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20 September, 1957. The Helsinki City Orchestra performs the Fifth Symphony by Jean Sibelius, conducted by Malcolm Sargent. 30 miles north, in a wooden house by a lake in the forest, the composer of the symphony is breathing his last.

The concert is being broadcast live and Sibelius鈥檚 wife, Aino, thinks about turning on the radio, hoping the music might revive him. In the end she chooses to let silence prevail. Sibelius dies that night, having published almost nothing for 30 years.

Sibelius' decades of silence were not happy ones. He lived to the age of 91, but for him that was too long. At one point he noted in his diary: 鈥淐heer up! Death is round the corner.鈥� He spent his silence at Ainola, his home on Lake Tuusula. The house itself is an elegant and peaceful place where Sibelius raised a family of five daughters and wrote most of his major works including his last major statement: Tapiola, a brutal tone-poem for orchestra.

Sibelius was a national icon in his lifetime and his music was loved internationally, too. The silence of his later years was not about public opinion, or lack of it: it was something much more interior and much darker. He agonised over his planned eighth symphony for many years, promising it to Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra and at various points even claiming to have finished it. But the conviction never lasted long enough for anyone to actually see proof of a score and one day, he fed the latest pages into the fire. The only evidence we have of the Eighth Symphony today is a single sheet of paper with a key signature and a list of instruments. Aino reported that afterwards that her husband 鈥渂ecame calmer and his attitude was more optimistic.鈥�

The rest is silence: the last word goes to Tapiola.

This is one of 100 significant musical moments explored by 麻豆官网首页入口 Radio 3鈥檚 Essential Classics as part of Our Classical Century, a 麻豆官网首页入口 season celebrating a momentous 100 years in music from 1918 to 2018. Visit bbc.co.uk/ourclassicalcentury to watch and listen to all programmes in the season.

This archive recording features the 麻豆官网首页入口 Symphony Orchestra with conductor Sakari Oramo.

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