List of compositions by Jean Sibelius

Sibelius at the time of Kullervo (left, 1892) and Tapiola (right, 1926), two celebrated works that bookended his career

The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) wrote over 550 original works during his eight-decade artistic career.^[1] This began around 1875 with a short miniature for violin and cello called Water Droplets (Vattendroppar),^[2] and ended a few months before his death at age 91 with the orchestration of two earlier songs, "Kom nu hit, död" ("Come Away, Death") and "Kullervon valitus" ("Kullervo's Lament", excerpted from Movement III of Kullervo).^[3]

However, the 1890s to the 1920s represent the key decades of Sibelius's production.^[4] After 1926's Tapiola, Sibelius completed no new works of significance, although he infamously labored until the late-1930s or the early-1940s on his Eighth Symphony, which he never completed and probably destroyed c. 1944.^[5] This thirty-year creative drought—commonly referred to as the "Silence of Järvenpää",^[6] in reference to the sub-region of Helsinki in which the composer and his wife, Aino, resided—occurred at the height of his international and domestic celebrity.^[7]

Today, Sibelius is remembered principally as a composer for orchestra: particularly celebrated are his symphonies, tone poems, and lone concerto, although he produced viable works in all major genres of classical music.^[8] While his orchestral works meant the most to him, Sibelius refused to dismiss his miniatures (piano pieces, songs, etc.) as insignificant, seeing them instead as "represent[ative of] his innermost self".^[9]