Sibelius Symphony No. 2 in D major

After he made his name with 'Finlandia,' his patron Baron Axel Carpelan urged him to go to Italy, saying 'it's time to travel.' Sibelius himself had no money, so Carpelan found backers and arranged the funds. In 1901 Sibelius stayed at a mountain villa near Rapallo, Italy, and began writing this piece.

There he jotted down a scene in which Don Juan welcomes a stranger in the dark and then recognizes him as 'Death.' The melody he wrote on the same sheet became the bassoon theme of the second movement.

It was premiered in Helsinki on March 8, 1902, conducted by Sibelius. Those were the years of Russian pressure, and people took the grand finale as a symbol of Finnish independence. But Sibelius never accepted that kind of programmatic reading.

Not everyone liked it. The American critic Virgil Thomson panned the piece as 'vulgar, self-indulgent, and provincial.'