Symphony No. 8 (Sibelius)

Symphony No. 8 (Sibelius)
The Eighth Symphony was Jean Sibelius's final major compositional project, occupying him intermittently from the mid-1920s until around 1938. How much of the symphony was completed is unknown; Sibelius repeatedly refused to release it for performance, though he promised the premiere to several leading conductors. Following the success of his Seventh Symphony of 1924, it was expected that his symphonic flow would continue, but after the tone poem Tapiola of 1926, his published output was confined to minor pieces and revisions to earlier works. The Eighth Symphony's destruction was made known after Sibelius's death in 1957, but in the 1990s, while cataloguing the composer's many notebooks and sketches, scholars speculated that fragments of music from the lost symphony may have survived. Several short manuscript sketches have been tentatively identified with the Eighth, three of which (comprising less than three minutes of music) were recorded by the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra in 2011. The prospect of further reconstruction has generally been discounted; the propriety of publicly performing music that Sibelius himself had rejected has also been questioned.