Photograph: Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photoįurther composition studies in Berlin and Vienna between 18 included an encounter with the symphonies of Anton Bruckner, perhaps as a result of which he began writing orchestral music that he conducted on his return to Helsinki. View image in fullscreen Sibelius photographed circa 1909. In his student years, he concentrated on chamber music, though he wrote only one mature string quartet, the five-movement Voces Intimae of 1909. By then Sibelius was starting to realise that he would never become the violin virtuoso he aspired to be, and Busoni encouraged his composition.

(It was while he was a student, too, that he changed his first name from Johan to its French equivalent, Jean.) When the composer Ferruccio Busoni joined the institute as a piano teacher the two became friends. Very soon he abandoned law to study music full-time, and received his first formal composition lessons.

He composed copiously through his teens, yet despite his obvious musical talent he began studying law, though at the same time he enrolled at the Helsinki Music Institute (now the Sibelius Academy). The family’s first language was Swedish, but from the age of nine he attended Finnish-speaking schools and was soon fascinated by Finnish mythology, particularly the folk stories collected in the Kalevala, first published in 1835.īy then he was having piano and violin lessons. His father died when he was three, and he was brought up by his mother and grandmother. Sibelius was born in Hämeenlinna, in the south of what was then the Grand Duchy of Finland, an autonomous part of the Russian empire.

Sibelius string quartet sheet music