Customer Reviews

Sibelius; a personal portrait

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It is enjoyable to read a biography written by someone who knew and worked closely with Sibelius. This is a book about the man behind the music. I appreciate reading of the goodness, human frailties and ordinary human qualities of this man - who knew God through his music. His wife is quoted as saying that her husband's music is "like the Word Of God." That is my experience of his music. I thoroughly enjoyed and was inspired by this book.

I never so badly wanted to read a biography after I had listened to Tapiola, the greatest work of Sibelius. While I opened this book with admiration, I could hardly finish it. Despite the excessive praise from the author, I find Sibelius as a humanbeing is far less great than his music. Of course, his self-critism about his 8th symphony is admirable, but many evidences show that he failed to appreciate other people's merits. He pitied and arrogantly humoured the less gifted artists, but never encouraged them. His defamation to Wagner is outragous even to me, who do not care twopence about Wagner. After all, Sibelius never wrote a decent opera. While the author, once a secretary for him, worshiped him as a God. It is not unusual to relate sound to color by their frequencies, yet the author attributed Sibelius' doing so to the so called 6th sense, not to mention some luck guesses even less convincingly attributed to the 6th sense. Undoubtedly, Sibelius also made many wrong guesses which were purposely not written in the book, otherwise, he would have been a fortune-teller as famous as a composer. In other words, the "6th sense" chapter is purely the fancy of the author. In the chapter "the pressure of commonplace", the author cynically spared no pain to praise the lack of economic sense in the composer, which is in no ways a virtue. In summary, this book is not a very objective biography, but involutarily reveals the shortcoming of a great man.