Achim Breiling wrote:

>I read several times now that Sibelius had completed his 8th Symphony but
>destroyed it in a rage of frustration. Is this true or a tale?

Well, there's William Trotter's novel *Winter Fire*, a fantasy about a
rising German symphony conductor, inducted into the Wehrmacht and assigned
as an officer on the Russo-Finnish front, where he meets and befriends
Sibelius.

In the novel, the Eighth was completed, at least to the point where
the German could play it in piano arrangement.  He becomes increasingly
obsessed w/ it and wrests the only manuscript from the composer, only
to lose it, page by page, to the winds as he tries to escape into still
unliberated Norway in the war's last days.  Of course, that's only a story,
but, I must say, a very well told one.

Walter Meyer