Composition
The concept of a continuous, single-movement symphony was one Sibelius only reached after a long process of experimentation. His Third symphony, dating from 1907, contained three movements, an earlier fourth movement having been fused into the third. The final result was successful enough for Sibelius to use the same idea in his Fifth symphony, completed in 1915. Although his first mention of the Seventh occurred in December 1918, the source for its material has been traced back to around 1914, the time when he was working on the Fifth.
In 1918 Sibelius had described his plans for this symphony as involving "joy of life and vitality with appassionato sections". The symphony would have three movements, the last being a "Hellenic rondo". Surviving sketches from the early 1920s show that the composer was working on a work of four, not three, movements. The overall key seems to have been G minor, while the second movement, an adagio in C major, provided much of the material for the themes that eventually made up the Symphony. The first surviving draft of a single-movement symphony dates from 1923, suggesting that Sibelius may have made the decision to dispense with a multi-movement work at this time. Through the summer of 1923 the composer produced several further drafts, at least one of which is in a performable state: however the ending of the symphony was not yet fully worked out.
As 1923 turned into 1924, Sibelius was distracted from his work on the symphony by a number of outside events: the award of a large cash prize from a Helsinki foundation, family birthdays and the composition of a number of brief piano works. When he returned to the Seventh, the composer drank copious amounts of whisky in order, he claimed, to steady his hand as he wrote on the manuscript paper.
Along with his Fifth and Sixth symphonies, the Seventh was Sibelius's final home for material from Kuutar, a never-completed symphonic poem whose title roughly means "Moon Spiritess". This work helped to shape the earliest parts of the Seventh, those created during the composition of the Fifth and Sixth. One of the themes from Kuutar, called "Tähtölä" ("Where the Stars Dwell"), evolved into part of the Seventh's opening Adagio section.
Read more about this topic: Symphony No. 7 (Sibelius)
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