En saga (in Finnish: ; occasionally translated to English as, variously, A Fairy Tale, A Saga, or A Legend), Op. 9, is a single-movement tone poem for orchestra written from 1891 to 1892 by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. The piece, which likely began as a septet or octet for flute, clarinet, and string ensemble before evolving into an orchestral tone poem, premiered on 16 February 1893 in Helsinki with Sibelius conducting the Helsinki Orchestral Association. A decade later in 1902, Sibelius substantially revised En saga in response to an invitation from Ferruccio Busoni to conduct the piece in Berlin. It thus stands alongside The Lemminkäinen Suite (Op. 22), the Violin Concerto (Op. 47), The Oceanides (Op. 73), and the Fifth Symphony (Op. 82) as one of the most overhauled works in his . The Berlin concert, which occurred a fortnight after Robert Kajanus had premiered the revised version in Helsinki on 2 November, finally brought Sibelius the German breakthrough he had long desired.
En saga is without program or literary source. Nevertheless, the adventurous, evocative character of the music has encouraged many listeners to offer their own interpretations, among them a fantasy landscape (such as that by the Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela), a hunting expedition, a bard's storytelling, and the essence of Finnish people. Sibelius routinely declined to state a program, although in the 1930s, he conceded that, if one must find an inspiration, the tone poem owed its nature not to The Kalevala, the national epic of Finland, but rather to Iceland's Eddas. By the 1940s, however, Sibelius had reverted to his previous position, describing the work instead as "the expression of a certain state of mind"—one with an unspecified, "painful" autobiographical component—for which "all literary interpretations [were therefore] totally alien".
Critics have largely praised En saga as a masterpiece of "astonishing power and originality" that, stylistically, exhibits Sibelius's "personal brand of musical primitivism". Moreover, the revised version of the tone poem is often described as being of superior craftsmanship relative to the youthful rawness of its predecessor. The first (and to date only) recording of the original version was made in 1995 by Osmo Vänskä and the Lahti Symphony Orchestra. A typical performance of the final version of the piece lasts about 18 minutes, some 4 minutes fewer than its predecessor.
History
Composition
Although the creative origins of En saga remain somewhat uncertain, it appears as though the material that would become En saga may have begun as, and thus evolved from, a septet or octet for flute, clarinet, and string ensemble that the composer had begun in 1890–91, during which time he was a student in Vienna under Robert Fuchs and Karl Goldmark. (This chamber piece, however, has never been found.) Following the success of the choral symphony Kullervo in 1891, Robert Kajanus, founder and chief conductor of the Helsinki Orchestral Association, requested from Sibelius a purely orchestral piece, albeit one "in a more popular style" that would not make "too great demands on [the general public's] powers of concentration and comprehension"; in the 1930s, Sibelius told his biographer, Karl Ekman, that the result of this invitation was the orchestral tone poem En saga.
Later in life, however, Sibelius dismissed Kajanus's influence, telling a second biographer, Eric Ringbom, in the 1950s that En saga actually had not been the result of Kajanus's offer: "... Nothing came of it. Instead I completed the orchestral work I had already started and to which I gave the name En saga ... I did not comply with his request ... to write 'a short Da capo piece'". That Sibelius's statements to Ekman and to Ringbom are inconsistent is, perhaps, a sign either that Sibelius wished to downplay the influence of his on-again-off-again friend/rival decades after the latter's death (Kajanus had died in 1933) or that he was eager to dispel any notion that En saga was of less seriousness than his other compositions.