He wrestled with demons: Composer Jean Sibelius 

No lost work in the world excites such national fervour as the Eighth Symphony that Jean Sibelius threw on a bonfire at his home in Ainola some time in the early 1940s. No Shakespeare draft, no missing part of Goethe's Faust, no canto of Dante's would cause scholars to weep in England, Germany and Italy as they did in Helsinki when the editor of the composer's complete works, Timo Virtanen, announced in November that he had found what appeared to be a sketch from the lost symphony.

 Copies of the manuscript were rushed down to the new concert hall, where the Helsinki Philharmonic gave a quick read through — only for players to reach for their hankies on being told that they had just given the first sound of the missing link in the national story.

 Sibelius, who defined the nation in Finlandia, was called upon to rescue it in his Eighth Symphony. After seizing independence from Russia in 1918, the Finns were riven by civil war, poverty and isolation and almost rolled over by Soviet invasion in 1939. 

 Sibelius had fallen silent after finishing his Seventh Symphony in 1924. He took a commission for the next symphony from Serge Koussevitzky in Boston, but never came up with the goods. Thomas Beecham came to see how he was getting on. Sibelius, bluff and bibulous, showed him nothing. Modernists from the Schoenberg camp scoffed that the old symphonist was a busted flush. Admirers said he was wrestling with demons.