One last Sibelius symphony after all?

Legend has it that a favorite drinking game of the great Finnish composer Jean Sibelius was to spend the evening prodigiously imbibing with friends, after which one of them would be abruptly shut into a closet for 15 minutes or so. Then, from the other side of the door, the closeted partyer was ordered to give the full names of the people with whom he had spent the evening. Just to see if he was too hammered to do so. Or had passed out.

No wonder Sibelius never finished his Symphony No. 8. But now, perhaps, others can.

Sketches - some of them orchestrated - have been identified as probably being from the symphony that occupied him from 1927 until his death in 1957. Nothing of the piece was heard until late 2011 when journalist Vesa Siren of the Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat arranged to have the Helsinki Philharmonic play some of the orchestrated excerpts and post them on the newspaper's website. Since then, the world has wondered: Might there be one last Sibelius symphony after all?

"My hands shook a little" as the orchestra played, said Siren. "The woman next to me, the publicist for the Helsinki Philharmonic, started to cry. It was a historic moment. For so many decades, we imagined what it would've been like. Was he searching for a new style? The harmonies are quite bold and very surprising. The sound world is generally Sibelian, but ... in some new and previously unknown directions."

Video of the three excerpts on the Sanomat website (http://tinyurl.com/cx383dp - scroll to the bottom of the page) prompted extremes of opinion about whether a coherent piece could be assembled from about 800 pages of surviving sketches. The prevailing one is guardedly conservative; Siren even goes so far as to call the music "sketches from the period of the eighth symphony." Only scholar Nors Josephson believes there's a symphony to be had in all that scribbling.

Some want to leave the Sibelius canon as it is. As with the discovery of the sunken Titanic, some say just let it be. The composer revised mercilessly, the final result being the effortless concision of the Symphony No. 7. With its spectacular final harmonic resolution, it's possible that Sibelius had composed himself into a corner and had no place to go. Even if all the pieces of an eighth symphony are there, would posthumous assemblage do the composer justice?

Though the Philadelphia Orchestra was an early champion of Sibelius during the Eugene Ormandy era - he and the aging composer had a historic meeting while the orchestra was on a European tour - music director-designate Yannick Nézet-Séguin isn't clamoring for first-performance rights. He compared listening to the excerpts to watching deleted movie scenes, or the recent Amy Winehouse disc of odds and ends.

"It does fulfill our sense of wanting to know everything about something ... but do we really need another Sibelius symphony to assemble?" he said in a recent interview.

As for the music itself, Nézet-Séguin's reaction - "that last excerpt has the most naive quality" - was similar to that of conductor Sakari Oramo, who was quoted by Siren as describing the music's "archaic dissonance."

Posthumous completions of Mahler's Symphony No. 10 and Elgar's Symphony No. 3 have been successfully performed. The Mahler 10th, in particular, has been recognized as perhaps the composer's boldest symphonic conception, and uses harmonies that looked decades into the future. For decades, much of Mozart's reputation rested on his unfinished Requiem. Each such project, though, has its own problems, and the Sibelius eighth has plenty.

At least two premieres were scheduled (one in 1932 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra), but canceled. Ormandy is said to have lobbied strongly to premiere the work. Parts of the symphony were sent to copyists, presumably to prepare for a performance. On numerous occasions, the composer described the symphony as on the verge of completion, and later in life, he said several times that the symphony had been finished. At least one version was burned by the composer in what he described as a large "bonfire" during the mid-1940s. The most optimistic theory is that he destroyed old versions to clear his mind for a new one. No other works were forthcoming during those last 30 years.

Siren has four theories for the silence: The composer was out of debt and no longer needed money; he was famous and thus had a greater reputation to live up to; his hand tremors put a huge strain on the act of writing down his music - so much so that, in later years, his wife forged his autograph for fans. It's also possible that he felt out of step with the times. Maybe his tonality-based music would be passé amid post-World War II modernism. Or maybe his new style was so different from the old that he risked alienating his admirers.

And alcoholism? Sibelius struggled with that. "He was a very hard worker. He worked all day and all night," says Siren. "But after the masterpiece was ready ... he partied hard, sometimes for several days and nights."

After discussing the Sibelius hand-tremor theory over the summer at the Bard Festival's Sibelius symposium, Siren was told by medical doctors that alcohol, in earlier times, was used to treat it. "And he had a bottle with him when he finished the Symphony No. 7 ... but during the 1930s, he mainly stayed at home and didn't want to be drunk as a skunk in the presence of his wife."

Siren believes that the surviving sketches were early ones. Yet that doesn't necessarily make them less valid. In the essay "From Heaven's Floor to the Composer's Desk," Sibelius scholar Timo Virtanen puts forth the idea that the composer seems to have extensively worked out the music in his head - orchestration and all - before committing it to paper. No surprise that Siren's visceral reaction to the short eighth-symphony excerpts is that "Sibelius knew exactly what he was doing."

Certainly, the fragments have caused a certain amount of excitement, and it must be said that the scholar who most believes in a possible completion - Josephson - came to that conclusion without seeing the more evolved, orchestrated sections that Siren had recorded. Descendants of Sibelius' associates - namely, those of the copyist Paul Voigt - have been searching their attics for more material.

One of the oddest coincidences, though, is how Siren's report coincided with a satirical piece on the eighth symphony by a composer named "Sipulius" (which means "onion" in Finnish) in the magazine Aku Ankka, a children's Donald Duck publication that has adult sophistication. Its side of the story: Uncle Scrooge commissioned the symphony, but had it locked away upon finding that the rhythm spelled out in Morse Code "Scrooge is a cheapskate penny-pincher."

"What is truly unbelievable," says Siren, "is that they commissioned the story on the lost symphony before my scoop. The editor [of Aku Ankka] dropped his cup of coffee the morning [my] article appeared and filled his [online] 'Duck News' page with factual information on the lost symphony and linked to our article. No greater honor. . . ."

What a laugh Sibelius must be having.