In June 1914 Sibelius returned from a month-long visit to the United States. This had been one of the most successful trips of his life. In addition to the various honours bestowed on him by fervent American supporters, the trip had featured his new tone poem, The Oceanides, his largest post-Fourth Symphony work to date. Although he returned home in an expansive frame of mind, the sudden onset of the world war at the end of July changed utterly the conditions of his life. Above all, the ‘business’ aspect of his career fell instantly into tatters. His habitual trips to the principal centres of European music were now unthinkable, and even the hope of publishing significant works outside of Finland became snarled in politics and, in effect, ground to a halt. Thus at the moment when Sibelius was crystallizing a new set of compositional principles, a four-year period of professional stasis was imposed on him. The effect was as if he had been literally banished to the periphery: an eccentric, troubled, broodingly ‘mystical’ figure residing in emphatically non-‘modern’ conditions with his family and servants and meditating deeply on the changing seasonal moods and deep silences of Järvenpää's forests, overlooking Lake Tuusula. While, far away (or so it seemed), the European world was changing forever.