What was it with Sibelius and the milk pudding?* (2)

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7 March

And old Jean had a thing not just about gâteaux, but milk puddings, notably tapioca:

Of course, he tried to give the game away, by writing a whole programmatic work in praise of it, but - probably only in a misreading (his handwriting was worse than mine) brought on by incredulity, rather than an attempt to suppress his message - it ended up as being interpreted to depict a forest spirit called Tapio and his realm, hence Tapiola.

No wonder it was his last work, for his publisher asked him for clarification of its themes, and he then had to struggle to write four lines of verse to turn his appreciation of one of his life's delights into some other wretched evocation of Finnish mythology!


End-notes

* Oh, I know that it's a formulation little better than Can I get...?, but it was done with thought, with deliberation, with Love.


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