Water Droplets (Sibelius)
earliest written work by Jean Sibelius
Water Droplets (in Swedish: Vattendroppar; in Finnish: Vesipisaroita; occasionally translated to English as Water Drops or Raindrops), JS 216, is a chamber piece for violin and cello pizzicato written by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (then called Janne) when he was a schoolboy. The "tiny piece", which is just 12 measures long, cannot be dated with precision, because the autograph manuscript is lost. Scholars nevertheless speculate that Sibelius wrote the duo sometime between 1875 (nine to 10 years old) and—more likely—1881 (15 years old). Regardless, Water Droplets retains a degree of historical significance as Sibelius's earliest written work. Fazer Music published the piece in 1997. A typical performance lasts 45 seconds.
History
Sibelius's father, Christian Gustaf, died of typhus on 31 July 1868, leaving behind his pregnant, 26-year old wife Maria (née Borg), as well as two young children: Jean (then two) and his older sister Linda; Christian had mismanaged his affairs, and following his death, his estate was declared bankrupt. Maria was forced to move back in with her widowed mother, Juliana Borg (née Haartman), and two unmarried sisters (Tekla and Julia); shortly thereafter, she gave birth to Sibelius's younger brother, Christian, on 27 March 1869. Throughout his childhood, Sibelius—then called Janne—lived within this extended family circle, which moved around Hämeenlinna several times. The children typically summered in Loviisa with their paternal grandmother, Katarina (née Åkerberg), and Aunt Evelina.
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This entry incorporates text from “Water Droplets (Sibelius)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.