page_title: En saga
section_title: Composition
hierarchical_section_title: En saga / History / Composition
caption_attribution_description: English: Robert Kajanus
context_page_description: En saga, Op. 9, is a single-movement tone poem for orchestra written in 1891–92 by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. The piece, which likely began as a septet or octet for flute, clarinet, and string ensemble before evolving into an orchestral tone poem, premiered on 16 February 1893 in Helsinki, with Sibelius conducting the Helsinki Orchestral Society. A decade later in 1902, Sibelius substantially revised En saga in response to an invitation from Ferruccio Busoni to conduct the piece in Berlin; the tone poem thus stands alongside the Lemminkäinen Suite, the Violin Concerto, The Oceanides, and the Fifth Symphony as one of Sibelius' most overhauled works. The Berlin concert, which occurred a fortnight after Robert Kajanus had premiered the revised piece in Helsinki on 2 November, finally brought Sibelius the German breakthrough he had long desired.
  Uncommonly for a Sibelius tone poem, En saga is without program or literary source. Nevertheless, the adventurous, evocative character of the music has encouraged many listeners to venture their own interpretations, among them a fantasy landscape, a hunting expedition, a bard's storytelling, and the essence of Finnish people.
context_section_description: Although the creative origins of En saga remain somewhat uncertain, it appears as though the material that would become En saga may have begun as, and thus evolved from, a septet or octet for flute, clarinet, and string ensemble that the composer had begun in 1890–91, during which time he was a student in Vienna under Robert Fuchs and Karl Goldmark. (This chamber piece, however, has never been found.) Following the success of the choral symphony Kullervo in 1891, Robert Kajanus, founder and chief conductor of the Helsinki Orchestral Society, requested from Sibelius a purely orchestral piece, albeit one "in a more popular style" that would not make "too great demands on [the general public's] powers of concentration and comprehension"; in the 1930s, Sibelius told his biographer, Karl Ekman, that the result of this invitation was the orchestral tone poem En saga. 
  Later in life, however, Sibelius dismissed Kajanus's influence, telling a second biographer, Eric Ringbom, in the 1950s that En saga actually had not been the result Kajanus's offer: "... Nothing came of it. Instead I completed the orchestral work I had already started and to which I gave the name En saga ... I did not comply with his request ... to write 'a short Da capo piece'". That Sibelius's statements to Ekman and to Ringbom are inconsistent is, perhaps, a sign either that Sibelius wished to downplay the influence of his on-again-off-again friend/rival decades after the latter's death (Kajanus had died in 1933) or that he was eager to dispel any notion that En saga was of less seriousness than his other compositions.
  The autograph manuscript of the original 1892 version of En saga does not survive, although a manuscript and complete set of orchestral parts are preserved in the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra collection. The copyist for these documents remains unknown; although surviving invoices indicate that two copyists Sibelius typically employed, August Österberg and Ernst Röllig, each copied the score, in July 1895 and December 1898, respectively, neither the surviving manuscript nor the orchestral parts are in the hand of either man. Most likely the documents were produced in 1901 by an unidentified copyist for the conductor Georg Schnéevoigt, who conducted the original version of the tone poem during his concert tour of Riga.
caption: Finnish conductor, Robert Kajanus (c. 1910), who both encouraged Sibelius to compose En saga and would later premiere the revised version of the tone poem
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