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Leoš; Janáček is music's best-known example of a creative “late bloomer.”Jean Sibelius's life is in stark contrast to this; at nearly the same age (60) he became one of music's most frustrating instances of “early burnout.” These composers are not totally unique, of course. Rossini's final decades were compositionally sterile, and England's Havergal Brian wrote most of his significant music in his eighties and nineties. Recently, the world has rediscovered that Igor Markevitch was a brilliantly promising composer in his youth, abandoning these efforts during World War 11. He turned in his remaining (nearly four) decades to a conducting career of great distinction. One could explore in each of these cases (and, doubtless, others) what in each man's internal psychodynamics and life circumstances contributed to such dramatic turnabouts. I focus on the Czech and Finnish masters for reasons of my familiarity and identification with their music, and also because of the vast body of literature about them in the English language. Source material here drawn on about Janáček has included works by Vogel (1981), Horsbrugh (1981)’ Hollander (1963), Tyrell (1981, 1998), and the composer himself (, ). Data about Sibelius are derived from Layton (1993), along with that writer's translation of Tawastjerna's epochal biography (1976, , ) and other volumes by Newmarch (1939), Ekman (1938), Grey (1934), Levas (1972, Johnson (1959), Trotter (1993), Goss (1995, 1996)' James (1983, 1989), and Ringbom (1977). Moreover, the literature cited here is remarkably consistent, both factually and in the psychological portraits it paints of each man.
Psychological consistency does not imply that anyone has yet promulgated a definitive theory of Janáček's or Sibelius's internal