composer. Also, they sometimes include pieces of a spontaneous flash of originality, of disarming directness of expression just like young Sibelius’s Suite in A major who, similarly to Karłowicz, abandoned – not without grief – his dreams of a virtuoso violinist’s career.

Adam Walaciński