![]() ![]() Situating this national creative tide in the context of Nordic and European cultural currents, Sibelius dramatically deepens our knowledge of a misunderstood musical giant and an important chapter in the intellectual history of Europe. ![]() To solve the deepest riddles of Sibelius’s life, work, and enigmatic silence, Goss contends, we must understand the awakening in which he played so great a role. Skillfully evoking this artistic climate-in which Sibelius emerged as a leader-Goss creates a dazzling portrait of the painting, sculpture, literature, and music it inspired. She goes on to trace Sibelius’s relationships with his creative contemporaries, with whom he worked to usher in a golden age of music and art that would endow Finns with a sense of pride in their heritage and encourage their hopes for the possibilities of nationhood. Focusing on previously unexamined events, Goss explores the composer’s formative experiences as a Russian subject and a member of the Swedish-speaking Finnish minority. Glenda Dawn Goss begins her sweeping narrative in the Finland of Sibelius’s youth, which remained under Russian control for the first five decades of his life. Recasting his mysterious musical silence and his undeniably influential life against the backdrop of Finland’s national awakening, Sibelius will be the definitive biography of this creative legend for many years to come. One of the twentieth century’s greatest composers, Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) virtually stopped writing music during the last thirty years of his life. ![]() The author traces the construction of a Finnish Great Myth of National Origins from the 16th century until the end of the Second World War, and provides richly illustrated examples of how the process of nation-building influenced and amplified the deep historical core of the emerging Finnish national consciousness. Accordingly, a conception of an original ancient greatness was paramount for the nationalist movements in both the Grand Duchy and the early Republic of Finland, especially so when the perceived nation was considered in need of intellectually unifying defences against the many conceived threats of Russianness after ca 1890. This study presents the case for how the conceptions of a distant, glorious past have been advanced and actively developed within the national project of constructing a modern ethnicity of Finnishness. Even quite obvious political interpretations, visions, and imageries of an ancient Golden Age have all too easily been dismissed as the consequences of mere patriotism, Kalevala enthusiasm', or Karelianism. Finland, during both prehistoric and medieval times, has been the subject of numerous studies, but none of these have previously considered the nationalist essence of the integral, underlying history culture' or public archaeology' of the nation. ![]()
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