In the Seventh Symphony Sibelius takes the process he had begun in the Fifth to its logical conclusion: all the movements are fused together, like a Cubist-period Picasso, into one composite, concentrated, complex structure into which no division, even embryonic, is any longer possible. Like the Sixth, elements of this, too, were conceived as early as 1917 alongside work on the Fifth, but the battle to compress was even more of an intense struggle, to the extent that the process could go no further; the Eighth, which Sibelius “finished many times” (but never to his final satisfaction), ended up in the 1940s as ashes in his fire. Indeed the Seventh is already so terse, pared down to essentials, that it lasts hardly more than 20 minutes, and was premiered in March 1924 under the title Fantasia Sinfonica. But by the time it was published in 1925 Sibelius had changed this to “Symphony No.7 (in One Movement)”, and it thus stands as the majestic non plus ultra conclusion to his symphonic achievement.

sources

A  Autograph score (1924), in the National Library of Finland, Helsinki

E,P  First edition score and parts, published by Wilhelm Hansen in 1925; E is viewable online at IMSLP

F,R  Revised edition of score and parts, published by Hansen in 1980, both viewable online at IMSLP

Though (like Symphony No.6 above) F omits any mention of Paavo Berglund's name, it is in fact a revision of E altered precisely according to a booklet which Berglund published in Turku, Finland in 1970 entitled A comparative study of the printed score and the manuscript of the Seventh Symphony of Sibelius. This booklet does exactly what it says: meticulously taking the score page by page (as in section 3 below), it corrects E to A. This booklet (or Berglund himself) is referred to below as Bg.

But of course nothing is ever quite as simple as that. Sometimes markings in E are patently valid, yet happen to be absent in A; sometimes dynamic inconsistencies in both A and E necessitate editorial suggestions; then there is the problem of pencil markings in A whose status is unknown. These are discussed in sections 8, 4 and 7 respectively, below. The whole affair is therefore complex, and there are many corrections and discussions.