Tapiola

Although no one could have regarded it as such when Walter Damrosch gave its premiere in New York on 26 December 1926, the tone poem Tapiola was Sibelius’ last major work. The piece was initially assumed to depict the landscape of his native Finland, with its title alluding to Tapio, spirit of the forests in Finnish mythology, and the composer implying much the same through his introductory text. Only more recently has the ingenuity of its structure been recognised, its opening motif on strings becoming the root of an arborescence of related motifs that emerge over its 18 minutes such that the music remains in a constant state of transition, with even the vestige of formal boundaries found in the Seventh Symphony absent. Tapiola’s mesmeric final minutes perhaps explain why an Eighth Symphony never came to fruition, as Sibelius headed into a virtual silence that ended only with his death in 1957.