Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)
Autograph manuscript signed ('Jean Sibelius) of the song 'Die stille Stadt', op.50 no.5, [c.1906]
One of Sibelius's most beautiful songs.

For voice and piano, on up to three systems of three staves, ink with some pencil annotations on 9-stave paper, four pages, 341 x 270mm, a few minor emendations, the German text added in another hand.

Provenance:
(1) Sotheby's, 6 December 1991, lot 193.

(2) Bloomsbury Book Auctions, London, 31 March 2015, lot 176.

(3) Schøyen Collection, MS 5544.

A setting of a text by Richard Dehmel, 'Die stille Stadt' (The silent town') is almost a tone-poem in its construction of atmosphere and beautiful melody. Although Sibelius had written songs from the very beginning of his career, the opus 50 set was the first he composed as a collection, and his only song collection based on poems in German. The influence of the German late Romantic lieder tradition is strong throughout the series, and a structural and atmospheric debt to Schubert has been discerned in the present song in particular.