FIRST ENCOUNTERS

When, on 4 December 1905, Jean Sibelius set off for Paris after his first brief trip to Britain, he left behind him a small but influential coterie of individuals who were to play a crucial role in encouraging the cause of his music in the English-speaking world over the next three and a half decades or so. At Queen's Hall in London, Henry Wood had been the first British conductor to programme Sibelius's works in his concerts, rapidly followed in both Birmingham and Liverpool by the composer Granville Bantock. Ernest Newman had written some of the earliest and most enthusiastic reviews of these concerts, and Sibelius was to find a durable place in his criticism thereafter. As London representative of Sibelius's German publisher, Breitkopf & Härtel, Otto Kling also laboured to promote Sibelius's compositions with the concert-going (and music-buying) public. It was, though, with Rosa Harriet Newmarch that Sibelius enjoyed the closest and most sympathetic of all his British friendships. They met frequently during his five trips to Britain (in 1905, 1908, 1909, 1912 and 1921), and Newmarch visited him twice in Finland (in 1910 and 1915) and once in Paris (in 1911). As well as programme notes, journal articles and translations of his songs, Newmarch published three short books about the composer and his music: Jean Sibelius: A Finnish Composer (1906, also translated into German), Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 4 in A minor, Op. 63 (1913, also translated into German) and Jean Sibelius: A Short Story of a Long Friendship (US edition 1939; UK edition 1944, under the title Jean Sibelius).