Sibelius repeatedly refused to release it for performance, though he continued to assert that he was working on it even after he had, according to later reports from his family, burned the score and associated material, probably in 1945.

His Seventh Symphony of 1924 has been widely recognised as a landmark in the development of symphonic form, and at the time there was no reason to suppose that the flow of innovative orchestral works would not continue.

[1] The country remained divided between a culturally dominant Swedish-speaking minority, to which the Sibelius family belonged, and a more nationalistically-minded Finnish-speaking, or "Fennoman" majority.

[3] Sibelius's association with the Järnefelts helped to awaken and develop his own nationalism; in 1892, the year of his marriage to Aino, he completed his first overtly nationalistic work, the symphonic suite Kullervo.

[4] Through the 1890s, as Russian control over the duchy grew increasingly oppressive, Sibelius produced a series of works reflecting Finnish resistance to foreign rule, culminating in the tone poem Finlandia.

[15] By the autumn of 1927 Sibelius was able to inform the New York Times music critic Olin Downes—one of his greatest admirers—that he had set down two movements of the Eighth on paper and had composed the rest in his head.

[17] Later in the decade, Eugene Ormandy, a fervent admirer of Sibelius who directed the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1936, is thought to have lobbied strongly for the right to perform the premiere, should the symphony in due course emerge.

"[16] The composer's daughter Katarina spoke of the self-doubt that afflicted her father at this time, aggravated by the continuing expectations and fuss that surrounded the Eighth Symphony.

After the war ended in March 1940 he moved with his family to an apartment on Kammiokatu (later renamed Sibeliuksenkatu or 'Sibelius Street' in his honour) in the Töölö district of Helsinki, where they remained for a year.

In February 1943 he told his secretary, Santeri Levas, that he hoped to complete a "great work" before he died, but blamed the war for his inability to make progress: "I cannot sleep at nights when I think about it.

There is no record of what was burned; while most commentators assume that the Eighth Symphony was among the works destroyed, Kilpeläinen observes that there had been at least two manuscripts of the work—the original and Voigt's copy—as well as sketches and fragments of earlier versions.

[30] The most optimistic interpretation of his action, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer's music critic David Patrick Stearns, is that he got rid of old drafts of the symphony to clear his mind for a fresh start.

The musicologist Erkki Salmenhaara posits the idea of two burnings: that of 1945 which destroyed early material, and another after Sibelius finally recognised that he could never complete the work to his satisfaction.

[16] Although Sibelius informed his secretary in late August 1945 that the symphony had been burned,[29] the matter remained a secret confined to the composer's private circle.

"[16] In fact, after the burning he had altogether abandoned creative composing; in 1951, when the Royal Philharmonic Society requested a work to mark the 1951 Festival of Britain, Sibelius declined.

[31] As late as 1953 he told his secretary Levas that he was working on the symphony "in his mind";[32] only in 1954 did he admit, in a letter to the widow of his friend Adolf Paul, that it would never be completed.

Alex Ross, in The New Yorker, quotes an entry from the composer's 1927 diary, when the Eighth Symphony was allegedly under way: "This loneliness is driving me crazy... To be able to live in the first place, I must have alcohol.

[18] Andrew Barnett, another of the composer's many biographers, points to Sibelius's intense self-criticism; he would withhold or suppress anything that failed to meet his self-imposed standards: "It was this attitude that brought about the destruction of the Eighth Symphony, but the very same trait forced him to keep on revising the Fifth until it was perfect.

[37] René Leibowitz, a proponent of the music of Arnold Schoenberg, published a pamphlet describing Sibelius as "the worst composer in the world";[38] others dismissed him as irrelevant in what was perceived for a time as an irresistible movement towards atonality.

[39] This climate diminished curiosity about the existence of material from a possible Sibelius Eighth, until late in the 20th century, when critical interest in the composer revived.

He added, however, that the library contained further Sibelius sketches from the late 1920s and early 1930s, some of which are akin to the ringed fragment and which could conceivably have been intended for the Eighth Symphony.

"[16] In 2004, in an article entitled "On Some Apparent Sketches for Sibelius's Eighth Symphony", the musical theorist Nors Josephson identifies around 20 manuscripts or fragments held in the Helsinki University Library as being relevant to the symphony and concludes that: "Given the abundance of preserved material for this work, one looks forward with great anticipation to a thoughtful, meticulous completion of the entire composition".

[25] Another Sibelius scholar, Timo Virtanen, has examined the same material and is more restrained, concluding that although some of the sketches may relate to the Eighth Symphony, it is not possible to determine exactly which, if any, these are.

Even the fragment marked "VIII", he maintains, cannot with certainty be said to relate to the symphony, since Sibelius often used both Roman and Arabic numerals to refer to themes, motifs or passages within a composition.

Permission from the Sibelius Rights Holders was secured, and John Storgårds, chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic, agreed to play and record these excerpts at the orchestra's rehearsal session on 30 October 2011.

Although only the first movement, copied by Voigt, is fully accepted as having been completed, the intended scale and general character of the Eighth Symphony may be inferred from several sources.

114 (1929), as providing evidence that in his final compositional years Sibelius was "progressing towards a more abstract idiom: clear, ethereal images little touched by the human passions".

[16] Further originality, Kilpeläinen says, is found in the "Surusoitto" music for organ, composed in 1931 for the funeral of Sibelius's friend Akseli Gallen-Kallela, a work that Aino Sibelius admitted might have been based on Eighth Symphony material: "Did the new symphony", asks Kilpeläinen, "thus also represent a modern sound unlike that of his previous style, with bleak, open tones and unresolved dissonances?

[40] Sirén, who played a major role in organising the performance of the fragments, believes that completion is impossible on the basis of existing sketches,[41] and would be dependent on further discoveries.

"[18] Reviewing the recorded excerpts in Gramophone, Andrew Mellor remarks that even if further manuscripts should come to light, the Sibelius Rights Holders would have full control over the material and would decide whether performance was appropriate.