The Tempest (Sibelius)
| The Tempest | |
|---|---|
| Theatre score & suites by Jean Sibelius | |
The composer (c. 1927) | |
| Native name | Stormen |
| Catalogue | JS 182 (full score) |
| Opus | 109/1 (prelude); 109/2–3 (suites) |
| Text | play by William Shakespeare |
| Language | Danish (trans. English) |
| Composed | 1925, rev. & arr. 1927 |
| Publisher | Hansen (1929, Opp. 109/1 and 3; 1930, Op. 109/2) |
| Movements | 36 (JS 182); 1 (Op. 109/1) 9 (Op. 109/2); 9 (Op. 109/3) |
| Premiere | |
| Date | 16 March 1926 |
| Location | Royal Theatre Copenhagen, Denmark |
| Conductor | Johan Hye-Knudsen |
The Tempest (Stormen), Op. 109, is incidental music by Jean Sibelius to Shakespeare's The Tempest. He composed it mainly in the late summer 1925, his last major work before his tone poem Tapiola. Sibelius derived two suites from the score.
The music is said to display an astounding richness of imagination and inventive capacity, and is considered by some as one of Sibelius's greatest achievements. He represented individual characters through instrumentation choices: particularly admired was his use of harps and percussion to represent Prospero, said to capture the "resonant ambiguity of the character".