Fragment Found

Aside from his Valse Triste and his ringing tone-poem Finlandia, Jean Sibelius' most popular composition is a little descriptive piece called The Swan of Tuonela. Written in 1893, The Swan of Tuonela was originally part of a suite of four tone-poems illustrating the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, on which U. S. word-poet Longfellow modeled his Hiawatha. Of this suite only The Swan of Tuonela, and another, noisier fragment called Lemminkaeinen's Homecoming have been published and performed. The manuscripts of the other two fragments were lost.

But six years ago, when Sibelius' close friend, aged Finnish Conductor Robert Kajanus, died, another prominent Finnish conductor, Georg Schneevoigt, got a chance to rummage in Conductor Kajanus' attic in Helsinki. There he found the missing manuscripts: Lemminkaeinen and the Maidens, and Lemminkaeinen in Tuonela. Overjoyed, Conductor Schneevoigt got permission to perform them at Finland's 1934 Kalevala Festival. Last week, in an all-Sibelius concert by the NBC Orchestra in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, Conductor Schneevoigt gave U. S. listeners their first chance to hear the Tuonelese swan's long-lost cronies. While Manhattan's Sibelians clapped their hands with joy, soberer critics decided that the missing pieces merely filled out the puzzle.

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