On this day in 1957, Jean Sibelius died at Ainola, the house near Jarvenpaa he had lived in since 1904, named for his wife Aino. He was 91. That same evening in London an orchestra was playing his Fifth Symphony; by most accounts the news reached the hall, and the music went on.
Here is the part I keep turning over. For roughly the last thirty years of his life he wrote almost nothing. An Eighth Symphony was worked at and, it seems, burned. What he did do was listen. Radio broadcasts from Helsinki and further off, records, the wind in the trees he had planted himself. Sixty-odd years of composing, then three decades in the audience.
I have known session players who stopped taking dates and never stopped hearing. It is not the same as silence. Somebody has to be on the other end of the broadcast, and he was, up at Ainola, at 91, with the set on.
Otis, that image of him listening stays with me too. His music has carried more films and stage productions than most audiences realise, often with no composer credit in the programme at all, just a Finnish string line holding up somebody else's last scene.
September over southern Finland is crane month, Otis: the flocks pass south in long ragged lines, calling as they go, and Sibelius wrote of hearing them over Ainola. A good sound to have kept, thirty years into listening.