The Tempest (Sibelius)
work by Jean Sibelius
The Tempest (Stormen), Op. 109, is incidental music by Jean Sibelius to Shakespeare's The Tempest. He composed it mainly in the late summer 1925, his last major work before his tone poem Tapiola. Sibelius derived two suites from the score.
The music is said to display an astounding richness of imagination and inventive capacity, and is considered by some as one of Sibelius's greatest achievements. He represented individual characters through instrumentation choices: particularly admired was his use of harps and percussion to represent Prospero, said to capture the "resonant ambiguity of the character".
History
Sibelius had completed his 7th Symphony, which was to be his last, in 1924. The Tempest and Tapiola were to be his last great works, and he wrote little else for the remaining 32 years of his life, which came to be known as "The Silence of Järvenpää".
The idea for music for The Tempest was first suggested to Sibelius in 1901, by his friend Axel Carpelan. In 1925, his Danish publisher Wilhelm Hansen again raised the idea, as the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen was going to stage the work the following year, directed by Adam Poulsen.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Tempest (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.