Jean Sibelius

Can we judge a composer's character from their music? With Sibelius, says Stephen Johnson, this would not necessarily appear to be the case

- Stephen Johnson

Imagine, if you can, that you know only the music of Jean Sibelius and Gustav Mahler - nothing of the men that wrote it. Imagine I then tell you that one of these men (Composer A) was a strict disciplinarian, ran a tight ship professionally and financially, balanced his day job and creative life to near-perfection, was as exacting in his personal life as in his work, and never drank or otherwise indulged to excess. I then tell you that the other (Composer B) was a needy, womanising emotional mess, with a terrifying alcohol dependency, who spent money like water and who sometimes had to be propped up at his desk by his heroically patient wife in a desperate effort to get him to finish a piece on time.

Unless you rightly suspected a trick question, I imagine you'd almost certainly get them the wrong way round. I'm pretty sure I would. Composer B was indeed Jean Sibelius, mythologised in his own lifetime as the austere 'Titan of the Northlands', who rejected Mahler's notion of a kind of symphony that could 'embrace everything' in favour of 'severity of form' and 'profound logic', who was said to have compared his own music to pure spring water – so different from all those lavish continental cocktails (which as a man he would definitely have preferred!). If ever there was a warning against trying to explain artists' work in terms of their life...