Perhaps there was an argument in his mind. Perhaps he had been hearing _Parsifal_, for there are times in the symphony when one is reminded of Amfortas with his complaining voice. Not that Sibelius was obliged to borrow phrases; but the mood of the composer and that of the wounded knight are at times alike. There is also the suggestion of similar harmonic and orchestral, but not melodic expression. The thematic material is for the most part cool, contemplative, often fragmentary, or purposely incomplete. The melancholy that drips from the pages is almost without relief. Nor does one find the symphony of “baffling simplicity” as a London reviewer found it a few years ago. The “simplicity” was carefully contrived. There is little real beauty, frank or subtle—there is little that impresses by loftiness of thought, or nobility of expression. There is prevailing sobriety. Sibelius might say, “That is the way I felt when I wrote it. I could not write otherwise any more than I could then feel differently.” Is it not a significant fact that Sibelius soon left this path that he had found? * * * This symphony, dated 1911, was performed at Helsingfors in that year. The score is dedicated to Eero Järnefelt. The reviewer for the London _Times_ noted (February 28, 1921) that there was moderate applause after a performance, and added: “After all, what was there to make a fuss about? No accumulation of energy, no building to a climax, no display of rhetoric; just a number of ideas, each dwelt on as long as it showed capacity for growth, each left as soon as it had generated another; there is just enough relevance to defeat the charge of inconsequence, not enough arrangement to suggest a moment’s tautology. The fineness of this symphony is of the ascetic type which refuses the luxuries of sound and finds a miracle in the simplest relations of notes. From these relations the tunes grow naturally as folk tunes grow. From the intonation of two notes at the outset comes the whole of the first movement; a perfect fifth is the source of the most expansive melody which crowns the third movement. There is nothing abstruse about it; people only fail to understand it because they cannot believe that any man could be so simple and so real as Sibelius shows himself to be.” Mr. Fox Strangways wrote (February 21, 1932): “Sibelius has, what only the best composers have, the flair for the phrase that will repay investigation. His phrase on paper impresses no one; when you hear it, spaced out, set in relief, debated upon, it grows life size. He seems to go on for minutes together in an ordinary tone of voice, and then suddenly an idea stings him, and he is afire, and the whole room hanging on his lips.”