“ps – How about the Sibelius concerto occasionally?” | by T. Wozonig

The stimulating framework of the workshop “Historical Perspectives on Musical Commissions” prompted me to reflect upon the two protagonists of my ongoing PhD project – Salzburg-born conductor Herbert von Karajan (1908–1989) and Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) – from the perspective of “patronage” and “commission.” While in the call for papers, musical patronage, following Louis Epstein’s 2022-volume The Creative Labor of Music Patronage in Interwar France, was defined as “premedit...