ABSTRACT
The musical reputation of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius—deified in the Twenties and Thirties by conductors and public alike, declining markedly in the Forties, and hitting a very deep bottom from the Fifties on—has taken another turn. When someone from the audience at the symposium asked about Sibelius's intellectual formation, his core philosophical beliefs, his readings, there was absolute silence. As the founding father of the expression of Finnish nationalism in epic musical terms, Sibelius always cultivated in his maturity and old age the granitic appearance of the dour, heroic Finn, symbolic of his nation's recent history, its struggle for independence from Russia above all. For defenders of Sibelius, the symposium was an occasion to take appreciative note of recent scholarly contributions by one of the participants in the Sibelius symposium—Professor Glenda Dawn Goss of the University of Georgia.
