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Many of his in-laws and forefathers were well-known doctors, artists and clergy members. Sibelius began to study law at first. But unsatisfied, he changed his mind soon and shifted courses to music.
In 1890, his real composition works started. The first decade had been the most fruitful and successful period of Sibelius' whole career and life.
Finland's history and its wonderful ferry tales and legends had been inexhaustible source for symphonies and incredible orchestral suites such as "En Saga" (1892, revised in 1901), "Karelia" (1893), "Four Legends for Orchestra" (1895) and "Finlandia" (1900). Sibelius took most of his musical ideas from his native land Finland with Finnish longing and melancholy.
One might ask, whether Sibelius' "Violin Concert" was the composer's carefully planed revenge on the deities of this instrument.
In his childhood, Sibelius had first played the piano, but after a few years he switched to the violin. He later confessed: "The violin took me over completely. From then on for the next ten years or so my profoundest wish, the loftiest aspiration of my ambitions, was to become a great violin virtuoso." But Sibelius never quit managed to reach these goals.
As I mentioned earlier: Sibelius took most of his musical ideas from his native land Finland. In this respect, the music that he wrote in 1906 for Hjalmar Procope's play "Belshazar's Feast" represents a rare excursion for the composer into the exotic and the oriental.
