Jean Sibelius - The Swan of Tuonela

- Composer: Johan Julius Christian Sibelius (8 December 1865 -- 20 September 1957)
- Orchestra: Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra
- Conductor: Evgeni Mravinsky
- Year of recording: 1965

Painting: The Swan of Tuonela (Ben Garrison, 2011)

The Swan of Tuonela [Tuonela joutsen], tone poem for orchestra (from the Lemminkäinen Suite), Op. 22 No. 2, written in 1893.

The tone poem is scored for a small orchestra of cor anglais solo, oboe, bass clarinet, bassoon, four horns, three trombones, timpani, bass drum, harp, and divisi strings. The cor anglais is the voice of the swan and its solo is perhaps the best known cor anglais solo in the orchestral literature. The music paints a gossamer, transcendental image of a mystical swan swimming around Tuonela, the island of the dead. Lemminkäinen, the hero of the epic, has been tasked with killing the sacred swan; but on the way, he is shot with a poisoned arrow and dies. In the next part of the epic he is restored to life.

The Swan of Tuonela was originally composed in 1893 as the prelude to a projected opera called The Building of the Boat. Sibelius revised it two years later as the second of the four sections of the Lemminkäinen Suite (Lemminkäis-sarja), also known as the Four Legends from the Kalevala, Op. 22, which was premiered in 1896. The Kalevala epic is part of Finnish mythology.

Sibelius revised the tone poem twice, once in 1897 and again in 1900. (Sibelius has left posterity no personal information concerning his writing of this piece.) The original manuscript of this work no longer exists. When it actually disappeared is not known.

Disney also planned to use the piece in a segment of Fantasia. It was planned out in storyboards but was never animated.