Jean Sibelius

Jean Sibelius was a Finnish composer whose seven symphonies and tone poems made him the central figure in Finnish music and a major voice of late-Romantic and early-modern symphonic writing. He was born Johan Julius Christian Sibelius on December 8, 1865, in Hämeenlinna, Grand Duchy of Finland, and died on September 20, 1957, in Järvenpää, Finland.

He grew up in a Swedish-speaking family, lost his father to typhus at age two, and learned violin and piano in childhood. He studied law briefly at the Imperial Alexander University in Helsinki before switching to the Helsinki Music Institute, then continued his studies in Berlin and Vienna. As a young man he adopted the French form Jean from his sea-captain uncle's calling cards.

His 1892 choral symphony Kullervo, drawing on the Finnish national epic Kalevala, established him as a national composer at a time of rising Finnish cultural identity under Russian rule. The 1899 tone poem Finlandia, written for a press celebration that protested Russian censorship, became an unofficial anthem of Finnish independence.

Between 1899 and 1924 Sibelius composed seven symphonies, moving from the late-Romantic warmth of the Symphony No. 2 to the compressed single-movement structure of the Symphony No. 7. He also wrote the Violin Concerto in D minor, the Karelia Suite, the Lemminkäinen Suite, and incidental music for several plays. After about 1926 he composed almost nothing for publication, a long silence often called the silence of Järvenpää, the lakeside village where he lived with his wife Aino and their daughters.

The given name Jean is the French form of John, from the Hebrew Yochanan, meaning God is gracious; he chose it as a young man.