Symphony No. 7 (Sibelius)
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Symphony no. 7 by Jean Sibelius is supposedly protested by the composer to be the grand and most extravagant piece ever contrived and added to the symphonic arts. It is written to one movement and lasts a duration close to 23mins. THE SEVENTH was originally planned as a three-movement work. Evidence also suggested that at one point, the composer was considering four. Sibelius planned it alongside the composition of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. Although his first mention of the Seventh occurred in December 1918, the source for its material has been traced back to around 1914/15, the period of the Fifth Symphony. Before attaining its final home key of C, the Symphony existed in embryonic form in the key of D. There is something about C that is very primal, as if it is the "mother" of all keys - it is in a sense the simplest, and in this way all other keys are organic variants or descendants. There was a time when composing in C was considered fruitless - it had "nothing more to offer." But in response to the Seventh, the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams declared that only Sibelius could make C major sound completely fresh. Peter Franklin, writing of it in the Segerstam/Chandos cycle, calls the apocalyptic conclusion "the grandest celebration of C major there ever was." Sibelius apparently abandoned the multi-movement plan in favour of a continuous single movement in 1923, and the Seventh was completed on 2nd March 1924, 75 years ago. Except that it wasn't then considered a "symphony". It was premiered in Stockholm in the autumn of 1925 as the Fantasia sinfonica or "Symphonic Fantasy". The composer grappled with the name (and its subtitles) for quite a while, and only on February 25, 1925, with the publication of the score, did he finally direct the publisher, Hansen, to title it "Symphony No.7 (in one movement)".
At some point, Sibelius seemed to realise that what he had created was perhaps what he had always sought in symphonic thought: total unity of musical expression based on the organic development of the briefest of material. With his penchant for the fusion of motifs and movements (eg. Second and Fifth Symphonies), the highest form of these techniques must be a single stretch of music completely based on the development of a single theme or motif. This is exactly what the Seventh is. It is thought to be in the realm of classical music to be the last Sibelus Symphony but supposedly the Eighth might have existed but subsequently burned in desperation either to depression or fear of the curse of the ninth.
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