The Chicago Symphony Orchestra was the first American orchestra to embrace the music of Jean Sibelius. In 1901, during its ninth season, at a time when the orchestra was widely known for championing important new German music—it had given the first American performances of Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben the previous spring—the orchestra gave the US premieres of two of Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen pieces.

Inspired by the Finnish national epic poem, the Kalevala, the four Lemminkäinen pieces Sibelius composed between 1893 and 1895 (often referred to as Four Legends from the Kalevala, Op. 22) established the full Sibelius style. In place of textbook regulation and the grand symphonic traditions, his music now followed its own rules: Folklike, ancient-sounding modal melodies of a distinctly Finnish origin move, sometimes stubbornly, in a unique landscape of repetition, obsessive drive, dark colors, jarring juxtapositions, savage rhythmic patterns, and slowly building cycles of immense power.

The four legends from the Kalevala all revolve around the figure of Lemminkäinen, a young and powerful hero—not unlike Wagner’s Siegfried or the star of Strauss’s Heldenleben—and something of a Don Juan as well. Each of the four tone poems captures a decisive moment in Lemminkäinen’s adventures—hunting, seducing, fighting, and, through his mother’s magical powers, even surviving his own death.

In 1898, after lending music of lasting brilliance to heroes taken from the pages of Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and Cervantes, and to two great legendary characters—Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel—Strauss could think of no other subject more suitable than himself. At the top of his last great tone poem he wrote Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life, or A Heroic Life), leaving little doubt of the title character’s identity. Opening with nonstop orchestral exhibitionism that he labels The Hero, the tone poem is all at once an epic journey and one of music’s most vivid portraits.