Sibelius

When Finland was still a Russian grand duchy his tone poem Finlandia was taken as a nationalist declaration and for a time could not be performed under its own name. He was a national symbol by his forties, and the Finnish government gave him a lifetime pension.

After finishing Tapiola in 1926 he published almost nothing for thirty years — the silence of Ainola. He is said to have burned the manuscript of an Eighth Symphony. His symphonies grew tighter as he went: the Seventh is a single movement of just over twenty minutes in which the themes press against and grow out of each other like strata. He said, and it has been quoted too often since, that the essence of a symphony is the severity of its form.