Surendranagar “My gift for composition is not the kind which will ever be ‘successful.’ It is far too subjective for that. When I was a boy I thought I would invent an altogether new art (it would be half-sculpture and half-music, I thought). I began with sculpture and as you know that turned out disastrously. But still I had deep down inside me a strong impulse to do something creative artistically. I chose music and suffered numerous setbacks until 1886 and that in spite of the fact that I had as early as 1881 written a piano trio that I thought was quite good considering my age at the time. Afterwards I went to the Institute so as to learn modern technique, which doesn’t really serve my purposes at all. Things did not work out ideally, although I had some success – in the absence of any real competition. I think I was almost the only person in Finland who was composing at all in those years. At first Martin Wegelius was by no means favorably disposed to my music. You can imagine that my steps were not particularly light as I made my way home of a winter’s evening tired and depressed to Brunnsparken. I cannot say how often I wanted to give up and live the life of an idiot for which I have always felt myself well-qualified. But it was my fate to want to compose.” – Jean Sibelius.
buy Pregabalin I believe he was 25 when he wrote this. I copied it out on a piece of paper and pinned it to the bulletin board above my desk in college, and came across it again today. What artist does not know this melancholy?
Someday someone will put out in English a little volume of Sibelius’s writings on art and artistic process. His journals and letters contain excellent reflections, and what is more, a superb portrait of an artist actually working – the almost comical (seen from afar; I’m sure inspiring, terrifying, and irritating up close) up-and-down alternation between godly creation and suicidal despair.
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