“Everyone in Finland loves Sibelius,” said Anne Marie, who was showing me the sights of Helsinki. We were standing before the Sibelius Monument in a sylvan glade in Sibelius Park, 600 glittering stainless steel pipes welded together in an undulating form like a sort of gigantic organ. “Everyone?” I queried. Helsinki had already struck me as a close on ideal place to live: clean, cultured, prosperous, and she’d been telling me about the network of music institutes that enable any child to learn an instrument, which presumably accounts for the huge number of Finnish musicians and composers on the world stage. Even so, it seemed quite a claim. “Oh not necessarily for his music,” she added, “but for what he represents as an emblem of our nation.”

Finland is a young country, independent only since December 1917, 17 years after Sibelius’s great patriotic work Finlandia was first performed. Before that it had been a Russian grand duchy and before that Swedish. Few legacies of Swedish rule endure, although Swedish remains an official, if minority, language and a compulsory subject in schools. But vestiges of the century of Romanov rule abound.