Swan of Tuonela
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The Swan of Tuonela (Tuonelan joutsen) is an 1895 tone poem by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. The story behind it is an excerpted legend from the Kalevala epic of Finnish mythology.
The tone poem is scored for strings and harp, with a notable cor anglais solo, one of the most famous in the orchestral literature. The music paints a gossamer, transcendental image of a mystical swan swimming around Tuonela, the island of the dead. Lemminkäinen, the hero of the epic, has been tasked with killing the sacred swan, but on the way he is shot with a poisoned arrow, and dies himself. In the next part of the epic he is restored to life.
The Swan of Tuonela was originally composed in 1893 as the prelude to a projected Wagnerian opera called The Building of the Boat; Sibelius revised it two years later as the second of the four sections of the Lemminkäinen Suite (Lemminkäis-sarja) , also known as the Four Legends from the Kalevala, op.22, which was premiered in 1896. Sibelius revised the tone poem twice: once in 1897, and again in 1900.
The piece was also considered to be a segment of Disney's Fantasia. It was planned out in storyboards, but was never animated and was not included in the film.
A joke popular among orchestral musicians and music critics is that, if left for too long in the refrigerator, the Swan of Tuonela becomes the "Swan of Salmonella".
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