In his poignantly titled short story, The Silence, Julian Barnes describes a composer in his old age, alone and isolated, reflecting with whimsical bitterness on his past musical triumphs in an age before the world was swept by the carnage of world war and the angular sounds of musical modernism. Largely fictional, though based heavily on the final volume of the English translation of Erik Tawaststjerna's biography, Barnes's story nevertheless reveals much about the way in which, outside Finland at least, our perception of Sibelius is still shadowed by the long twilight of his career. Many of the photographs taken of Sibelius at Ainola during his eighties, half-lit and austere, serve to reinforce Arnold Bax's famous description of the composer as ‘an arresting, formidable-looking fellow, born of dark rock and northern forest’, explicitly eliding national topography and the composer's individual physiognomy with a sense of intense creative alienation. From this perspective, Sibelius's apparently conservative, peripheralised position on the very edge of the Continental European musical tradition seems strikingly at odds with the continued popularity and vitality of his music in the concert hall.

Recent Sibelius scholarship, however, has begun to deconstruct this image. As James Hepokoski has written, the study of the various historical reactions to Sibelius's music has revealed ‘some of the most ideologically charged moments in twentieth-century reception history’. Balilla Pratella, writing in a ‘Manifesto of Futurist Musicians’ in 1910, hailed Sibelius as a leading musical futurist, a dynamic youthful image far removed from the backward-looking figure of Barnes's narrative.