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Magazine Sections + Fashion + Art & Design + Travel + Food + Culture * Sports Columns + Jason Gay Sections + MLB + NBA + NFL + Golf + Tennis + Soccer Search [ ]Search BEST OF Books & Arts in Review What to Read This Fall Best Books of SeptemberSopranos Prequel Falls Short'No Time to Die' ReviewReviews of Booker Prize WinnersBest Books of 2020 Share * Facebook * Twitter * LinkedIn * Copy Link * Books & Arts * Books * Bookshelf 'Jean Sibelius' Review: An Early Finale Finland's great composer was also his country's hero, and the silence of his later years was experienced as a loss to the nation. By Tim Page Oct. 1, 2021 9:52 am ET In his native Finland, Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) has always been much more than "just" a great composer. He was the country's first modern hero: To find an American equivalent, we might liken him to some improbable mixture of George Washington, Mark Twain, Thomas Edison and Louis Armstrong. His image has been affixed to stamps and currency, his life and music were taught to schoolchildren, and his most famous piece, "Finlandia," was long ago adopted as an unofficial national anthem. It is no coincidence that so many present-day classical musicians hail from Finland. Still, in most of the world, Sibelius is re-evaluated by each new generation. During much of his lifetime, he was generally considered the greatest symphonist after Brahms. His music fell from fashion around World War II, and his reputation was reduced in some circles to the stature of a minor nationalist, a sort of Finnish Grieg. And then, in the last decades of the 20th century, composers and conductors listened once more and found him fascinating--a remote, titanic and mysterious modernist, almost interplanetary in his strangeness. "Sibelius is new again," the critic Andrew Porter proclaimed in the New Yorker in 1981--and so he was. 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